Walt Disney himself was the voice of Mickey Mouse. Now he's a tycoon at the center of a vast business empire. Mr. Disney, can you still make a noise like Mickey Mouse?

Well, yes, but of course I don't make any Mickey, Mickey.

Mice films. Can you make that noise for us now?

Well, Mickey used to talk something like this, a false letter. Of course, he's an old mouse now and a false letter. Getting a little old.

Silly. Well, now, Walef has dreamed up these characters. Did you think of them as simply as comic animals, or were you concerned with them as human personalities?

Well, no, I'd say human personalities in the body of a cartoon animal. It was just a way to crowder away into it the competition.

The competition of animated cartoons?

Yes, that in those days I had Felix the cat to compete with, and I can't remember all the others, but you just had to get in there and you had to make him funnier or better or I don't know what.

Well, the character of Donald Duck is probably even the character of Donald Duck is even better known than that of Mickey, I'd say. This very angry man who always seems to be getting into terrible scrapes.

In the form of a duck. No, I know where he's better known. Mickey is very well known around the world. But the duck came along as a result of too many taboos put on to Mickey Mouse. People didn't feel that Mickey could blow his top like the duck. In other words, he had to maintain a certain dignity. So in order to give ourselves the latitude, we created this little duck. This is terrible tempered Mr.

Duck. As an outlet for yourself.

Yes, and it gave us the contrast that we needed in the film. Now, I used to tee Mickey and the Duck together at one time. And also at one time, I had all four of these characters in one film at one time. Then I divided them up and each one had his own film, each one had his own show.

Well, many of the Donald Ducks, particularly, seem to show great extremes of cruelty. This has come up again in a recent film of yours, the accusation of cruelty with regard to the film of Tonka. Now, is this one which you feel is perfectly justified?

Oh, Tonka, the one where the Indians were cruel to the horse? The horse. Well, that's served as contrast to the boy. Now, The Boy really trained the horse with kindness, and it's a little lesson in how to train an animal not with cruelty, but kindness.

But what about the charges of cruelty made against you in relation to the earlier film, the Donald Duckham, the extreme - The.

One where we'd hit him on the head or something like that? That thing, yes. Oh, I don't know. That comes from... I didn't invent that. That comes from Punch and Judy. Judy. I mean, been going on for centuries.

Were your films principally designed for children?

Well, no, you have to appeal to the adult or... Well, the adults have the the money, children don't have any money.

But so there was nothing childish in your your.

No, we designed the films to appeal ourselves. And we're our own own censors the studio group, if we do something that isn't right, we hear from the various members of the staff, It just isn't right. You can't do that. And I never test the film beyond the studio. Of course, I have enough employees there that are not actively engaged in the the phases that they would be what I'd call a non-critical audience. They'd be closer to the public. So I test my films with my own own Mr.

Disney, in recent years, you started producing these films of real animals, these real animal films like Bear Country and so on. On. Nature nature films. Nature film. Now, how much is this a direct result of your imagination, working with imaginary animals?

Well, it's an offshoot of of development. Before I went into production on Bambi, I took my artists through a course, a special course in animal anatomy. We were getting a little closer to the real animal in Bambi. Bambi. And these characters, they're not actually close to the actual animal itself. So animal anatomy is a thing that is not taught properly in the art schools. So I started a special course in animal anatomy. I brought animals into the studio in our art classes. Instead of live models, we had animal models. But I found that the animals in captivity are not themselves. What you see of an animal in a zoo is not actually what the animal is when he's out in nature itself. So I sent camera crews out into the wild to capture what an animal actually does in his way of life. And from the film that I brought in for the artist to study, I realized that there was a great story there there that had been told.