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really began to be aware of that. Since he’s gone and looking back on the things he did now that we have the problems that he had, we begin to say, “God, how did he do it? How did he handle it? How did he keep twelve hundred people all working on a product and know which each one was on? How could his mind conceive of this? His personnel work—how could he pick out what was the right way to go with something?”
    DP: How did he sleep at night with all these problems?
    FT: Yeah! At the time, none of that impressed me at all. I probably was cocky enough to figure I could do it, too, if I wanted to.
    DP: In some of the articles I’ve read, some people say the shorts are the best that Disney did, and after that, the pictures were becoming too realistic. Other people single out
Pinocchio
as the best. Some people I’ve talked to think that no zenith has been reached and that maybe the next film will be the best. Do you see a peak in the art?
    FT: No, that oversimplifies it too much. The way I size it up, at the time Walt started, the potential of animation—no one realized what was there really. He just figured, “Here’s something that I can use.” He was always looking for what can you do with it, [thinking,] “What can I make of this thing?” He never took a thing as it was and sold it. There was always his curiosity about what can you do. So he got interested in animation, [thinking,] “What can we do with this?” getting new ideas and stimulating thought. To me, he reached his peak really of what I like to do in animation with
Snow White,
because it was the richest in personality development and yet the simplest and strongest in story concept. Its popularity over the years makes me feel that I’m right in feeling that this was a peak. Now, that is not to say that it in any way reached a peak in the whole art of animation, because Walt never wanted to do the same thing twice. He was always going on to something else. So we went on to
Pinocchio.
It was the most elaborate picture, but it was quite weak story-wise. But as far as elaborate stuff to look at—pretty stuff on the screen—it was just a knockout. It cost too much money to do any more of that, so we simplified it, and we went to
Fantasia
and
Bambi
and
Dumbo.
If there had not been the war, which is what ruined
Fantasia,
and if
Fantasia
had gone over better, we’ve often wondered where would we be today, because Walt was reaching out and reaching out and reaching out. Because of the war, he had to turn around and come back in. He could no longer expand. But the possibilities—oh, it’s just unlimited! Guys have said, “Whatever you can dream of, you can do in animation.” From that point on, [after]
Fantasia,
there’s been very little searching, really. He did it with a lot of those package pictures—
Make Mine Music, Melody Time,
things of that sort—where he could take little shots which were different and which might have been Silly Symphonies in the old days and experimented with them to see what he could do with them. But he was always reaching out, always searching—a terrifically creative mind.
    Well, now, if you could have gone on with the staff he had—twelve hundred well-trained men, very creative men—he could play them against each other, he could shock them, and he could do all sorts of things, who knows where we would have gone. So I don’t feel that you ever reached a zenith. I feel that you were expanding like this, andbecause of economics, you had to turn back in on yourself. When he did
Cinderella,
he had to be sure it was a safe picture because his market was still uncertain. Well, it was solid—the returns on
Cinderella—
so now he was back in business, but he couldn’t experiment as wildly as he had before. So he went on to
Peter Pan
and began doing these other pictures, like
Alice in Wonderland.
So by then, he had used up the