CS: A lot of people feel Pinocchio is the apex of animated features. Snow White may be warmer, there are parts of Bambi that are more beautiful and Dumbo will make you cry more readily. But in Pinocchio, everything works in a way that's never quite been equaled.

OJ: I think that's because of Walt's involvement. In the book, the author says Walt was never again as close to the stuff as he was on Pinocchio and Snow White. I think that after he got off Pinocchio and on to Fantasia, it was a different kind of a picture and a different type of involvement. When he came to Bambi, the money situation and the war were causing problems, although I think he turned out a real gem. I think this was his last major involvement.

FT: If things had gone the way he'd planned for the next ten years, there's no telling where he would have gone. He believed in Fantasia so strongly and we've talked many times, where the studio would be today if it had gone over.

CS: The way Snow White did.

FT: If there'd been no war and if there'd been money from Pinocchio.

OJ: He'd have been doing wonderful things.

FT: He would have gone out into the Field of Dreams. He wouldn't have done another picture like Pinocchio and he wouldn't have done Cinderella that was so much like Snow White. We wouldn't have done any of those pictures; they all felt to me, working with him, that he was held in. He was trying to make it the best he could, but this wasn't really what he wanted to do. During that time he was nervous.

OJ: Towards the end of that period, when he started on his locomotive, I'd see him out in the shop, and he said, "I got to get this place so it doesn't hang on one picture all the time." He knew he had to do something to put that place back on a sound footing, but it wasn't necessarily going to involve him in the way he had been involved.

Charles Solomon is an internationally respected critic and historian of animation. His most recent books include The Disney That Never Was (Hyperion, 1995), Les Pionniers du Dessin Animé Américain (Dreamland, Paris, 1996) and Enchanted Drawings: The History of Animation (Knopf, 1989; reprinted, Wings, 1994). His writings on the subject have appeared in TV Guide, Rolling Stone, the Los Angeles Times, Modern Maturity, Film Comment, the Hollywood Reporter, Millimeter, the Manchester Guardian, and been reprinted in newspapers and professional journals in the United States, Canada, France, Russia, Britain, Israel, the Netherlands and Japan.