An Evening with Roy E. Disney

I headed over to the Newport Beach Film Festival this evening.  It’s a lower-profile festival put on by that community in some nice, older theatres.  The one that I was at was on a peninsula right on the ocean.  The event that had caught my eye was Walt’s nephew Roy E. Disney presenting an evening of rare or not-often-seen Disney short films.

I’m rather a fan of Roy, since he quietly put his influence behind pushing Disney to greatly innovate in the 1980s and that led to their big hits in the late-1980s and 1990s.  He also was the host of “Fantasia 2000” if you ever saw that marvelous film.  In many ways, “Fantasia” reminded me a lot of the spirit of the evening, with a diverse range of short films.  Roy told a number of great stories, including referring to his big company war with former CEO Michael Eisner, and was quite on-top-of-things for a guy of 78.