I remember the weeks of expectation leading up to the outing with my parents the excitement of queuing in the winter dark and of going into the bright, warm cinema foyer and discovering that there was a souvenir programme - what joy! - filled with stills from the movie and (the first time I had been aware of the studio drawing attention to this aspect) pictures of the actors who provided the character voices.
That film was The Jungle Book and it came as a gift to the kid who was besotted with animation and who, when Walt Disney had died the previous December, had truly feared that the magic was finally over and that - like the founder of the Mouse Factory - cartoon movies were now dead and buried. The date: December 1967 the place: the Odeon cinema, Bromley the event: the release of a new Disney animated film - in fact, the last ever Disney animated film to be personally produced by the man whose name was above the title: Walt Disney. It's all but forty years ago, but I remember it as if it were yesterday!
