Chairman Roy is Disney's greatest success.

Girl warrior Mulan, who rode on to the big screen last week, has been hailed as the cartoon character who saved Walt Disney.

But Roy Disney, the 68-year-old nephew of the legendary Walt, knows better - because HE is the saviour of the most famous film company in the world.

Mulan has taken Dollars 120 million at the US box office and ended a run of moderate successes - Hercules and The Hunchback Of Notre Dame stuck at around the Dollars 100 million mark.

But 15 years ago, the cartoon kingdom was in deep trouble when Roy Disney helped take the company out of a frightening and disastrous slump.

At the time, Disney was reckoned to be worth just Dollars 2.5 billion. Recent stock exchange figures place the company's value at Dollars 70 billion.

So the amiable Roy Disney is more than ready to battle with movie moguls such as Steven Spielberg who want to cut into Disney's cartoon kingdom.

Spielberg's Biblical saga Prince Of Egypt and the insect kingdom epic Antz are both aimed at the lucrative animation market which Disney has dominated.

But if Roy, as chairman of Walt Disney Feature Animation, is worried about the competition, it doesn't show.

He says: "We try to ignore it. The most important thing is that we make the best films we can."

So far, they've been good enough to see off the likes of Anastasia and Quest For Camelot from Fox and Warner Bros.

Asked how he feels about those films flopping, Roy says: "It's reassuring. But you'd like everybody to succeed. On the other hand, a bad piece of work makes us look even better."

The thought that Disney might look anything but good once prompted Roy to walk out on them.

The great eras of Snow White, Fantasia, Mickey Mouse, Peter Pan and Pinocchio were distant memories and Roy was sure Disney had lost its way.

He says: "After Walt and my father died - in 1966 and 1971 - the company really started to go down hill creatively. One problem was that an awful lot of people sat around and wondered whether Walt would have liked something - a futile question, because he was no longer there.

"Secondly, they started to think of the company as one which had theme parks and, by the way, made movies on the side.

"That is precisely, of course, what we are not. The theme parks are the tail, not the dog. If we had not made Snow White or Fantasia, Mickey Mouse and Cinderella, we could not have built the theme parks, because there wouldn't have been any theme."

So Roy orchestrated a coup to take over the company. Not surprisingly, he can effortlessly rattle off the date when he returned to the Disney fold - September 24, 1984.

He says: "That was one year that I'd never like to live through again."

That's because taking over Disney sparked a family fall-out - before Roy's comeback, the company had been in the hands of Ron Miller, the husband of Walt Disney's daughter.

The coup caused a rift in the family, but it was worth it, because it saved Disney from being bought up by predators.

Roy says: "We managed to keep it whole, which it might not have been otherwise."

Now, particularly because he looks so like Walt, Roy Disney is regarded as the company's trademark.

"But when I left the company, that was the last thing that anyone thought of me. I was just the kid who didn't agree with a lot of them," he said.

Since his return, Disney has enjoyed another golden age, with hit films such as The Little Mermaid, Beauty And The Beast and Aladdin.

But Roy is also shrewd enough to know that the box office performance of every Disney film will be weighed against its biggest smash, The Lion King, which took Dollars 312million in the USA alone - even though that is unlikely to be repeated.

He says: "The Lion King cast a long shadow. When Pocahontas took Dollars 135 million dollars the next year, it was called a failure, so we have to live with the legacy of Lion King.

"But Mulan has already taken more than Dollars 120 million, and that has reassured people that we know what we are doing."