Legend has it that Walt Disney's staff once presented their boss with a spoof cartoon on his birthday. Lovingly illustrated, it depicted an apple-cheeked Snow White engaging in serial sex with the seven dwarfs. When the lights came up, Disney applauded vigorously, marvelled at the film's ingenuity and casually wondered who was responsible for it. When the blushing illustrators identified themselves, Disney promptly fired them. They never worked for the company again.

If there is one moral to be taken from this tale, it is that you tarnish the Mouse House at your peril. Let's put it another way. Disney stands for all things sweet and clean and wholesome and to say (or do) otherwise is to risk its wrath. Disneyworld Florida reportedly once employed a team of trained marksmen. Their mission: to gun down any birds they suspected might be about to land a deposit on Main Street.

A recent survey revealed Disney to be the single most trusted brand name in America. Fitting really, because few corporations present so perfect a mirror of the nation that spawned them. Just as America is a land of glaring contradictions - a libertarian Utopia founded on slavery and genocide - so its most beloved brand is a split, two-fold creation. Behind Disney's gleaming window display lies an engine-room of rampant venture capitalism.

Disney's authorised history is well-known. It began 100 years ago this week, with the birth of a poor kid in Chicago who would go on to become an American institution. Down the years, biographers have speculated that the man's squeaky-clean output was a response to his own turbulent, itinerant childhood and his harsh experiences working for the Red Cross in the first world war. Whatever the reasons, Disney was to hit on a magic formula. In sugaring age-old myths and folk-tales with a bright, animated coating, he became arguably the 20th century's most popular and prolific storyteller.

The trouble is that Disney the entertainer goes hand in hand with Disney the man (an undercover liaison for the FBI; a rabid anti-communist who shopped suspected sympathisers during the McCarthy era). And Disney the man goes hand in hand with Disney the industry; a vast spiderweb that extends far beyond a cheerful band of dedicated animators. At the last count, Disney owned nine TV stations, 21 radio stations, seven daily newspapers, various book and music publishers, several airports and five movie studios (including Miramax, which allows the company to profit from films like Pulp Fiction without seeming directly associated in its drugs'n'violence plotline).

Plus we have those Disney theme parks (in Orlando, Anaheim, Tokyo and Paris). Take Disneyworld Florida, the place that offers the most intriguing insight into the Disney mode of business. The corporation bought the land from local farmers under the banner of the Reedy Creek Improvement District, a supposedly public entity established by the state of Florida. Critics allege that this has enabled Disney to run the Magic Kingdom as a sort of semi-autonomous principality, bypassing rules and regulations that hamper other businesses in the state. If so, the agreement effectively casts the Florida state government in the role of Pluto; a compliant lapdog to the Disney master. (That said, Florida's immediate neighbour to the north isn't much better. In 1998, the governor of Georgia declared a state-wide "Hercules Day" as a means to promote the latest Disney blockbuster).

In the end, the Walt Disney story stands as a textbook example of that classic oxymoron: the entertainment business. This is the central contradiction at the corporation's heart - the rigorous, ruthless business of pushing a product that speaks warmth and light and goodwill to all men. For most of us, the entertainment is all that registers. We view Bambi and Pinocchio as nostalgic classics of our childhood while simultaneously thrilling to more recent output like Toy Story, A Bug's Life and the upcoming Monsters Inc (all made in collaboration with Pixar), with their state-of-the-art computer imagery and hipper, more streetwise scripts.

And yet could it be that the product itself is as deeply suspect as the business behind it? Disney, its critics contend, trades in a bogus, sentimentalised, Prozac-style view of a world where all the roughage has been social-engineered out of existence. Carl Hiaasen certainly thinks so. In his anti-Mouse book Team Rodent, the Miami-based writer claims that: "Disney is so good at being good that it manifests an evil, so uniformly efficient and courteous, so dependably clean and conscientious, so unfailingly entertaining that it's unreal and therefore an agent of pure wickedness."

If Walt was still alive, he'd presumably be celebrating his centenary with a pageant that would put the Queen Mum to shame. As it is, the animator died in 1966; killed off by a twin assault of lung cancer and cardiac arrest. He left behind both a multi-billion dollar company and (legend has it) a cryogenetically preserved corpse. If the stories are true, the Walt who gave us Disney currently resides under glass: a human faËade, impeccable looking; at once lifelike and utterly unreal. Man and brand in perfect harmony.