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Mickey Mouse turns 90 this week and despite the many decades under his belt, the loveable rodent looks like he hasn’t aged a day.

Since his humble beginnings as an idea thought up by the once struggling animator on a cross-country train ride from New York to Los Angeles, the little mouse has taken the entertainment world by storm and captured the hearts and minds of generations.

And for veteran Disney director and animator Eric Goldberg, Mickey Mouse sparked his interest in the industry.

“When I was a kid in the late 1950s, Mickey was on television alongside the Looney Toons, the Fleischer cartoons like Popeye and Betty Boop and I just ate up it all with a spoon,” he tells Mirror Online.

“I would watch the Mickey Mouse Club, which had some new animations by the nine old men [a group of animators who created some of Disney's most famous works] - and of course, they would run the classic Mickey cartoons on there as well.

“So it wasn't a question even of discovering Mickey, he was already there,” he adds.

From then on, Goldberg says animation and Mickey became his obsession.

“I was just an animation sponge, I really wanted to learn everything about it from the age of eight,” he says. “I started doing flip books and from that point no memo pad in the house was safe.

“Mickey was at the heart of a lot of that stuff because he was relatively simple to draw”.

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Mickey the inspiration

It’s no secret the cartoon character’s many adventures over the last nine decades have inspired countless artists who then, in turn, grew up to work for the very same studio that brought him to life - and Goldberg was no exception.

His illustrious career at the Walt Disney Studios began as supervising animator of the wise-cracking Genie in Aladdin before moving on to co-direct Pocahontas and animating the feisty Danny DeVito-voiced satyr Phil in Hercules.

But for the award-winning cartoonist, it’s Mickey Mouse he feels the most affection for.

Dressed in a shirt with the character’s face imprinted all over it, Goldberg says it’s Mickey’s enthusiasm, resourcefulness and playfulness which has helped him remain as endearing and relevant as ever.

“He's like us,” he explains. “Mickey is not perfect but he has attributes that many of us would like, he's very resourceful, he's very inventive and one of the things a lot of people don't tend to think about is that he's simply fun to watch.

“When he is being playful, kids can relate to that and when he is being resourceful or clever, adults can relate to that.

“There are all sorts of shadings to his personality that make him a very unique 'every mouse',” he muses.

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How Mickey has been reinvented

The 63-year-old and self-confessed expert on the house of mouse was only too keen to share his knowledge about the cartoon’s creation.

Mickey has gone on to surpass his cartoon form, becoming a powerhouse that never goes out of style and in doing so he’s been reinvented over the years.

“Probably the biggest change that most people would notice is in 1938. Up until that point Mickey had two dot eyes and occasionally in the middle 30s they would draw in what they call 'pie eyes', where he’d have a little cut out of those black pupils - it looked like a pie slice.”

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However, according to Goldberg, the jovial round character everyone knows and loves was not quite codified during the 1930s; instead, fans have grown up with a Mickey that was redesigned at the beginning of the 1940s, the one popularised in Fantasia’s the Sorcerer's Apprentice.

“During that sequence, Mickey looks up at the sorcerer and he has this little tiny smile, which then drops like 'I guess he's not buying that one' and by having that pliability in his face it gave him a lot more subtlety.

“He could be big when he needed to be big but he could also be subtle and I think that range of emotion also helped solidify his popularity,” he says.

If Mickey didn’t change, then neither did his right-hand gal, Minnie. His anniversary is just as much hers too, which is something Goldberg is quick to point out.

“She's 90 as well, she's been there since the very beginning!”

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Animation 'cheats'

Goldberg isn’t just a fanatic, he also had the privilege of stepping into Walt Disney’s shoes and directed a small animated short for the 85th anniversary of Steamboat Willie.

The Oscar-nominated Get A Horse! was a hybrid of hand-drawn and computer animation, working off the original black-and-white version of Mickey and his pals.

“Frankly as animators, we had to practically unlearn everything we knew about animation in order to get the animation to look like it was produced in 1928,” he says.

“We had sent our minds back, set our animator clocks backwards so that we could do the same things that they did.

“But our CG animators did a great job in really understanding how that Mickey worked and employing the same kind of cheats that we used in hand-drawn in the 3D world.

“The most famous cheat used, is when Mickey looks at you front face you can see both of his ears flat on. And when he looks in profile you're still seeing both of his ears flat on.

“It always worked, they always animated convincingly when drawn by hand but computer animation doesn't like to cheat the rules, so we kind of broke a few in order to get that to work,” he jokes.

The future for Mickey

With 90 years now firmly behind him, Mickey Mouse still elicits so much joy from grown-ups, children or those in between, and it's for that very reason he continues to celebrated around the world.

But what’s next for Mickey? With interests in popular entertainment constantly changing, will Walt’s humble creation ever slip into the realm of obscurity?

Predictably Goldberg has his own opinions on this subject too and, for him, Mickey Mouse has a very bright future.

“I think he's going to go for another 90, myself. He's not a character who's ever going to go out of fashion.

“We are still animating Mickey, there things that are done for television audiences like Mickey and the Roadster Racers and the Mickey shorts.

“We're still animating the classic character for a lot of the theme park work as well, and you can see him as he’s projected 40 feet high on top of the castles for all to see.

“We've done a lot of animation in the last couple of years with Mickey and the gang in that classic design and style. And I don't think that's going to stop.”