But what is the secret to its success?

Nearly 100 Ventura County professionals from various industries paid $395 each to snag some tips from the entertainment company at a full-day event Friday at the Residence Inn by Marriott in Oxnard.

"We're here to learn how Disney does it, and try to adapt their business practices for our organization," said Erin Antrim of the Boys & Girls Club of Greater Oxnard and Port Hueneme.

"Disney Keys to Excellence," sponsored by the Oxnard Chamber of Commerce, featured program facilitators Fernando Beltran and Leslie Bays-Baker from the Disney Institute. They discussed effective leadership, management, brand loyalty and how to build relationships with customers.

The purpose was to share the "business behind the magic," through stories about Disney's history and culture, for participants to apply to their own businesses.

Most of the lessons were simple and based on common sense. For example, the importance of making eye contact and smiling at customers and treating employees well.

"Our front line is our bottom line," Bays-Baker said. "They make or break the experience."

She asked attendees to think about how their vision conveys their values and how they can inspire passion in others.

Several people in the audience said they were inspired and that the seminar got them thinking.

Dennis Madden, chief executive of Automatic Transmission Rebuilders Association in Oxnard, called the ideas "thought-starters" that would require more reflection. He said it made him realize the importance of teaching employees about the company's origin and what role each employee plays.

"Sometimes we get so involved in a task — we have to sit back and really examine what's important," Madden said.

John Mussmacher and Jeff McCorkle both said they were there to learn how to be better managers and stronger leaders at Taconic, a biotech company in Oxnard.

"A lot of times, seminars are a vehicle to remind us of what we should be doing," said Mussmacher, a site director.

Nancy Lindholm, president and chief executive of the Oxnard Chamber of Commerce, had hoped attendance would be higher. There was space for 250 participants. She attributed the lower than expected turnout to the economic downturn. Those who did attend seemed to enjoy themselves, she said.

"I know I've picked up tips," she said. "Development of culture is key, and the four building blocks (leadership, management, service and loyalty) really relate back to developing that culture."

For Antrim with the Boys & Girls Club, a story that illustrated Walt Disney's passion stuck with her the most.

In 1930, he gave a group of animators 50 cents each and told them to go have dinner and return to a stage afterward. They came back with full stomachs to a dark stage — to save money, there was just one light on — and then Disney launched into a lively tale of Snow White, selling them on the idea to create the first feature-length animated film.

Robert Iger, chief executive of Walt Disney, said on a visit to London that ESPN, the company's sports broadcaster, was its second principal brand after the Disney name itself - and indicated that he hoped to expand it globally.

"I know they [ESPN] will look at the Premier League rights again, both individually and in partnership with others," Mr Iger said. The next auction of Premier League broadcast rights is due to start next January.

ESPN is also interested in pursuing the rights to show Premier League games in the United States, where the rights are held by Fox, the broadcaster owned by News Corporation, parent company of The Times. It believes that there is a growing audience for football in the United States.

Mr Iger said that ESPN's coverage of Euro 2008 had proved extremely popular and Disney chose to air the semi-finals and the final on its mainstream ABC network. Senior executives of the broadcaster believe that the arrival of David Beckham in the United States at the LA Galaxy had helped to lift interest in the sport in the one leading country that has largely ignored the world's game until recently.

BSkyB, the satellite broadcaster 39.1per cent owned by News Corp, paid £1.31 billion to secure the rights to show 92 live games a season in the existing three-year contract, which expires at the end of the 2009-10 season. Setanta Sports paid £392 million for the rights to show a further 46 games a season live.

The Disney chief emphasised that he had earmarked about $250 million (£142million) to $300 million for acquisitions in video games and said that the company was looking "at companies that fit well within the Disney or ESPN brands" that have "a foot[hold] into new technologies".

Mr Iger specifically avoided directly commenting on ITV, but the criteria cited did not suggest that Disney had a strong interest in network broadcasters in Britain or elsewhere. The company has abandoned plans to introduce ABC-branded general entertainment channels in big markets globally.

Most of Disney's recent acquisitions in Europe have been modest, with the company buying the websites Soccernet, Cricinfo and Scrum.com. It also bought NASN, a broadcaster specialising in transmitting American sports across Europe, for about £50 million in 2006.

Mr Iger hinted that Disney had taken a brief look at Bebo, the social networking site, which was acquired by AOL in March. He emphasised the group's interest in social networks, saying that the model sat well with Disney.

He said that, as the economy proved tough in the West, Disney continued to focus on emerging markets. It is looking to expand considerably its lucrative consumer products business in emerging markets, particularly in Asia. It is also creating films for local markets alongside local production groups.

Roadside Romeo is a forthcoming Bollywood animated film, with the actors Saif Ali Khan and Kareena Kapoor lending their voices to animated characters. Disney intends to exploit India's undeveloped film merchandise market.

Mr Iger said that Disney was relatively resilient to the global economic crisis, saying that advertising accounted for only 20 per cent of group revenue. However, he said that the company was still feeling the pinch, adding: "The global economic crisis affects us because of the impact on the consumer ... What's going on in the housing market has an impact, as do commodity prices and unemployment. The US consumer is definitely hurting."

To plunge the international press into a deeply authentic mermaid experience, French composer Michel Redolfi, will stage an underwater concert in a heated pool lined with state-of-the-art speakers and a live solo percussionist in full scuba gear for the floating audience.

Redolfi, 56, who has been creating sound installations underwater in swimming pools and oceans around the world -- including La Jolla, Calif., Sydney and Cannes -- for more than two decades, admits that the underwater landscape is not as silent as you might think.

"Besides the calls of the large mammals, there are about 20,000 different sounds in the ocean. Many shrimp and fish rely on sound to move together in the deep. It's a noisy world, so intense in some oceans that it actually blocks man's electronic communications," he said.

On Thursday, listeners will be invited to try out the musical acoustics in the Mediterranean, both on the surface and, inevitably, under the sea.

Though a tale of childhood set during the Holocaust, this is no Life is Beautiful. Where that film's mawkish coda offered the audience bogus consolation, the harrowing final few minutes of Herman's film rush us headlong into the infernal machinery of the Final Solution, to which the only responses can be silence, sorrow and tears.

Survivors' stories, or the stories of so-called righteous gentiles such as Oskar Schindler, may be uplifting and life-affirming, but they do not reflect the truth of the Holocaust: that most people perished. Irish author John Boyne's 2006 best-selling children's novella did not duck this truth, and neither does Herman's adaptation.

Even so, one British commentator recently accused the movie of representing a "Disneyfication of the Final Solution," before going on to wonder "whether The Gas Chamber ride is being installed outside Paris". It was a cheap shot, and Herman is rightly puzzled. "I found that a very muddled piece and didn't really understand what she was getting at because I can't find any Disneyfication in this film," he says. "I don't quite know what she means. It's almost as if that because it's from a child's angle, it becomes too sweet. But one of the points of the story is the innocence of the kids and the ignorance of the grown ups."

"The kids" are Bruno, the eight-year-old son of the newly-appointed commandant of a concentration camp, and Shmuel, the Jewish boy on the other side of the camp's electrified fence, whom he befriends. Despite the charge above, there is virtually no sentimentality in Herman's portrayal of their journey from innocence to a grim realisation about the adult world surrounding them.

Moreover, he has kept his word to Boyne that he would not dilute the book's shocking climax. "I met early with him and sort of promised that I would protect the ending. Although that was a promise, obviously, that wasn't really in my power to keep," he laughs, "because making movies doesn't work like that."

It appears that Herman did not just want to be faithful to Boyne's vision. "In a way, the ending is sort of payback to the ending of Life is Beautiful," he says, referring to Roberto Benigni's lugubrious Oscar- winning comedy. "The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas accelerates to the end, it gets ahead of you, and then it's gone. There's no sort of, 'Oh, I can meet my mother out in the countryside.'"

The ending had actually been one of the key elements that appealed to Herman when he first read The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas in galley form, prior to its publication. There was already a buzz about the book but, unusually, no-one had picked up the film rights. "I was kind of surprised because the word was so good," he says. "But then you think about the subject matter and you can perhaps understand why (the studios] stayed clear. I just felt that if people read the book, they might think it's difficult to turn into a film, so if a film studio could read a screenplay instead of the book, they might get it. But the only way of doing that was to buy the rights myself." So that is what he did.

Free to work without studio interference, Herman set about adapting the book. He took out one of his favourite scenes where Hitler and Eva Braun visit Bruno's family in Berlin – "we're making a fictional story, and putting in a real character would put it out of kilter", he explains – and made his version of the camp an unnamed place rather than Auschwitz, or "Out-With", as Boyne's Bruno calls it in the novella. Herman was fascinated by the ambiguities of looking at this world and its characters through the eyes of a German child. People who we would consider monsters in hindsight, such as Bruno's father (played by David Thewlis in the film), become more familiar. "These guys were really human beings," says the filmmaker. "They protected their family, they were decent fathers during the evening. And then the next day they'd go out and kill so many people. I love all that ambiguity."

It also makes for a less clear-cut emotional response as a viewer. When tragedy strikes at the end of the film, you are unsure whether to feel sympathy for two of the central adult characters – they're Nazis, damn it! – or say they had it coming. "I love the fact that people are confused about their emotions and their feelings towards them."

Researching the film was one of the most emotionally gruelling things Herman says he has ever had to do. Trawling the internet for information, "You find yourself on sites that you shouldn't be at, and you click a link and then you're on one that you really shouldn't be at. And then you get to a stage where you say, 'I really don't need to do research this far." It was a very depressing, upsetting time, really, while I was writing it." By the time he and everyone else arrived on the set, they had "all been to pretty dark places".

When The Boy with the Striped Pyjamas was first published, people questioned whether the Holocaust was a fitting subject for a children's book. Herman, though, is not even sure that Boyne's novella – despite its deceptively simple, fabulist form, which the director/writer has striven to recreate – is actually a children's book.

"I was always a little bit muddled about (that] because you have to be old enough to understand the Holocaust to be able to understand the ironies of Bruno's story, in a way," he explains. His film, he says, is only a family film in the sense that "parents can, and probably should, take their kids. I don't think it's specifically aimed at kids at all."

Nonetheless, it is children who are likely to benefit most from the film, because of the journey that it takes the audience on as the scales slowly fall from Bruno's eyes. A continuous undercurrent of dread lets you know that it will probably not end well. And when the tragic denouement arrives, it is as uncompromising as almost anything in The Grey Zone, Tim Blake Nelson's flinty film (now available on Region 2 DVD) about the sonderkommandos of Auschwitz-Birkenau – arguably still one of the toughest, bleakest and most honest movies about the Holocaust, and, in particular, the moral dilemmas faced by prisoners in the camps, ever made.

Shooting such scenes is always difficult, but staging the final moments of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas was further complicated by the involvement of the two young boys playing Bruno and Shmuel, newcomers Asa Butterfield and Jack Scanlon respectively.

"That was just a nightmare on so many levels," says Herman. "You've probably got more lawyers there than filmmakers. You had all the legalities of kids in amongst grown-up naked people, who can be where and when, and what they can see. It was really horrendous. You'd got the parents with them and all sorts of helpers. It's disturbing for us grown ups, but I'm sure it's even more disturbing for the kids."

Viewers will have to decide for themselves whether it was worth it or not. But any parents looking for a way to introduce their children to one of the 20th century's darkest moments could do a lot worse than start here. According to Herman, the film has already received the seal of approval from several Holocaust survivors, including one woman who was herself in Auschwitz as a child.