Walt Disney used to say that his company was built on a mouse. You know, that squeaky little thing in red shorts and white gloves who scampered into the world in 1928 and has spawned billions in merchandise and theme parks. The Walt Disney Co. (http://www.businessweek.com/ticker/) may have been built on the back of a mouse, but this summer the company is pinning much of its box-office hopes on another rodent: a rat.

Remy, the animated star of Ratatouille, which is due to hit theaters on June 29, is a rat who improbably dreams of becoming a great chef at a fancy Parisian restaurant. It’s the first film that animation powerhouse http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/snapshot/snapshot.asp?capId=34864198) has made since Disney plunked down $7.5 billion last year to buy the studio that created such box-office blockbusters as Toy Story, Finding Nemo, and The Incredibles. Money Well Spent?

So, a lot of folks are waiting to see whether Ratatouille justifies all those Disney dollars that Chief Executive http://investing.businessweek.com/businessweek/research/stocks/people/person.asp?personId=191572&symbol=DIS spent. A little background: At the time of the deal, Pixar, majority owned by Apple (http://www.businessweek.com/ticker/) Chief Executive http://investing.businessweek.com/businessweek/research/stocks/people/person.asp?personId=340149&symbol=AAPL, was nearing the end of its 14-year contract with Disney to jointly make films. Jobs and departing Disney Chief Executive Michael Eisner were sniping at one another, and Jobs was testing the waters for a move of his animation factory to Warner Bros. (http://www.businessweek.com/ticker/), Sony (http://www.businessweek.com/ticker/), or anyone not named Disney. When Iger replaced Eisner in late 2005, one of the first things he did was make nice with Jobs.

When Iger made the Pixar deal, several Wall Street analysts figured that he had overpaid. Heck, even Eisner came out of semi-exile to speak to board members, pleading with them to veto the rich deal. So now, there will likely be a ton of folks on Wall Street waiting to see whether Ratatouille is, well, a rotten tomato. Box-Office Predictions

Chances are good that Ratatouille won’t be a blockbuster. It’s not the rollicking, show tune-laden, laugh-fest that Pixar usually makes. It is, however, a tremendously well-made, stylish film that will take your breath away in terms of technology—rat hairs look real and human movements are so authentic you won’t believe they were generated by a computer.

The story is heartwarming; the dopey guy gets the girl, and the rat overcomes adversity to live his dream. “It’s the most gorgeous animated film that I’ve ever seen,” Iger (who, granted, is not exactly unbiased) said in a recent earnings conference call. “And in the best Disney and Pixar traditions, it’s a terrific, funny, original story with a lot of heart that has all the makings of a classic.”

Richard Greenfield, an analyst with Pali Research, figures Ratatouille will trail the $462 million worldwide box office tallied by Cars. That 2006 Pixar film was generally considered a modest disappointment because it fell short of the $631 million that The Incredibles grossed two years earlier and well short of Finding Nemo’s $864 million worldwide tally. Still, Greenfield points out that Cars has gone on to sell tons more merchandise than anticipated. “This is not a story about how one film performs,” he says.

NEW YORK: Irascible, exacting, fearless and determinedly pro-investor, James Walker Michaels, the editor of Forbes magazine for almost 40 years, died last week at 86. Because he sharpened and refined what had passed for business and financial reporting in the United States, he earned a place in journalistic history.

But because he stayed behind the scenes at Forbes, even as less talented editors assumed celebrity status at other publications, Jim Michaels never became a household name. I could not let his death go by, therefore, without reflecting on his mind, drive and the profound lessons he taught those who worked for him and were eager to learn.

“He was certainly the best business editor that Ive ever seen,” Warren Buffett told me last week. “He knew the subject, he knew the writing, and you knew that every story had been edited by Jim. He made them short, and he made them sing.”

And his reporters? He made them nervous.

Under Michaels, a tough taskmaster, Forbes became a boot camp for business reporters. When I worked for him in the late 1980s and then again in the mid-1990s, he routinely spiked articles that played it safe. (Pity the reader was his refrain as he rejected an article that drew no conclusion.)

He refused to play the access journalism game. (Better to have your nose pressed firmly against the glass than to be a guest of the people you report about.) He believed in congratulating true business achievers and slamming crooks and flops. What better way to celebrate capitalism, he argued, and keep it safe from the me-firsters who could wreck it?

He cared only about the Forbes reader. Writers egos, famously large, concerned him not one bit. When editing, he would hammer his views directly into reporters copy, often in capital letters. Flaccid writing and weak thinking brought out his bark and bite.

Here are some examples, culled from an aging file known internally at Forbes as the Abuse File. Ive kept them because I treasure them:

“This is badly written and badly edited. It would be an insult to foist it on the reader.”

“This is a real snoozer, lacking in specifics. Why not just send them a nice lacy valentine and forget the prose.”

“Im sending this one back because the character is deader than a dodo.” Cant the writer “inject a little life without adding 10,000 words?”

“A good story turned into oatmeal by bad organization.”

“Please fix this quickest. It lacks most of the ingredients of a Forbes story. The quotes are room emptiers.”

“This is the kind of sentence that drives readers to stop reading.”

“This is a paid advertisement. Did you forget to say he walks on water?”

As you can see, the comments were blistering. But they were also instructive. Any writer who heeded them became the better for it. Here are some more:

“If I cant stay awake editing this, how can a reader stay awake reading it? Whats the point? If it has a point, maybe we can make a story of it.”

“I cant make head nor tail of this. Theres a story buried in all this confusion, but I cant find it. Fix it or kill it.”

“This is a remarkable job of interviewing an interesting and colorful man and getting precisely one quote.”

Writers were not the only ones to feel the Michaels lash. “Your initials are on this so I suppose you understand it,” he wrote to one of his editors. “I dont.” Atop another article, he wrote: “Replace or run white space.”

He regularly banned words and phrases he considered overused.

“Fast track,” “game plan,” “bottom line” and “superstar” were some examples. “Upscale” was another: “If I see this word again Ill upthrow,” he wrote.

More than 40 years after George Orwell wrote “Politics and the English Language,” his 1946 essay on the decline of the language, Michaels made his writers read it. Orwell wrote: “Political language - and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists - is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

Michaels knew, of course, that there was plenty of wind in financial writing, and he worked mightily to expel it. The sharper the words, the better the article. Here you go:

“This is exactly the sort of lazy writer jargon that will put us out of business. Please use the rich resources of the English language.”

LONDON: Thousands of financial professionals in London are likely to lose their jobs over the next year as a result of the credit crunch, and many of them may face a jobless Christmas, experts say.

There may be 6,500 fewer professionals in the City of London financial hub in 2008 than this year, according to a report by The British Center for Economics and Business Research that was to be released Monday.

Jonathan Said, the centers senior economist, said that about 2,000 City jobs would be slashed by Christmas off a record high of 349,100 registered this month.

“What we are likely to see as we enter 2008 is a reduction of almost one for every two jobs added this year,” one of the reports authors, Sarah Bloomfield, said in a statement.

“It will feel worse than it actually is because the City has become used to adding jobs at breakneck speed,” she said.

Private equity, mergers and acquisitions, hedge funds and structured finance units will shed the largest number of jobs, the center predicted.

The Swiss bank UBS said last week it would axe 1,500 jobs in its investment bank whose major centers are in London and New York. Credit Suisse also said it would lay off 170 employees in its investment banking unit.

“Clearly, there are going to be more job cuts, especially from the likes of Citi where we can expect the highest,” said Shaun Springer, chief executive of the recruitment firm Napier Scott, in London, referring to Citigroup.

Citigroup, the largest U.S. bank by market value, said last Monday it was expecting a fall of about 60 percent in third-quarter earnings.

But recruiters say the City will not suffer layoffs on a scale seen in the previous period of market volatility. According to the report, more than 15,000 financial jobs were lost in London between 2001 and 2002.

“I dont think there is going to be a massive wave of job cuts,” Springer said. “The banks did that back in 2001 and 2002, and in 2003 they found themselves desperately short not only of the skilled staff necessary to effect expansion but similarly short of graduate juniors because they didnt take any of those either.”

Rather, the number of employees will be reduced steadily over the year, he predicted.

“Five percent get culled every year anyway,” Springer said. “Whether they are going to be replaced, I doubt. Whether hiring is going to be as frenetic in 2008 as it was in 2005, 06 and 07, I doubt. Theres always natural wastage also, will that be replaced? Perhaps not.”

The consequences of the cutbacks will vary.

“Therell be greater talent on the market for a short period of time and that might potentially ease certain organizations war for talent,” said Robert Thesiger, chief operating officer of recruitment firm Imprint.

But, the banking industry risks losing some of its experienced workforce for good. During the last market meltdown, Springer said, many City professionals were forced to move out and never returned.

“They didnt sit kicking their heels waiting for the recruitment market to recover. They went and did something else.”