Nature & Animals Quote by June Foray

A single phone call turns a working voice actress into a piece of permanent cultural furniture: the hiss, purr, and sly menace of Lucifer the Cat in Cinderella. June Foray’s line is deceptively casual, but it’s doing a lot of work. “Someone at Disney” is both anonymous and mythic, the faceless gatekeeper of an era when studios functioned like kingdoms and talent moved through them by summons. The power dynamic is baked into the phrasing: she’s “called in,” not invited, and the job is framed as sound, not performance, even though the “sounds” are the character’s entire personality.

The subtext is how animation labor gets flattened. Foray isn’t describing creative collaboration; she’s describing a pipeline. A record is heard, a need is identified, a specialist is inserted. That’s the golden-age studio system in miniature: astonishing artistry delivered through industrial efficiency. Her matter-of-fact tone also signals professional pragmatism. Foray isn’t selling magic; she’s recounting craft as employment, which is precisely why the line lands. It punctures the romantic story we like to tell about Disney with the reality that these icons were built by working artists making payroll.

Context matters, too: Cinderella (1950) sits in Disney’s postwar push to reassert itself, and Lucifer embodies a domesticated kind of villainy - petty, comic, intimate. Foray’s credit is a reminder that “evil” in a family film often comes from technique, timing, and voice, not just drawing. The cat’s cruelty is performed, engineered, and, in this case, hired.