So what was the Pope saying to you? "He was asking me if he could become a director," says Joe Barbera, looking at the framed photograph of himself greeting the head of the Roman Catholic church, which occupies pride of place amid the Oscars, Emmys and honorary fire- chief helmets that adorn his 14th floor office in Sherman Oaks. "He was a Hollywood fan, I can tell you that."
Alas for the fans of biblical epics and costume dramas, the Pope never made it to Hollywood. Barbera did. And he didn't just make it to Hollywood, he made it in Hollywood. The boy who started his artistic life copying pictures from the Bible, at the Holy Innocents school in Brooklyn more than 80 years ago, went on to become half of one of the most celebrated partnerships in film history. Working with William Hanna, he created an extraordinary menagerie of animated characters including Tom and Jerry, the Flintstones, Top Cat, Yogi Bear, Huckleberry Hound and Quick Draw MacGraw. He has won seven Oscars, eight Emmys and a total of 247 awards around the world. Now, 30 years after the last Tom and Jerry movie, there is to be a new one: Mansion Cat, for which Barbera is acting as consultant and doing one of the voices.
"One nun, Sister Mary Nicholas, she would belt you on the back of the head," says Barbera of his days at the Holy Innocents. He talks in a low Brooklyn growl, with the timing of a stand-up comic. "And my grand mother - she had the fastest hands in the west." He demonstrates how she would deliver a speedy clip to any child that stepped out of line. Whack! Biff! Maybe this is where all those whacks and biffs that characterise Tom and Jerry started.
Barbera will be 90 in March, but he is looking natty and groomed in a black polo shirt, herring-bone tweed jacket and flannels. "You're looking very dashing," says Catherine, who handles publicity for him at Warner Brothers. "What do you want?" he asks with a louche grin. He comes to work every day, driven in his Mercedes by his assistant, Carlton.
Half a dozen of his projects are in storyboard form in his room. He starts running through one of the plots, complete with action, when he suddenly stops and says sotto voce to Catherine in a Groucho-like aside: "He looks like a Disney spy to me."
Walt Disney, of course, looms large over any discussion about the history of animation. Barbera was nearly hired by him when he was a young hopeful cartoonist in New York. He had just seen Disney's Skeleton Dance: "I wrote my first and last fan letter to Walt Disney studios in California and I got an answer right away from Walt Disney himself. He said he was coming to New York and he would call me. The luckiest break I ever had was that he never called. I would have gone over there and disappeared."
They only met once, at a barbecue, and he remembers Disney mainly for his secretive nature and enjoyment of bourbon: "We admired him, but we were way ahead of him in humour."
He explains how his family came from Sicily - "It's not just the Mafia, Sicily has some of the best food, the best architecture" - and how he was born in Delancey Street in the heart of New York's Italian quarter on the Lower East Side. His father was a hairdresser who liked to bet on the horses at the Belmont race track.
The young Joe embarked on a career in a bank. He detested the work and studied art at night at the Pratt institute. His first animation work was on Popeye, as an inker. "I was there three days and I asked one of the other inkers how long he had been doing the job. He said 'three years,' so I quit." After a spell at the Van Beuren cartoon studio he worked for Terrytoons in New Rochelle and was then hired by the new MGM Cartoon arm in Los Angeles.
It was there, in 1937, that he met Hanna, another young animator who had moved with his family as boy from New Mexico to Watts in LA. Sixty years on, they are still friends and collaborators, although Hanna's visits to the studio are less frequent. Those were heady days in the cartoon world. Some Disney animators rebelled against their boss in 1941, went on strike and were sacked. They founded their own studio, United Productions of America, choosing a different, freer style of cartooning than Disney's and producing such characters as Mr Magoo, Howdy Doody and Gerald McBoing Boing.
Barbera and Hanna meanwhile ploughed their own furrow, working for MGM at a Stakhanovite pace. In 1940 they had produced their first Tom and Jerry cartoon, Puss Gets The Boot, and despite some reservations about the characters from their producer, Fred Quimby - "what can you do with a cat and mouse that would be different?" - two stars had been born.
In 1943, Yankee Doodle Mouse won an Oscar and another followed for Mouse Trouble in 1944, for Quiet Please in 1945 and so on through the 40s and early 50s. Every year the game was to try to beat Disney to the award. "It's pretty much the same now," Barbera says. "The only difference is that the women wear less clothes."
He is not impressed by new cartoon techniques. He and Hanna had experimented with live action using Tom and Jerry in a dance sequence with Gene Kelly in Anchors Aweigh as long ago as 1945 and having them join Esther Williams for an underwater ballet sequence in Dangerous When Wet in 1953. After Quimby's retirement in1955, Hanna and Barbera became the production heads for cartooning at MGM. It was the time of the blacklist in Hollywood, but Barbera says he was not touched by it: "It was only the live action writers that were affected. I didn't have any dialogue in my films - I was influenced by Charlie Chaplin, the most brilliant of all."
In 1957, MGM decided to close their cartoon division: the golden era of film cartoons had ended with the arrival of television - "the monster", Barbera calls it. The two friends took Tom and Jerry and formed Hanna-Barbera; they tossed up for whose name should come first. Their first new characters were Rough and Reddy and the prodigious output continued as they accommodated the new television market with the Flintstones, Huckleberry Hound and Top Cat.
In 1975 they revived Tom and Jerry with Grape Ape, a gigantic purple ape. It was clear that the cat and mouse were now less violent. Was this because of public pressure? Barbera says the same argument about violence in films being a bad influence was going on 50 years ago. "Tom and Jerry were never going to kill each other, they were friends. Tom did it to Jerry and Jerry did it to Tom."
Although they survived through the 80s, outside the studios the animation world was changing. In 1991 Ted Turner bought Hanna-Barbera and when Turner merged with Time Warner, Hanna-Barbera became part of the deal. They had to leave their beautiful old studio building to move to the anonymous space in Sherman Oaks. Barbera is a traditionalist and regrets the passing of a more sociable time.
"In those days, our cartoon studio was like a club, people worked there for 25 years," he says. "Now when you finish a job they let you go ... There are too many conferences nowadays, six people trying to settle on an idea."
So what does he think of other cartoon styles? The Simpsons, where Itchy and Scratchy are a form of homage to Tom and Jerry? "I already did that (the family) with the Flintstones but their material is good. I salute them." South Park? "It seems that everyone who doesn't know how to draw has a TV series." He does not think much of the east European cartoon tradition - "there's no warmth" - or the Japanese school - "the violence is unbelievable".
He is married to an Englishwoman - "from Mitcham, does that sound right?" - and has been to lunch once with the Duke of Westminster. "He has his own airfield, you know." He met the Duke's children, "the little princes" as he calls them and was flattered to discover that the Duke's dog was named Scooby Doo. He would cross the Atlantic by Concorde. One occupational hazard was that the pilots would always ask him to draw a cartoon for them: "Thank God I quit flying."
He has a home in Studio City where the previous night he had been taking part in a karaoke evening, doing a bit of Dean Martin. There's also a villa in Palm Springs, complete with pool and tennis court.
But he says he will keep coming in to work until he drops. "I don't know that I love to work but I love to have new ideas." He tells how Sun Microsoft had invited him to talk to their salespeople and explain how he came up with the idea of the Jetsons and the world of the future. "I told them 1,000 years from now or a million years, the problem is always going to be parking." He had also come up with the idea of the treadmill, now an integral part of the LA home, 35 years ago, he says.
The new Tom and Jerry, the seven minute Mansion Cat, contains much of the old mayhem, albeit with objects that were not available when the pair first commenced hostilities in 1940 such as a video machine, a remote control, a waterbed. It contains a Hitchcockian homage to Joe and Bill: a photograph of them appears inside the mansion. Joe has only been the consultant on the film and provides the voice of the mansion's owner, but he says the formula that he and Hanna created in the 30s still holds good: "The secret is the story."
Before we part, he mulls over the idea of a story about the events of the US election as a potential for an adventure, although George W and Al does not have quite the same ring to it as Tom and Jerry. He politely suggests lunch at his house, makes a joke with his assistant, Lois, and says farewell. Tomorrow he will be back in the studio with another idea. That's all, folks.