WWW-HE built an empire dedicated to delighting kids, but there was nothing endearing about the infamously noxious racial attitudes of Walt Disney. In “Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination,” out this month from Knopf, biographer Neal Gabler reveals that Disney used racial epithets referring to African-Americans and called an Italian band heard in the animated classic “Pinocchio” a “bunch of garlic eaters.”

When animator David Swift told him he was moving to Columbia Pictures, “Walt called him into the office, feigned a Yiddish accent, and said, ‘OK, Davy boy, off you go to work with those Jews. It’s where you belong, with those Jews.’ ” When Disney released “Three Little Pigs” in the 1930s, the American Jewish Congress bitterly complained that it featured a wolf as a Jewish peddler – a depiction “so vile, revolting and unnecessary as to constitute a direct affront to the Jews.”