Kevin Lima, who grew up in Pawtucket, has gone on to have a long association with Walt Disney Studios, directing a string of hits — A Goofy Movie, Tarzan (co-directed with Chris Buck), 102 Dalmatians, the upcoming Enchanted — that would be the envy of many better-known Hollywood directors.

Tomorrow night, Lima will receive the Blackstone Valley Excellence in the Arts Award at the 22nd annual Blackstone Valley Tourism Council dinner at the Kirkbrae Country Club in Lincoln.

The cheerful Lima said over the phone from his home north of San Francisco that when he first heard he was getting the award two months ago, “they said it was the Lifetime Achievement Award! I said, wait a minute, I’m 45 and, if I’m lucky, I’ve lived only maybe half my life.” And that’s how the award was changed to the Excellence in Arts Award. Either way, though, he’s delighted. “It’s a great honor to be recognized by the community I grew up in. I felt that they’d forgotten about me.”

Lima said it was puppeteer Mark Kohler, for whom he began working summers from the time he was 14 in a work-study program, who was influential in getting him the award. “I worked there every summer and holidays until I was a sophomore in college. I was 14 years old when I started as an apprentice. When I was in college, I wrote a couple of shows. It was a terrific experience. It gave me a good basis in storytelling and in plotting.”

He also spent a summer with Eve Brook’s Costumes in New York City, creating costumes for the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus.

He started out studying acting and theater design at Emerson College in Boston, but he transferred midway through his college studies to the animation program at the California Institute of the Arts, where he also met his future wife, Brenda Chapman. She went on to co-direct the animated film The Prince of Egypt and is currently working on a film for Disney-Pixar.

Although puppets had been part of his young working life, Lima said, “From the time I was 5, I wanted to be an animator when my mom took me to see The Jungle Book at the Leroy Theater in downtown Pawtucket. From that moment I wanted to be an animator … and, specifically, I wanted to be a Disney animator.

“I took some detours while I was at Emerson, where I studied to be an actor. But then I realized that I could be an actor with a pencil when I went to Cal Arts to become an animator and a storyboard artist. I’ve grown up in that world.”

Since then, he went on to direct actors — many of them celebrated — in such hit films as 102 Dalmatians (Glenn Close, Gerard Depardieu); the TV movies Eloise at the Plaza and Eloise at Christmastime (Julie Andrews), and Enchanted (Susan Sarandon, James Marsden), which is scheduled to open Nov. 21, a prime pre-Thanksgiving opening date that shows Disney’s confidence in positioning it as a film that can play right through the holidays and into the new year.

Asked if he felt intimidated by working with such stellar names, some of them Academy Award winners, Lima said, “Umm, sure. I do. I do get intimidated.

“But ultimately, they’re just people, and when you get past that first day they become just another actor.”

Lima describes Enchanted as “a classic romantic farce” as well as “a can of condensed Disney.” For the first several minutes, the film plays as a cartoon in which a pretty princess in a ball gown gets tossed down a well by a wicked witch, who looks exactly like the witch in Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. But instead of disappearing, she pops up out of a manhole in the blaze of neon-lit Times Square, now a real young woman in her frilly ball gown.

Enchanted, Lima said, has references to many of the old Disney animated princess movies. “There are many Disney moments that anyone familiar with the films will find mirrored back at you,” often whimsically. Disney had optioned the screenplay from an out-of-the-blue spec work by writer Bill Kelly nine years ago. When Lima came onto the project 2 1/2 years ago, after other directors had tried and failed to make it work, “I had to say, ‘I love Disney, so now let’s turn it on its ear,’ ” he said with a chuckle.

For example, Lima said that the rats who are seen helping the princess, played by Amy Adams, scrub a toilet in the movie trailer currently in theaters are a reference to the forest animals that often helped such Disney princesses as Snow White and Cinderella with their housework. “They had rabbits and squirrels and birds. In Enchanted, she has to make do with what’s on hand — rats and cockroaches and pigeons.”

He also promised references that only die-hard Disney fans will get. “A sign on a detective agency door reads Churchill, Harline & Smith,” he said, an ode to Frank Churchill, Leigh Harline and Paul J. Smith, who wrote the songs for Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. He also cast singers Jodi Benson, the screen voice of Ariel in The Little Mermaid; Paige O’Hara, the screen voice of Belle in Beauty and the Beast; and Judy Kuhn, the singing voice of Pocahontas in Pocahontas, in small on-screen roles.

Beginning in mid-October, Lima will travel to 10 European cities in 14 days to promote the film, which opens there at the same time as it does in the United States. It will be the capstone on a movie he has been working on for well over two years.

But tomorrow night he will be back in Rhode Island, for what may well be the best award of all, from his hometown crowd.

Also being honored at tomorrow’s dinner will be Bob and Peter Conway of Cumberland, vice presidents of Conway Tours/Gray Line of Rhode Island, who are being inducted into the William Blackstone Society.

Awards will also be presented to former Pawtucket Times reporters Doug Hadden, Rich Dugas, Dave Casey and Kevin O’Connor and former Woonsocket Call editor Denise Perreault for their years of coverage of the tourism industry in the Blackstone River Valley.

Tickets to the dinner honoring Kevin Lima and the others, which begins at 7 p.m. tomorrow at the Kirkbrae Country Club in Lincoln are still available at $55 per person from the Blackstone Valley Tourism Council at (401) 724-2200 or online at www.tourblackstone.com.)

mjanuson@projo.com