Oliver & Company (1988)

As with The Black Cauldron, I chose to give this movie a review because I have not seen it since its original theatrical run twenty years ago. In fact I have surprisingly vivid memories of the Saturday I went to see this movie when I was eight. You see my family had only lived in Boise for about a year at that point and my dad got lost trying to find the right theater, that and small elements of the film are what stayed with me. For most among those elements is the song at the beginning of the film, ‘Oliver Don’t You Cry’ I believe the name is, and it’s a rather poignet little number performed by Huey Lewis; in fact the whole soundtrack of this film is laced with the work of 80's pop artists, including Billy Joel who was making his acting debut in the part of Dodger.

The film of course is an adaptation of Dickins Oliver Twist, though extremely simplified, and ultimately more watch able then the Oscar winning 1968 musical version. A capable voice cast includes the work of Bette Milder, a young Joey Lawrence, the ubiquitous in animation Dom Delouse, Roscoe Lee Brown, and Cheech Marian as Tito the Chihuahua, the comic break out character to all the kids in the audience. The villain of the picture, a crime lord named Sykes, is quite intense, I remember him being perhaps to intense for my eight year old self, he also falls victim to one of the more violent deaths of a Disney villain, when he is felled by a train on the Brooklyn Bridge. This was one of the first Disney animated films to really make extensive use of computer aids in the animation, and is (according to special features on the DVD) the movie that quality and box office wise ushered in that platinum era of 1988-1994 which would include such classics as The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and The Lion King. This movie is however not the great accomplishment that those movies were, despite having a rather strong sentimental value to me. 3 out of 5.