Oliver & Company (1988)

What a freaking movie. So many twists and turns. Absolutely intense from start to finish.

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

There's a more than satisfactory amount of boom-boom in the movie's trim running time.

Oliver (Joey Lawrence) is the last free kitten who gets left behind in the box. He has to find a way to survive in the bustling streets of New York. He joins streetwise dog Dodger (Billy Joel) and his gang of strays. They steal for bum Fagin who owes loan shark Sykes. Jenny Foxworth is a lonely rich girl with absent parents.The story is based on Dickens' Oliver Twist. The animation is inferior Disney. It may be too daunting to animate the streets of New York without looking cheap. It's pre-CGI and leans more towards TV level. There is a vast difference between this and Beauty and the Beast 3 years later. This looks bad by comparison. There are many songs but none of them are catchy enough. The story is a functional adaptation with appealing enough characters. In the end, it's fine for a family film.

While not one of the big name Disney animated films this is enjoyable enough fare, with some nice voice acting, and a modern (at the time) twist on 'Oliver Twist' by Charles Dickens.It doesn't hold up to modern standards of animation, and looks a little dated now. Also, many of the voice actors (Billy Joel aside) aren't that well known today, so for kids now the fact that Billy Joel is voicing a dog isn't that much of a big deal.It's a decent film, but if you were given the choice of watching this or 'The Lion King' for example, I know which one most people would go for.

You know those women, and to a lesser degree men, who, even when they're in their forties or fifties, still try to dress, look and sound like they're still in their twenties. Like they're still relevant and cool and hip. Of course you do. Well, not to be mean, but Oliver & Company is a lot like that. Made in the late 80s, and probably one of the Disney films that show its age the most, it's very heavily tied to the era it was made in. And not just the era, but the city of that era. In this case New York. Now, sometimes that wouldn't be that big of a deal. It'd be like a time capsule. But Disney films are supposed to be timeless, and this is anything but. I still get it, I was born in the 80s, even if barely, but I'm not sure that kids born today will get this when they grow up. It's just so disgustingly 80s.But yeah, that's more of a pet peeve of mine than an outright flaw of the movie, but it has some other problems as well. Like the villain, who has a cool visual design, but has next to no characteristics beyond the fact that he's a loan shark and trains dogs to do his bidding. Or the fact that the main character, Oliver, contributes nothing to the plot, aside from being the MacGuffin. Or even the animation style, which is once again so disgustingly 80s. I hate the way 80s are always made to look.Nevertheless, there's a lot of good stuff as well. The dog characters are all a lot of fun, with the possible exception of Georgette, who I can't make up my mind about. All of them have fun personalities and work well off each other. The film also contains some nice song sequences and is really the first true Disney musical in a while. The Great Mouse Detective had some songs, but not to this degree. Of the songs Why Should I Worry is especially worthy of notice.And yet I can't say that Oliver & Company is a particularly good film. It's certainly not awful and I have some fond memories of it from my childhood. But unlike so many other Disney films, it doesn't hold up when seen as an adult.

Sometimes the movies you see as a child don't hold up so well when you experience them again as an adult. "The Rescuers" and "Atlantis: The Lost Empire" still carry the same magic they did when I first saw them. I've also discovered a few I didn't see the first time around which now hold a special place in my heart, with "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" immediately coming to mind. Unfortunately, there are also a couple that lose their luster when viewed again through older eyes, like "The Sword in the Stone." I'll be adding "Oliver and Company" to the last category.A wayward kitten named Oliver spends his days and nights wandering the streets of New York City. While searching for food, he runs into a dog named Dodger who spends his days scrounging up food for his misfit family of stray dogs and assisting their homeless human friend Fagin make ends meet. Just as Oliver joins the canine clan, he is adopted by a girl named Penny. Danger materializes in the form of a pack of Dobermans that Penny's parents. They take a disliking to Oliver and plan to remove the threat to their home any way they can."Oliver and Company" is nothing more than a water-downed version of "Oliver Twist" that injects the sounds of Billy Joel, Bette Midler, and Broadway musicals together into one intolerable experience. Replace the humans in Charles Dickens' classic novel with animals and you have a recipe for annoyance. It's 74 minutes of sheer pain and agony for parents to endure while their children smile and giggle at the cuteness unfolding on screen.One of the biggest problems with "Oliver and Company" is they dumb down the main villain of the book. The character of Fagin from Dickens' novel is a perfect example of evil and cruelty. Disney makes him a sympathetic bumbling bad guy with a good heart in this animated version.