Oliver & Company (1988)

(In French, On TV, March 2019) The mid-1980s weren’t the best of times for Disney Animation Studio. It had been years since Disney had an all-out success (arguably 1973’s Robin Hood, less arguably 1967’s The Jungle Book) and Oliver & Company was the last of the not-so-good streak before The Little Mermaid kicked off the Disney Renaissance a year later. So, it’s perhaps best not to expect too much from the film. It does stem from a halfway clever concept, by setting a modern take on Oliver Twist in 1980s New York. The setting is probably half the fun of the film, with the other half being an easy (maybe even cheap) use of anthropomorphic animals as heroes. You can visually identify Oliver & Company as being from the Disney doldrums by the sometimes-cut-rate quality of the animation and the limited imagination of the result once the “talking animals do Oliver Twist in 1980s New York” thing is accepted. You can see in here some touches that portend the new and successful direction that Disney would soon take—the use of animals, obviously, but also taking a classic story and presenting it as a musical: it may even be somewhat underrated in this regard. Few will claim that Oliver & Company is a Disney classic, but at times it approaches some second-tier favourites such as The Aristocats—cute animals plus music equals nostalgic charm for those who grew up on the movie. It does get better as it goes on and ends on something of a high note, so at least there’s that.