Oliver & Company

A mostly charmless exercise. This film displays what may be the first instance of gross product placements a Disney flick. That's bad enough. Worse, the animation is inconsistent; sometimes the drawings are impressive, but often they're Saturday morning cartoon quality. This movie may also stand as the first instance of familiar voice syndrome; several of the principals are more doing their schtick than creating characters. Furthermore, there's the setting that's problematic; this film displays the sort of Eighties-era admiration of New York that produced such grotesqueries as Wall Street (the movie, not just the financial crime center) and Donald Trump. All in all, it's about what you'd expect from the last of the studio’s "wilderness years" productions--this was immediately followed by The Little Mermaid, thus demonstrating that the transition from so-so (and worse) quality to the genius to come played out at something near warp speed. On this movie's own terms...I’ve never read Oliver Twist, so I cannot comment on how loosely based (or not) this film is to the source material, but I’d put my money on "not so much." At least some of the music and songs show improvement over the canon's earlier efforts (probably the product of having Billy Joel playing a big part here). All in all, this movie conveys a sense of the studio struggling to raise its vehicle off the ground--they were trying, and knew they needed to get better, but had not yet found the formula. Ultimately, to the everlasting gratitude of the film industry, the effort eventually paid off in a big way. Just not here.