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So we’ve come to the final film of the Bronze Era, and it is, undoubtedly, the absolute worst of the lot. Despite coming out a year before The Little Mermaid elevated the studio back to heavy-weight prominence and lush animation, Oliver and Company looks like it’s been hanging around the vaults since the early 70s. To call the animation rough and uninspired would be too kind.
It’s hard to decide what’s the worst thing about Oliver and Company – the poor songs, cheap ploys for relevance by casting MOR musical acts, lack of character development, or the routine plot mechanics. It’s all so bland, so tastefully inoffensive, it could only be described as the sight of the studio working on autopilot. Very little care or effort went into this one.
The appearance of Huey Lewis singing over the opening credits is our first warning. I can’t think of many children of the 80s who were demanding his music, nor for Billy Joel. At least Joel manages to liven up his stiff characterization with New Yawk sass. Even stranger is the decision to not have Sheryl Lee Ralph, a Broadway dynamo, sing her song, instead, they’ve got Ruth Pointer. The discordance between her speaking and singing voice reminds you of those moments in West Side Story or My Fair Lady when Marni Nixon’s immaculate vocals wouldn’t match the body they were supposedly emanating from. It feels like such a cheap ploy to be “hip” with the times, and it just becomes cringe inducing to the modern viewer.
There’s very little to do with Charles Dickens here, but this wasn’t the first time that Disney had repurposed a narrative into something entirely different. The problem is that unlike Pinocchio, which also had little to do with Carlo Collodi’s original text, they forgot to transform any of the characters into unique individuals. All of them play as types, with the voice actors doing all of the hard work. Bette Midler comes off best as melodramatic poodle from the upper class, but it’s not dissimilar to any of Midler’s numerous comedic roles from the same decade.
Even worse is how the few human characters look like they’re from completely different films than the cutesy animals. There’s no central conflict, and the only one that arises is between Fagin and Sykes, who are ancillary characters, at best. Human girl Penny is all soft and sweetness in comparison to the ugly caricatures of the others, and her lack of pupils is distracting.
There’s nothing that really works here, and Oliver and Company is of most importance for the history of which it precedes. Disney executives decided that they would start releasing one film per year, this was the first film in that plan. They also decided to include McDonald’s Happy Meal tie-ins, and I remember while the Renaissance was on-going that each new film was announced by both a trailer and a series of commercials for the fast-food giant. Lastly, Oliver and Company was the first film that was a big Broadway style musical from the studio in a long time, which would become the norm going forward. Shame that this film is lousy, but the insistence on celebrity stunt-casting would point towards a major problem for the studio going forward. It deserves its status as a historical footnote.
