Oliver & Company
Short description
Oliver & Company is an animated family film about a small orphaned kitten in New York City who is left behind when the other kittens in his litter are taken. Alone and hungry on the streets, he meets a streetwise dog named Dodger and is drawn into a gang of stray dogs belonging to a down-on-his-luck man, Fagin, who owes money to a dangerous creditor. The kitten is later taken in by a wealthy, lonely girl, Jenny, and when she is kidnapped by the creditor and his intimidating dog, Oliver and the whole gang set out to rescue her. The film is a loose, animal-centred reworking of Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist, keeping the names Fagin and Dodger while moving the action into a late-1980s New York of traffic and chases.
George Scribner directed; this was his first feature, followed chronologically by The Prince and the Pauper. The screenplay is credited to James Mangold, Tim Disney and Jim Cox, and Kathleen Gavin produced for Walt Disney Pictures and Walt Disney Feature Animation. The voice cast includes Joey Lawrence as Oliver and Billy Joel as Dodger, with Cheech Marin, Richard Mulligan, Roscoe Lee Browne and Sheryl Lee Ralph among the 26 credited cast members.
Made for a budget of about 31 million dollars, it took roughly 121 million dollars worldwide, a solid return. On IMDb it holds 6.6 from about 57,000 votes and on TMDB 6.7 from roughly 1,700; a critics' score of 5.6 from 56 reviews sits below both audience figures. The film runs 74 minutes.
What's left behind the scenes
- The plot is based on Charles Dickens’ novel "The Adventures of Oliver Twist".
- Many of the animated objects in the film were created and animated on a computer: cars, taxis, tires, Sykes' limousine, Fagin's bicycle, (part of a scooter and part of a basket), a cement mixer, a sewer channel, a spiral staircase, a piano, subway tunnels and trains.
- The cartoon is noted as the first at Walt Disney Company to use computer image processing.
- Ratigan from 'The Great Mouse Detective' (1986) can be spotted among the photographs in Georgette's room.
- Pongo, the dog from '101 Dalmatians' (1961), can be spotted.
- Jock, Peg, and Trusty from 'Lady and the Tramp' (1955) can be spotted at the 11th minute of the film.
- A calendar with the date April 21, 1988, hangs on the wall in the ship's cabin. From it, one can understand that the events of the cartoon begin on April 20th and end on April 25th, 1988.
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