#27 Oliver and Company

The Great Mouse Detective may have been an early foreshadowing of the Disney Renaissance, but the studio's wilderness years were not over yet, as Oliver and Company conclusively proves. Like The Black Cauldron, there are points at which it barely feels like a Disney film, but while The Black Cauldron came off like a dark, cultish 80's fantasy, Oliver and Company comes off at times like an 80's animation studio attempting to make a Disney-style talking-animals film.

The biggest problem with the film is that it's painfully dated, due in large part to the soundtrack, laden with saxophones and synth-piano that embody the corniest aspects of 80's pop (the fact that Huey Lewis sings the opening song does not help matters), in addition to being generally substandard lyrically (half of them being preoccupied with exalting New York and the "rhythm of the streets" or some such faff). The animation as well is completely lacking the timeless quality of Disney's better films, feeling more like a lesser Don Bluth effort than some of Don Bluth's own films (it might be telling that The Land Before Time opened against Oliver and Company at the box office, and roundly defeated it in its opening weekend). 

The characters don't fare much better either; Billy Joel's take on Dodger is thoroughly irritating, both for the blandness of the character and Joel's insufferable affected New York accent. Cheech Marin plays Tito the chihuahua basically as himself as a dog, while Bette Midler's Georgette, while capturing Midler's diva persona well, could probably be dispensed with completely without really affecting the plot. Jenny, the utterly generic rich girl with absent parents, is functionally an export of Penny from The Rescuers, although with far less personality and some odd animation problems; her head frequently appears too big for her body, and her facial features seem to drift at points. The villain, Sykes, meanwhile, almost seems like he belongs in a far darker film, at various points discussing the proper way to perform a hit over the phone and threatening a young girl with his vicious dogs, before getting killed by a train. As for Oliver himself, he's a protagonist entirely without agency, ping-ponging between situations through factors entirely apart from his control, existing only to be irksomely precious on a borderline-Aristocats level.

Oliver and Company is a film in which very little works, coming at the tail end of a long period of Disney's history in which many things were tried, with some successes and many misfires. A new era was about to begin, however, which would restore Disney to its Silver Age greatness, and, in many ways, exceed it. The Disney Renaissance was about to begin.