Unlike other animation studios, Disney does not currently put a lot of attention into the celebrities voicing their characters. There was a little bit with Moana, but of course the title character in that movie was voiced by an unknown teenager who’d never made a movie before. I heard at least as much hype about its celebrity composer. And I think this has a lot to do with the fact that, you know, they’ve been through that before. Because if there’s another major selling point to Oliver and Company, I’m not sure what it is.

Oh, it’s cute enough, I guess. It’s Disney’s second Dickens adaptation, this time Oliver Twist. Oliver (a pre-Blossom Joey Lawrence) is the last remaining kitten of a litter. The rest are sold, or eventually given away; Oliver alone is abandoned. A dog named Dodger (Billy Joel) uses him to steal hot dogs from a street vendor. He does not give Oliver any, so the kitten follows him home to the barge Dodger lives in with an assortment of other dogs and a pickpocket named Fagin (Dom DeLuise). Fagin owes money to Bill Sykes (Robert Loggia); he uses the dogs to steal things to pay Sykes back. The next day, in the confusion, Oliver is unable to get out of a limo he’s robbing in time, and he ends up taken in by young Jenny Foxworth (Natalie Gregory); she is not an orphan, but she is the child of neglectful parents, who leave her with butler Winston (William Glover).

The dogs steal Oliver back, to the delight of poodle Georgette (Bette Midler), and Fagin crafts a plan to ransom Oliver to the “very rich pet owner” in exchange for the money he needs to pay off Sykes. Only Sykes finds out about it and is a considerably less cute person to be abducted by. Fagin decides to help save Jenny from Sykes and his ominous Doberman Pinschers.

Roger called it harmless and inoffensive, and Gene flat-out gave it a thumbs down. And, you know, it’s on the bottom tier of Disney animated features. I like it more than Chicken Little, but I’m not sure how much of that is the fact that I saw this in the theatre—twice, in fact, which I’ll get to, but most importantly in its initial release, when I was a kid. This was shortly before Storm Front and therefore “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” but I was vaguely familiar with Billy Joel and didn’t dislike him. And, when I was eleven, I was fond of this movie. Maybe twelve; the release date was about a month before my birthday. But either way, it was fine, though not great, to me then and is considerably lowered in my estimation now.

And, yeah, part of it is the voices. Billy Joel isn’t a bad voice actor, but there’s no emotional heft to Dodger that he has to worry about. Bette Midler is, well, Bette Midler; it seems to me that the role is really written to show off her strengths rather than advance the story. And Cheech Marin as Tito the Chihuahua is exactly what you’d expect of a cartoon chihuahua voiced by Cheech Marin in 1988. Except no pot jokes, because it’s still a Disney chihuahua. And Dom DeLuise is Dom DeLuise-y, and Roscoe Lee Browne, fine actor though he may have been, is Roscoe Lee Browne-y. It is, as with many animated movies from other studios, basically an exercise in writing celebrities.

So okay. Let’s not talk about the fact that they’ve chosen to have a chihuahua voiced by a Hispanic guy (and you’ll note I’ve chosen not to celebrate Cinco de Mayo with The Three Caballeros, thank you, even though I like that movie), which I find kind of a questionable decision, and never mind that IMDb and Wikipedia cannot agree about whether or not Marin’s even actually a fluent Spanish-speaker. (He was born in LA.) It’s that it kind of strikes me that the dogs in these things are always a distinct breed in the first place. They’re street dogs, but they’re a chihuahua and a Saluki and so forth. Dodger’s the only one who even looks like a mutt to me, and he’s supposedly a Jack Russell terrier. Jack Russell puppies sell for hundreds of dollars.

Oh, yeah, that other time I saw this movie in the theatre? The 1996 rerelease, when I was in my first year in college, before my Brief Drop-Out Interlude. I went with a group of friends. Most of us saw this, and the other two went and saw Leaving Las Vegas instead, because they didn’t want to go see a kids’ movie. Now, I am not here to debate the merits of Leaving Las Vegas, but I will say that those two people, at least, wished they’d seen the kids’ movie instead. At least this has a happy ending. Though still an oddly dark one, now I think about it.