Oliver & Company

The film came out of a pitch meeting called by Disney’s new bosses Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg: story artist Pete Young offered Oliver Twist with dogs, and The Little Mermaid was approved in the same session. Oliver and Dodger were drawn first as two kittens, then as two dogs, before the split. A subplot in which Fagin steals a panda from the Central Park Zoo survived months of drafts; the panda became Jenny. George Scribner borrowed a method from Lady and the Tramp, having real streets photographed by cameras about 18 inches off the ground for a dog’s eye view. Computers produced 11 minutes of imagery: the Brooklyn Bridge, the subway, Sykes’s limousine and Fagin’s trike, built from 18 parts and the first object on the film tested this way. The Los Angeles Times counted more than 30 appearances of logos and brand names in 1988, some repeats: a Ryder truck tyre, a Yamaha piano, Kodak and McDonald’s billboards. A good fit if you want songs written as extensions of a character rather than numbers that halt the story. Not for viewers who bristle at a hand drawn New York full of brand names; Why Should I Worry?, sung by Billy Joel but written by Dan Hartman and Charlie Midnight, lost at the 46th Golden Globes.