Fort Worth Star-Telegram from Fort Worth, Texas • 86

t30 tl CI 0 11 A E1 Multitude of stars can take their bow (wows) in 'Oliver' BY MICI LEL 11 PRICE Fort Worth Star-Telegram Walt Disney must be smiling down from whatever heaven he has found Can't say for certain about Charles Dickens but if he's rotating in the grave it's probably with amused delight over the Disney Studios' Americanization of Oliver Twist The attraction is Company a mean-streets counterpart to the citified civility of Disney's 1961 masterpiece One Hundred and One Dalmatians Comparison is inevitable as well 7) 174 cn 0 7 -o i si A i 4' to I 11 -4 1 I -0 I Nikk 4 zo0 7---- 7 I lir '-CLIIN l( -) 14 widol dimwitted voice fora mutt known as Einstein The story pivots on the plight of Oliver an orphaned kitten who falls in and out of the right and wrong crowds through much of the picture The cat in lapsing from the mob of outlaw dogs to a pampered existence with a wealthy family must deal with a kidnapingextortion scam in addition to the routinely menacing aspects of living in New York Jim Coleman supervisor of backgrounds gives the city as hard-edged a look as that which Frank Miller applied to his by nature grimmer Batman novel The Dark Knight Returns Glen Keane another of the key animators achieves a formidable presence for a principal human villain by showing the character largely in shadow and deploying his powerful automobile as personification George Scribner an animator bowing here as a screen director exhibits a competence with suspense and a fine grasp of both sight gags and verbal humor TN musical score is generally a pleasure Oliver's violent introduction to gutter-level survival inspires an ironic Streets of Gold performed with urgency by Ruth Pointer The opening tune Once Upon a Time in New York City pushes singer I luey Lewis to an unaccustomed depth of feeling and Midler's reading of Perfect Ain't Easy is a particular standout The kids are bound to get a charge out of Oliver Company which packs an uncommonly tough intelligence for an unthreatening movie and refuses to condescend to its built-in juve audience The adult audience will find plenty to like too here's the best family-fare picture since Benji the Hunted REVIEW: FILM Oliver Company Price's on a scale of I to 10 Director George Scribner voices of Cheech Marin Richard Mulligan Joey Lawrence Billy Joel Roscoe Lee Browne Sheryl Lee Ralph Dom De Luise Robert Loggia Bette Midler Rated: (some suggestive humor basically innocent and unobjectionable) Dodger is a city canine who knows streets and hot dog stands in Manhattan with the studio's Lady and the Tramp (1955) Oliver Company matches up nicely No animated cartoon shop has ever topped a Disney dog and with MGM's Tom and Warner Bros' Sylvester no longer around to corner the market Disney cats ascend to supremacy Company rains more dogs than cats but the title cat (voiced by Joey Lawrence) holds his own with an impressive gang of bow-bow Bowery Boys The ringleader is Dodger (the voice of Billy Joel) a hipster pooch whose gang of pickpocket dogs is in the service of a human in brought to his first solo outing 1987's Born in East LA Bette Midler excels as Georgette a snooty poodle and Sheryl Lee Ralph as a pooch of kind heart but easy virtue comes close to Peggy Lee's vocal enactment of Lady and the Tramp Dignified Roscoe Lee Browne is a well-bred bulldog and Richard Mulligan supplies a convincingly Fagin (Dom De Luise) The standout vocal enactment belongs to Cheech Mann who voices an impulsive chihuahua named Tito with a hilariously accurate ethnicity The broadly delineated Hispanic accent recalls the Cheech Chong routines of Marin and Tommy Chong but resonates as well with the affectionate enlightenment which Mar 'Land Before Time' belly-flops as an animated adventure trip REVIEW: FILM The Land Before Time Price's pick: 2 on a scale of I to 10 Director Don Bluth Featuring: The voices of Fred Gwynne Pat Ilingle Bill Erwin Burke Byrnes Helen Shaver Will Ryan Gabriel Damon Judith Barsi Candy Hutson Rated: (suitable for all ages some scary moments) BY MICIIAEL IL PRICE Fort Worth Star-Telegram Much has been made of Don Bluth's departure-in-frustration from the Disney animation shop and his rival efforts since 1979 have met with enough popular success to prove the move worthwhile Popular success doesn't say a great deal for popular tastes though Bluth whose grasp of comedy and pacing is a tad more refined than that of Larry Harmon's inept Bozo the 001471 cartoons of the 1960s has consistently placed competent sometimes animation at the service of manipulative weepy storylines and insipidly cute character designs Thus has the Bluth machine trivialized such weighty topics as vivisection and mind-control experimentation (in 1982's The Secret of NIMI1) and violent social upheaval (in last year's An American Tail) The new insult The Land Before Time establishes that not even the naturalistic grandeur of prehistory is safe from Bluth's forced preciousness What's agreeable about Stu Krieger's screenplay (from a Judy Freudberg-Tony Geiss story) plays like a knockoff from the Disney filming of Bambi (1942): A young brontosaur named Littlefoot (Gabriel Damon affecting an abrasive whine for the vocalization) is separated from his mother follwing an attack by a flesh-eating tyrannosaur The kid and the main creatures are recog Littlefoot left invites an Anatoasatmis on a misguided adventure nizably human kids in a blatant attempt to provoke role-identification by young viewers unfortunately reaches safety and connects with several chums who (to borrow a line from the press over numerous life-threatening obstacles" en route to a land of peace and plenty Two armored dinosaurs a flying lizard and a duck-like midget saurian complete the contingent One is a dolt another a smart-mouth another a feisty Pollyanna another a pathetic sort in need of confidence and nowhere amongst this ensemble can there be found a memorable character to compare with say Thralls Thumper and Flower or the Disney Cinderella's Laurel Hardy-like heroic mice Main culprits are source-authors Freudberg and Geiss whose screenplay for An American Tail betrayed a greater influence of television's you walk out early enough Kindest remark can muster about The Land Before Time is that it looks here and there like the stately dinosaur sequence of Disney's Fantasia (1940) Children of several not to mention have delighted in Fantasia for any number of reasons including the film's refusal to condescend The Land Before Time in speaking down to its audience and assuming that kids are stupid enough to swallow such a load of cutesy-poo hooey is enough to make you wish these characters had been devoured before their hatching over-obvious Sesame Street for which they had written than of genuine storytelling The problem recurs in The Land Before Time which assumes a short attention span on the part of the audience and indulges in close-shave emergency thrills to the exclusion of carefully developed suspense Marginally saving graces include a resonant narration by Fred Gwynne impressive backdrop paintings and an occasionally stirring score by James Homer A too-precious theme song called If We Hold On Together sung with mock-sincerity by Diana Ross comes agreeably late in the game and may be missed altogether if.