The twenty-seventh, so they say, full-length cartoon feature from the Disney people: it takes only as much as it can use from Dickens's Oliver Twist and throws it to a pack of stray dogs and an alley kitten. The narrative moves along briskly, unchecked even by several song-and-dance interludes; there's a steady flow of well-conceived, if not always -executed, scenes and shots (a quickie of the fluffed kitten after getting a blow-dry on a subway grate), with especially careful attention to the intimidations of Manhattan from the ankle-high perspective of a cat; the characters, if not fully and fatly Dickensian, are vivid and varied (the haughty show dog who enunciates the canine vocable as "Bark, bark, bark," the proper British manservant with a secret taste for TV wrestling, the cultured bulldog who prefers Shakespeare on PBS and whose thespian bent is put to use on the street in feigned injuries beneath car bumpers); the voices behind them, in the latter-day Disney manner, are in too many cases intrusively and distractingly recognizable: Bette Midler's, Dom DeLuise's, Robert Loggia's, Cheech Marin's -- his, especially. (1988) — Duncan Shepherd
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