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he Oliver Twist story animated with a twist -- the
setting is New York and Oliver is a kitten and Fagin the human
master of a pack of pickpocket dogs. When a wealthy little girl
from Fifth Avenue finds Oliver and takes him uptown to live in her
mansion, Fagin's evil boss, Sykes, steps in and kidnaps the pair.
His nasty plan is foiled however, when Oliver's motley crew of dog
buddies, aided by Jenny's prissy poodle, Georgette, decide to use
their street savoir faire to rescue their feline friend. |
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Six supervising animators and a team of over 300 artists and
technicians worked for over two and a half years to create this
hand-drawn feature film in the time-honored Disney tradition. More
than a million story sketches and drawings were required to produce
the 119,275 hand-painted cels that compose the finished film.
Designers went to New York and photographed street scenes from a
dog's perspective (18 inches off the ground), getting stares from
passersby but providing excellent reference material for the layout
artists. |
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To give the backgrounds a contemporary and hard-edged look,
Xerographic® overlays were used, the first time for this
approach since "101 Dalmatians." Many of the inanimate objects in
the film were created and animated on the computer -- cars, cabs,
buses, Sykes' limousine, Fagin's trike (part scooter and part
shopping cart), a cement mixer, a sewer pipe, a spiral staircase, a
piano, subway tunnels and trains, cityscapes, and even the Brooklyn
Bridge. This was the first film to have its own department set up
expressly for the purpose of generating computer animation. |
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Directed by George Scribner. Starring: the voices of Joey Lawrence
(Oliver), Billy Joel (Dodger), Cheech Marin (Tito), Richard
Mulligan (Einstein), Roscoe Lee Browne (Francis), Sheryl Lee Ralph
((Rita), Dom DeLuise (Fagin), Robert Loggia (Sykes), and Bette
Midler (Georgette). 72 min. 12-year-old Joey Lawrence would later
go on to become a teenage heartthrob on "Blossom." Many different
songwriters contributed to the production, including Howard Ashman
and Barry Mann ("Once Upon a Time in New York City"), Dan Hartman
and Charlie Midnight ("Why Should I Worry?"), Barry Manilow, Jack
Feldman, and Bruce Sussman ("Perfect Isn't Easy"), and Dean
Pitchford and Tom Snow ("Streets of Gold"). Rereleased and released
on video in 1996. |
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