Oliver & Company (aka Reviewing The Situation)

Growing up, I had the strangest relationship with Disney's 27th animated classic, Oliver & Company (1988). It was the first brand new Disney film (and the first brand new film, period) that I got to see on the big screen, and I do remember it getting quite a lot of hype at the time - the TV spots appeared in every advert break, there were various promotional tie-ins with cereals and fast food outlets, and I was given a copy of the Ladybird storybook. I was genuinely pumped for it, and the film did not disappoint my callow expectations (the two things that stood out to me most were Georgette's entrance and the villain's demise, which must be one of the most gruesomely unique in Disney history). Then something strange happened - there came a point, no more than a year later, where the film seemed to vanish without a trace. Merchandise tie-ins completely dried up (I collected an array of Disney comics at the dawn of the 1990s, in which I NEVER saw any mention of Oliver and his friends) and, whenever I raised the movie with my peers, I found that they would invariably shrug their shoulders and profess to never having heard of it. The one thing I was truly anxious for - a home video release - was not forthcoming. I sat back and watched as seemingly every other Disney title trickled out onto magnetic tape, and this one remained in its elusive black hole. If not for that Ladybird book, which gave me tangible proof of the film's existence, I'm not entirely sure that I wouldn't have written the whole thing off as a particularly fanciful dream. Instead, I had the peculiar and alienating experience of being the only person on the planet who apparently remembered this thing that had once seemed so big and prominent. Finally, in 1996, the film did resurface, with a theatrical re-release and, slightly later, a belated VHS release. The damage was already done, however. Disney had allowed cultural memory of this film to evaporate, simply through not caring enough to keep it alive. Oliver & Company seems forever doomed to its status as one of Disney's "forgotten" features.

It's odd, in a way, because Oliver & Company was a box office success at the time, narrowly beating out its rival, Don Bluth's The Land Before Time, at the domestic box office and pointing to a more optimistic future for Disney feature animation after a turbulent decade in which they'd endured the disastrous box office of The Black Cauldron (1985) and the humiliation of being upstaged by Bluth's previous feature, An American Tail (1986). It did, however, get very middling reviews from the critics (as did most Disney films from the so-called Dark Ages), which might be the major factor keeping it firmly out of the Renaissance era in most retrospectives, despite setting multiple precedents for the Renaissance era formula (among them, a pop-Broadway soundtrack - Oliver was Disney's first bona fide animated musical in some years - and an increasing emphasis on celebrity voices). Personally, I think what doomed Oliver & Company is that it had the misfortune of being followed up by The Little Mermaid (1989), the film that REALLY got people excited about Disney animation again. The success of Mermaid completely blew Oliver's out of the water, and I suspect Disney didn't see the point in keeping Oliver's fire lit now that they had something much more lucrative. Which doesn't quite satisfy me as to why the home video release was so belated, mind. Oliver was pushed to nearly the back of the queue, only marginally ahead of the maligned Black Cauldron (I love that movie, but it has more of an actively toxic reputation than does Oliver), and that's something I still don't understand.

I am biased, of course, since the film had such significance for me personally, but Oliver & Company deserved better. Among other things, it was only the second Disney animated feature to espouse the most radical suggestion of them all - that cats and dogs could live together in perfect harmony. Before then, One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961) was the sole entry bold enough to propose that feline-canine relationships could be rooted in anything other than total enmity (and I am strictly only considering the animated features here, so please don't bring The Incredible Journey to my attention), an idea regarded by earlier Disney features as an aberration. This is a big deal, as we all know that Disney have a long-running love of traditionalism, their films tending to reinforce the idea that everything has its proper, preordained place, and though Disney were always happy to depict all-round congenial spirits among the woodland set, the image of cats and dogs sharing a roof together was typically code for a horribly corrupted state that demanded rectification. The barely-sustained pseudo-harmony between Bruno and Lucifer in Cinderella (1950) was emblematic of the distasteful union between Cinderella and her abusive step-family; Cinderella's suggestion that they all try to get along is ultimately refuted, for it concludes violently, with Bruno brutally defenestrating Lucifer, much as Cinderella gets to reject her step-family once and for all. In Lady & The Tramp (1955), the Siamese cats' ill-gotten entry into Lady's home signifies the point at which her domestic utopia begins to dangerously unravel. The Aristocats (1970), which cast the cats in a heroic role for a change, took a more neutral stance. The dog characters, Napoleon and Lafayette, never directly encounter the feline protagonists, aiding them only unwittingly through their harassment of antagonist Edgar. A loose affinity is forged at the end of the film, but from a comfortable distance, when the dogs overhear the cats' final musical performance and are compelled to howl along.

Oliver & Company took inspiration from Charles Dickens' classic novel Oliver Twist, although it's naturally a very loose adaptation, with all but the basic plot trajectory - rags to riches, rags again, and then safely back to riches - and a handful of the character names having been retained. The film follows Oliver (Joey Lawrence), an abandoned kitten struggling to eke out a living on the streets of New York. There, he encounters Dodger (musician Billy Joel, who is actually quite good in the role, but alas, doesn't seem to have taken his voice acting career any further), a savvy terrier who first cons the impressionable cat into helping him rob a hot dog vendor, but subsequently initiates him into his pack, a ragtag crew comprised of Rita (Sheryl Lee Ralph), a down-to-earth Saluki, Tito (Cheech Marin), a lecherous Chihuahua, Francis (Roscoe Lee Browne), a Shakespearean bulldog, and Einstein (Richard Mulligan), a drippy Great Dane. All five dogs belong to Fagin (Dom DeLuise), a hapless down-and-out who uses them to "fetch" money and other valuable items. Fagin's current economic woes are rooted in the substantial debt he owes to a loan shark named Sykes (Robert Loggia, whom you may remember as Norman Bates' therapist), who has threatened grave consequences if Fagin does not produce the goods in three days. Oliver is separated from the dogs during a botched attempt to rob a limousine, but the limo's passenger, a well-off but lonely girl named Jenny Foxworth (Natalie Gregory), takes pity on him and elects to keep him as her personal pet. This turn of events suits Oliver, who is clearly better cut out for the sheltered lifestyle supplied by Jenny than for a life of petty street crime, but it isn't long before his old canine cronies attempt to restore him to their ranks, and Oliver finds himself at the centre of a vicious clash between the classes.

Word has it (and I'm not sure just how credible the sources are on this) that Oliver & Company was at one point intended to be a sort-of sequel to The Rescuers (1977), in the same way The Rescuers could once have been a sort-of sequel to One Hundred and One Dalmatians by casting the Cruella as the villain. The original idea was that Oliver would be picked up by Penny, the waif rescued from Devil's Bayou by Bernard and Bianca, now living in New York with her adopted family, but the decision was ultimately made for her to be a separate character, Jenny, with the similar name a nod to the character's conceptual ancestry. Fascinating though it is to think about the possibility of a shared Disney universe, I do have a couple of questions regarding the practicality of working Penny into this particular story. Firstly, there's the matter of temporal distance. Both The Rescuers and Oliver & Company are set in their respective modern times - the final scene in The Rescuers presumably takes place on January 13th 1978, which did indeed fall on a Friday, while Oliver & Company is set in 1988, a full decade later. I'm not sure how old Penny is supposed to be during the events of The Rescuers, but I wouldn't peg her as younger than 7; by the time of Oliver & Company she would need to be in her late teens at the youngest. Secondly, and it's entirely possible that the Penny connection was dropped before this particular story detail was cemented, there's the fact that Jenny's domestic life, prior the arrival of Oliver, isn't exactly idyllic, which would somewhat undermine Penny's triumph at the end of The Rescuers in being adopted and reinstated to a family. It's a significant, although not massively overstated plot point in Oliver that Jenny's parents are neglecting her, leaving her with only the companionship of Winston (William Glover), a benevolent but ineffectual butler, and Georgette (Bette Midler), the family's self-absorbed show poodle. Not exactly the life I suspect Penny had in mind when she finally made it out of the orphanage.

Oliver recalls both Lady & The Tramp and The Aristocats, in that it too revolves around an uneasy intersection between classes of animals, albeit with a conclusion that seems more favourable to both. First, though, let's look at the ways in which its predecessors already diverge from one another. The Aristocats, often criticised for recycling many of the narrative beats of Lady & The Tramp, in some respects represents a more radical take on the same story. This time, the intersection is between two classes of cats living in France in the early 20th century - Duchess, the beloved pet of a retired opera singer, and her three kittens, and O'Malley, a charismatic feral who helps the family when they are uprooted from their swanky Parisian abode and abandoned in the countryside by a disgruntled butler. O'Malley leads the wayward family back to Paris but, like Tramp before him, attempts to dissuade Duchess from completing the last leg of her journey, advocating instead that she stay with him and give ferality a try. Just like Lady, Duchess's interest is overridden by her sense of obligation toward her human. The conflict is resolved, in both cases, through the reverse scenario - the male suitor gives up his life of ferality and is fully inducted into the domestic sphere. Much as Tramp had to acquire a collar and licence, as badges of his revised allegiances, so too must O'Malley don a bowtie to show that he has been successfully assimilated into Duchess's elite milieu. Unlike Tramp, however, O'Malley is not required to totally renounce his roots in the process - as it turns out, all of his alley cat associates will be moving in with him, as part of Madame's bold new initiative to transform her fabulous mansion into a sanctuary for Paris's homeless cat population. Quite a contrast to the bleak implications for the uncollared dogs at the end of Lady & The Tramp, whom the film and characters alike are quite happy to leave impounded and destined for euthanasia. The two films are united in advocating the supremacy of the reigning class and the elimination of the class that undercuts it, whether through eradication or assimilation, although the nature of the ending in The Aristocats, which has Scat Cat and his crew reprising their energetic jazz number, "Everybody Wants To Be A Cat", suggests that their bohemian spirit may not be so easily broken-in. Do we get to bow out on more of a compromise, then? Meanwhile, the murine home invader, a symbol of complete domestic breakdown in Lady & The Tramp, is here on friendly terms with the cats (and I believe this is the first instance of a Disney animated feature to show the cats and the rodents getting along). Unfortunate Asian stereotypes are still represented by cats of the Siamese breed, but at least this Siamese is jovial, good-natured and one of the guys, compared to insidious and malignant aliens Si and Am.

The baby, who occupies the centre of the household in Lady & The Tramp and is to be protected above all else, is dispensed with in The Aristocats - for Madame, the cats occupy the void that might have been filled by a more conventional family, and narrative is satisfied that this is their rightful place (to the irritation of some viewers, who find it easy to sympathise with the root of Edgar's indignation - being passed over in favour of the cats in Madame's will). Although Lady and Duchess initially reject their respective suitors for much the same reason, the two pets clearly have very different ideas about their place within the domestic equation. Lady, who was forced out of her role as baby substitute when the actual baby arrived, has settled on a new occupation as the family's protector; peripheral to the core family unit, it is now her job to monitor and uphold it. If she were to leave, she asks Tramp, "Who would watch over Jim Dear, Darling and the baby?" Duchess, on the other hand, has more confidence in her worth as a companion: "She'd always say that we're the greatest treasure she could own. Because with us she never felt alone." (The archetype that was formerly villainised through the character of Aunt Sarah - the crazy cat lady - is vindicated through Madame.) Paradoxically, this requires Duchess to pass up an opportunity to fill the conspicuous void in her own family unit, ie: the absence of the cat who sired her litter of kittens, something that is not explicitly addressed outside of O'Malley's observations that the kittens could use a father figure. This in itself is quite a contrast to O'Malley's initial stance on encountering kittens, when his knee-jerk reaction is apparently to have nothing to do with a female cat who carries additional baggage. By the end of the second act, it appears that O'Malley has come around to the prospect of familial responsibility, but not domesticity (in Lady & The Tramp, no state of possible separation is ever shown to exist between the two) - he dismisses Madame as "just another human". O'Malley's major arc as a character - the putting aside of his negative assumptions about hairless ape overlords - is, surprisingly, never brought to the forefront of the narrative. By saving Duchess and the kittens from Edgar, he reaffirms merely his commitment to them - unlike Tramp, he does not have to prove his worth to human authority before being permitted to climb the social ladder, as Madame never learns the full extent of Edgar's treachery. Instead, Madame is shown combing O'Malley's fur in the final scene, and the conflict appears to have neatly resolved itself off-screen. O'Malley has accepted that, in order to be truly worthy of Duchess, he needs to fully integrate himself into her culture.

Oliver & Company replaces the central romantic relationship with a surrogate father-son bond between Dodger and Oliver (the class-crossing romantic arc is instead delegated to supporting players Tito and Georgette, and is played exclusively for comic effect). Although Dodger's initial interest in the youngster is wholly exploitative, he later warms to the idea of having a protege. When he learns, in the second act, that the cat's preference would be to abandon him for Jenny, he exhibits a greater sense of personal betrayal than either Tramp or O'Malley, for in his case he had a claim on Oliver's affections first. Or so he assumes - Oliver's professed aspiration was always to be a conventional house pet. Unlike its two predecessors, which start out within the safety of the domestic sphere and involve the protagonists being forced out from their familial bliss and into a more dangerous open, Oliver begins with its protagonist already literally in the gutter. Oliver's starting point is closer to that of Penny from The Rescuers - he too is an orphan who has lived through the sting of repeated rejection, but is still hopeful that he may one day be initiated into a family. Like Penny, whatever home and family he formerly knew is no longer open to him - his original owner having already discarded him, Oliver spends the opening portion of the film watching as his various siblings also abandon him one by one.

One reason why I believe that Oliver & Company is a far more interesting Disney feature than it's frequently given credit for is that it shows, more so than any other Disney feature before or after, a nightmare scenario in which the parents have completely vacated and left the children to fend for themselves. The total lack of any actual parental figures is pronounced, even if the film makes little explicit mention of it. Oliver's biological parents have been removed from the equation before the story even begins; his early life remains a blank spot that he never so much as mentions. Jenny's parents are mentioned a handful of times but not seen, having wilfully distanced themselves from the action. During the events of the film, Jenny's parents, who are apparently business partners as well as marital partners, are away at a conference in Europe, and Jenny is disappointed to learn that they will not be returning home in time for her birthday celebration (sneakily, they break the bad news via a letter, so Jenny cannot voice her objections). Absent parents are a notoriously ubiquitous feature of Disney's canon - there are only a scant number of pictures in which both parents are present and make it to the end, although few others which this absence is to be attributed to total apathy on the part of said parents. The Rescuers is its most obvious predecessor - we never learn the circumstances under which Penny became an orphan, but it is clearly the lack of active adult guidance that causes her to be seduced and assimilated into "weird" Medusa's more twisted version of the family unit; the police had apparently given up on trying to locate Penny long before Bernard and Bianca became involved, which reinforces the general air of adult indifference. Bernard and Bianca's mission to retrieve Penny from the swamps becomes a redemptive one for the traditional family; the two mice fill in the role as Penny's parental figures, protecting her where the adult world has failed, but only until she is safely returned to civilisation, whereupon the adult world is finally vindicated through Penny's successful restoration to a clean-cut family, the malign influence of outsider Medusa now vanquished and out of the picture. This is less the case in Oliver & Company, where the world that has already failed Jenny is ultimately diminished through the rise of a younger generation that intends to rectify the mistakes of its parents. The two abandoned children come together to create their own foundational unit, although Oliver and Jenny are not regarded as equals in the matter, as we will soon see.

Oliver is likewise intriguing because it rests on the premise that the safe hands in which the future was presumed to be at the end of Lady & The Tramp have ultimately failed. Lady & The Tramp presents familial domesticity as a pristine utopia that is constantly under threat from foreign containments and must be defended. The domestic family we find in Oliver, by contrast, is already in a state of decline, brought about not by outside influence but by its own internal apathy. The parents have absconded; Winston, their ostensible stand-in, seems compassionate enough but has no genuine authority, with every command or suggestion he makes throughout the picture being duly ignored. Georgette, the pampered pet of the household, is neither Lady or Duchess; she's vain and aloof, and appears to have little interest in a role as either family guardian or cherished companion. Judging by the assortment of pictures and trophies that adorn her bedroom, and by the lyrics of her musical number, "Perfect Isn't Easy", she prefers to keep herself immured in her own personal world in which she is perpetually at the centre. She reacts to Oliver's arrival with the same indignation as Lady to Si and Am, but whereas Lady's ailurophobia (and worse) came from her selfless desire to uphold the purity of Jim Dear and Darling's abode, Georgette's response springs entirely from her own self-interest. Oliver's intrusion is a threat to the purity of her world specifically, something he unwittingly demonstrates by eating a meal served to him in Georgette's bowl. Georgette could even be viewed as the anti-Lady, who does not so easily relinquish her spotlight once the new baby has moved in. Georgette is shown to resent the close and loving relationship between Jenny and Oliver, but there is no evidence to suggest that this is because she aspires toward such a relationship herself; rather, Georgette seems averse to the reminder that the entire world does not revolve around her. The film goes so far as to depict Georgette as something of a false friend to Jenny; not only does she exercise treachery by aiding Dodger and his gang in abducting Oliver, she later pretends to comfort the crying Jenny while actually snickering behind her back. Georgette is subsequently forced into the role of reluctant protector to Jenny, when she decides to venture out to the docks at night on receipt of Fagin's ransom note (again, one can only assume that the presence of active parental oversight might have have put a stop to this). When Jenny is kidnapped by Sykes, Georgette finally rises to the opportunity to prove herself the kind of worthy guardian that Lady aspired to be, although she does so as part of a team effort spearheaded by Oliver and Dodger; it thus takes the redemptive influence of the outsider to reinstate the values that the domestic realm formerly modelled. Hearteningly, it is the very outsider that Lady & The Tramp and The Rescuers alike regarded with so much suspicion.

What is conspicuously absent in Jenny's home life is shown to be present in its more destitute counterpart. Fagin's crew of down-and-outs practice the kind of traditional family ritual that Jenny is presumably missing out on, when Fagin reads his animals a bedtime story, in a sequence clearly designed to illustrate that, despite their partaking in criminal activity, there is a sweet, wholesome underbelly to their alliance. This is a direct inversion on the situation in The Rescuers, with the "trashy" class who live outside of the law preserving the virtues that the upstanding class has allowed to disintegrate - that Fagin and Medusa both live on houseboats (in Fagin's case, possibly squatting) only reinforces the connection. The class is comprised, predominantly, of uncollared dogs, the very class denied a happy ending in Lady & The Tramp (a couple of the same breeds are even represented). In the absence of biological kinship, these down-and-outs have formed a metaphorical family unit among themselves, of which Fagin is ostensibly the presiding parental figure, although it is Dodger, in practice, who serves as the patriarch of the group. He is a breadwinner who provides for his family's basic needs (Dodger's cruellest action, exploiting Oliver in his hot dog heist, is ultimately shown to have been carried out for the benefit of the other dogs) and who orders the group strategically. Rita, the only female member, is our obvious mother archetype, upon whom it falls to keep order within the group in a more moral sense. This includes intervening in the regular sparring between Tito and Francis, the figurative children of the group, whose interactions are molded by a heated sibling rivalry. Einstein, finally, is the gang's overgrown toddler - he is the most simple-minded and child-like of the dogs, being the one to request a bedtime story from Fagin. Once Oliver has been accepted into Dodger's family, he becomes the more traditional sacred child, recognisable from Lady's pristine household, around whom all of the other members rally to protect. They do this first by shielding him from Sykes' Dobermans and later by going out of their way to "rescue" him when he is taken by Jenny. His allotted function within the family is thus to reinforce its unity. Paradoxically, in order to successfully integrate him into their group, the very innocence that makes him its moral focus must be obliterated, as the dogs attempt to school him in the art of street crime. There is evident honor among these thieves, but they are thieves nevertheless, and as such their role in Oliver's journey is a purely provisional one. This outsider family can support the conventional family in recovering its former glory, but they cannot actually be allowed to replace it.

Despite the camaraderie extended by Dodger's pack to Oliver, the viewer is never given any real incentive to doubt that his rightful place is with anyone other than Jenny. On a subliminal level, we are prompted to favour the bond between Jenny and Oliver, not simply because she's a clean-cut child who could offer the cat a more conventional home than those criminal dogs, but because she does the one thing that Dodger and his friends have failed to do - she addresses him by his real name, Oliver. Dodger and the gang have, up until now, only cared to acknowledge him as "Kid". It's easy enough to conclude that, since Jenny is the first character within the context of the story to call him Oliver, she is the one who gives him his name. But that's actually not the case. Pay attention during the opening musical number, "Once Upon A Time In New York City", and you'll notice that Huey Lewis's narrator does indeed refer to him as Oliver within the lyrics of the song. From the viewer's perspective, Oliver has been the cat's name all along - it's made pretty explicit in the title of the film, after all - and when Jenny refers to him as such, it feels less like a grand revelation than the film's internal world finally coming up to speed with an intrinsic reality. Jenny, more so than Dodger, recognises Oliver for who he really is, and that's why she has the strongest claim on him.

The love and attention Jenny lavishes on Oliver is, we suspect, rooted in a desire to fill the void left by her absent parents, their relationship reminiscent of that between Tod and his surrogate mother, Widow Tweed, in The Fox and The Hound (1981). The unspoken narrative lurking at the back of Tweed's interactions with Tod is that of her deceased husband and her need to fill that gap, something conveyed only in the "Widow" portion of her name and her comment, on adopting Tod, that she is "not going to be so lonesome any more." By the end of the film, the one character thread that has not been resolved, at least not overtly, is the matter of Tweed ending up alone again (naturally). Tweed is forced to abandon Tod in the second act, restoring the natural order by returning him to the wild but re-igniting her former problem. From then on, Tweed seems resigned to solitude, an outcome subtly facilitated by the lyrics in her song, "In my heart there is a memory, and there you'll always be", which doubles as a final rumination on her grief for her lost husband. Through the symbolic release of her husband substitute, she learns to make peace with her husband's memory. Oliver, like Tod, is taken in as a substitute for a relationship that has already been ruptured, but unlike Tod he is ultimately validated in his ability to fill that role. Whereas The Fox & The Hound comes down heavily on the side of traditionalism, in insisting that there is an inflexible order to which is characters must inevitably adhere, Oliver & Company seems more inclined to empower the younger generation in reconstructing their own family units, albeit within conventional frameworks. The family is not simply reinstated, as in The Rescuers - redemption occurs through a shift in the very nexus of the family, reordering it so that Oliver is placed at the centre. In the end, Oliver gets to live the dream that was utterly unfathomable to Lady and Duchess. Why be the baby when you can be the boss?

A common criticism of Oliver & Company is that Oliver himself is a rather passive hero, tending to drift into scenario after scenario, while most of the action is driven by various other characters battling to determine his fate (let it not be said that the cat lacks tenacity, however - if he did, he would never have insisted on tracking down Dodger and those sausages). He is, in fact, a textbook example of what Sarah Harwood, in Family Fictions: Representations of The Family in 1980s Cinema, calls a "redeemer child", an archetype endemic to the cinema of the era: "They are objects of exchange between adults, trophies within various conflicts, but trophies that are also invested with the power to redeem and reconstitute the family scenario." (p. 127) For much of the film, Oliver's greatest strength lies more in what he signifies than in anything he does. He represents the seed of the incoming generation, and whichever party manages to secure him in their ranks is naturally advantaged for it. For Dodger and his pack, he is additional blood, presenting the possibility for the prolonged existence of their non-biological family. For Jenny, he represents the opportunity to regenerate her decaying family unit through the creation of a new foundational relationship. Initially, Jenny attempts to achieve this by fulfilling the vacant parental role herself, nurturing Oliver and enabling him to remain in his position as a passive trophy. The tables are turned at the film's climax, when Jenny, in attempting to be a dutiful parent and retrieve Oliver from a supposed kidnapper, is herself kidnapped, and Oliver takes an active role in rescuing her. While Oliver remains literally a child for the full duration of the film, his figurative coming of age is signified in his shift from waif to guardian, his empowerment coming at the expense of Jenny, who is herself reduced to the role of a trophy to be secured (Oliver does not enjoy the same privilege over his surrogate father, Dodger, upon whom he is still reliant for help in facing up to Sykes and the Dobermans). Jenny gets abducted because she lacks awareness of her own obvious vulnerability - she too represents the seeds of the future, and is therefore a lucrative asset for Sykes. Fagin is temporarily corrupted by his desire to exploit that future generational seed (in the form of Oliver), in a move that garners him approval from Sykes, and is redeemed by his decision to protect it (in the form of Jenny), when he assists the rescue mission, despite receiving the attractive offer from Sykes for his debt to be forgiven in exchange for his silence. Jenny's actual parents, meanwhile, remain distanced even when their daughter is at her most endangered - the task of having to negotiate with Sykes falls to Winston, who predictably cuts little ice.

Even when Jenny has been successfully delivered from Sykes, the climax yields one final bit of tension by doing the very Disney thing and suggesting that Oliver might have been killed in the effort. In the fifty-two year stretch between Bambi (1942) and The Lion King (1994), however, benevolent Disney characters were all but guaranteed their immortality (the lone exception being Gurgi from The Black Cauldron, who was technically dead for nine minutes), so seasoned viewers were very unlikely to be fooled. Jenny may ultimately be delegated that all-important role of sacred generational future, but it is Oliver who gets to decide whether or not the ending is happy on the basis of whether he lives or dies, thus determining the precise direction of that future. The matter of Jenny's absent parents is resolved at the end of the film, albeit somewhat redundantly - in the final scene, Winston receives a telephone call from Jenny's father; his voice is not heard, maintaining his status as a non-character, but it becomes apparent from Winston's one-sided conversation that her parents expect to be back later that day after all. Winston declines to tell Jenny, preferring for her to enjoy the surprise. Disney cannot resist but pander to the viewer's desire for a traditionally happy ending, but the anticipated reconciliation between Jenny and her parents goes entirely unseen, regulating the matter to the status of an mere afterthought and reinforcing that Jenny has, thanks to Oliver, already achieved resolution independently of them. It is clear that, even if Jenny can expect a more positive relationship with her parents going forward, it will be less important to her than her relationship with Oliver.

The ending of Oliver & Company diverges from both that of Lady & The Tramp and The Aristocats, for here the intersecting classes settle upon a state of co-existence, so long as a safe enough distance is established between them. Although Fagin and his dogs are welcomed at Jenny's birthday celebration, the union is only temporary, and when the party has concluded they set off again, leaving the Foxworth residence in peace and presumably resuming the same life of petty crime they were leading before the story began. In direct contrast to both Tramp and O'Malley, Dodger exits with a triumphant (on the surface, anyway) reaffirmation of the very same values he championed at the start of the picture. Meanwhile, the possible mergence suggested in the romantic relationship between Tito and Georgette is refuted in a comedic fashion, with Tito hurriedly rejecting Georgette when she makes an active attempt to domesticate him. What we have, then, is a less melancholic variation on the ending to The Fox and The Hound, where resolution is achieved through having the titular parties reconcile on an emotional level while simultaneously affirming their commitment to their respective family units. Unlike The Fox and The Hound, Oliver attempts to create some ambiguity as to whether this separation will necessarily be permanent, with the dogs making vague promises that they will see Oliver again. Dodger goes so far as to offer to keep a position open for him in the gang, should he ever change his mind, enabling the ending to give the impression that both possible character trajectories for Oliver are equally valid. Perhaps it is not a completely false one - where the intersection is maintained is in Oliver himself, who demonstrates to Dodger, during their final interaction, that he has internalised the lessons he taught him, by replicating Dodger's earlier gesture of a denied high five. Oliver must be restored to the domestic sphere to ensure its regeneration, but he remains identifiably the surrogate offspring of Dodger, putting the final emphasis on the successful transference of paternal mettle over Oliver's newly-secured relationship with his surrogate mother-cum-child.

That the dogs are not required to actively renounce their life of crime by the end is certainly interesting, and the film also privileges them in allowing them to have the last word, yielding the illusion it does perhaps see them as embodying the future direction of the family after all. The film closes with a final display of unity between the dogs, as Dodger sings a reprise of his signature song, "Why Should I Worry?", and this time the rest of the pack joins in, changing the lyrics to, "Why Should We Worry?" The precariousness of their position is, nevertheless, illustrated in the closing image, which shows them disappearing into the traffic of New York; whereas Oliver achieves stability, his friends are lost amid a sea of chaos. There is, furthermore, the tiniest hint of a shifting dynamic within Dodger's metaphorical family. Dodger flirts with a couple of passing female dogs, as he did during his original rendition of the song, but here we see Rita become visibly jealous and tug Dodger away. Although Dodger and Rita occupy the respective paternal and maternal positions in their unit, this is as explicit as the film gets in suggesting a romantic pull between the two. It indicates that Rita at least has a growing interest in settling down and creating her own more traditional family unit, undercutting Dodger's boisterous reaffirmation of the carefree life and subtly answering the question he poses in the lyrics by suggesting that, sooner or later, he will indeed have a whole new batch of charges to worry about. Changes are occurring, and for all of the enthusiasm with which the dogs resume their life on the Streets of Gold, one gets the impression that its days are numbered.

Oh, and post-Oliver & Company, the state of relations between Disney dogs and cats has actually been relatively peaceful. The Lion King is more of a cat vs cat film (since hyenas are more closely related to cats than to dogs). Bolt and Mittens got off on the wrong foot, but they worked it out in the end. Goofy and Pete (if they even counted in the first place) became suburban neighbours, and while they were still regularly at odds, their rivalry was a much more civilised one. Curse you, Frankenweenie, for letting the side down.