Film
Another digression into the world of adorable cats and dogs, but this time inspired by Charles Dickens' novel Oliver Twist, although taking very little from the original story and merely drawing inspiration from it. Oliver becomes an abandoned kitten who, at the mercy of events, is tossed between the slums and uptown of 1980s New York. Dodger is transformed into a friendly dog with a lived-in, somewhat braggart attitude, who takes the kitten under his wing and welcomes him into the gang. What in the book were the gang members consequently become a group of nice dogs of different breeds, who go around New York stealing rubbish to help their master pay a debt incurred with the villain Sykes, no longer a common criminal but a real gangster. This adaptation worked well, making Oliver & Company the first animated film to exceed $100 million in global box office.
Art
When Oliver, the kitten protagonist of the film, accidentally ends up with a very rich family who want to keep him as a pet, the other dogs in the company try to rescue him and go to the home of little Jenny Foxworth to rescue him. Used to the only makeshift accommodation they could afford, all the dogs are surprised by the luxurious villa with all the amenities. All of them, but especially Francis, the educated, refined English bulldog, who is passionate about Shakespeare and whose eye does not escape incredible paintings. We see him excited and wagging his tail under some paintings that evoke the style of some of the greatest artists of the last century but adapted to the protagonists. Francis himself confirms this by exclaiming:
"Chagall. Matisse. Only masterpieces!"
Let us start with Marc Chagall, painter of symbols, of dreams, of the blue. A painter who at times was more of a storyteller, creating characters bound together by telling their story. The story of two lovers totally surrendered to love: Marc and Bella Rosenfeld, his wife and life partner, as well as a source of inspiration. In Chagall's paintings, in fact, there is no room for tragedy, for the horrors of the pogroms and the violence of the anti-Semitic persecution he was experiencing in those years. Art is the artist's only refuge, it is his soul, the only place where the moments of joy experienced survive. Chagall often painted lovers surrounded by a mystical blue colour, with a moon in the background, referring to his love affair with Bella. He tells of kissing her at night, when love and dreams become confused. In space, objects sway, bend. Everything can be seen from different angles. As if in zero gravity. Chagall used the colour blue to narrate the night, to convey his feelings of love, of happiness. His painting is a perfect synthesis of magic and mystery, of dream and feeling, of intensity and passion that sometimes takes on the gloomy tones of nightmare, only to transcend into a delicate, euphoric lyricism that leaves the eyes and soul as happy as a beautiful morning dream. His paintings are so extravagant, dreamy and psychedelic that it is difficult to place them in a specific art movement: he was neither cubist nor surrealist, although he always painted surreal scenes. Lovers, cows and houses flying through the air, a violinist on the roof, bodies and objects painted without respect for form, he steered clear of all formal classifications and manifestos.
He was a loner and a dreamer. A bit like our Francis who attributes the first painting on the left to Chagall. Indeed, it reminds us of the atmosphere of works such as Over the City (1918), but here the protagonist seems to be his Mounting the Ebony Horse (1948). After all, the protagonists of this film are animals, not people, and everything is repainted according to the rules of their world.
The other paintings Francis sees are attributed to an artist we have already met in The Aristocats: Henri Matisse. It may be that he was a fauve (French for 'wild cat'), but he seems to have a thing for animals. One of his most famous paintings is in fact The Red Room (or Harmony in Red) of 1908, in which the dominant colour is obviously that of the title. A characteristic that we find faithfully in the Disney film, even though the protagonist is transformed, once again, into an animal. The atmospheres remain the same, retaining the decorative stylistic features of the French artist, even and especially in the small painting above that seems to be based on his cut-outs. Although mainly famous for his paintings, Matisse was also a sculptor and engraver and created a specific form of collage, which he called 'cut-outs'. He said he 'sculpted with scissors', starting with small pencil drawings that Matisse made when he was deciding on various possibilities for composition. Then, using large sheets of pre-painted paper that his students prepared, Matisse would attach these coloured papers with his scissors. The cut shapes would be pinned to the walls of Matisse's studio or dining room and the artist would move the pieces around until he was satisfied with their position. Finally, the finished product would be revealed and Matisse would glue the cut pieces together. All the cut paper was kept. In some cut-outs, as in Composition, Violet and Blue, the artist used the saved pieces as negative images of certain shapes. Other cut pieces emerged in later works as small squares of colour. Nothing was wasted. In the film we see a small one, but this is not always the case: some of his collages are very large, almost mural-like, even though he used simple images with repeated patterns and colours in a decorative manner. In The Parrot and the Mermaid (1952 - 1953), a larger mural, the shapes are reduced to their simplest forms, but are intriguing and bewitching without being childish. The enormous size of the work, with its multi-fingered seaweed, makes us feel as if we too are under water.
External Links
Watch Oliver & Company su Disney +
Paintings:
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