Anastasia 1997
Lately I have been catching up on some Disney movies and have started building a library of digital titles in addition to DVD’s. When I first signed up for Google Play, they gave me a free copy of Anastasia, an animated movie by Fox and director Don Bluth. I had never watched it, but I watched it this week in several parts during my commute to and from work. The animation in this movie is impressive and it features some big names (at the time) like Meg Ryan, John Cusack, Kelsey Grammer, and Angela Lansbury. There is a lot of ballroom dancing and I think that a lot of the animation was probably digitized from actual footage of actors. That makes the movements more realistic, but less like a cartoon. Walt Disney did the same thing for Snow White’s dancing scenes, but it ends up looking suspiciously real (though animating dance freehand would be too big a challenge probably).
The central story involves Anastasia, the daughter of Czar Nicholas, whose family is executed during the 1917 revolution. Anastasia escapes (in reality she was also murdered, but there were rumors for years that she was spared), but has amnesia and ends up an orphan. Eventually she learns that she is actually a princess, so that’s kind of happy, except that she also learns her family was murdered. Anyway, it is a decent story and has some historical elements to it. The villain in the movie is Rasputin who has magical powers and sells his soul to take revenge on Anastasia’s family (actually he was murdered about a year before the czar’s family). For most of the movie he is undead, and rotting, with appendages falling off. This is a kid’s movie? It is played for laughs, but it is pretty gruesome. His sidekick is an albino bat named Bartok, played by Hank Azaria who does so many great voices on The Simpsons, but whose nasally Russian-ish voice here is like fingernails on a chalkboard for me. He’s supposed to be a source of comic relief, but he’s not really that funny, a pale imitation of Gilbert Gottfried’s Iago in Aladdin. And since we rarely see his wings, he looks more like a mouse than a bat. Anyway, Rasputin is bent on killing Anastasia and fulfilling the curse he put on the Romanovs. I don’t think the rotting flesh Rasputin really works and we kind of know that they’re not going to let this beautiful riches to rags to riches princess get killed. So I don’t think the fundamental conflict works and maybe they could have fleshed out more of the story of the princess trying to prove her identity, though I don’t know if there is enough material there to sustain the movie.
The music seems decent. Twenty years later, you haven’t heard of these songs, but one of the songs as well as the score were nominated for Oscars. I think my problem with the movie is that, similar to Disney’s Hunchback of Notre Dame around that same time, is the movie didn’t need to be animated. Except for a dog and Bartok, the entire cast are people. Rasputin needed some animation and there are a lot of special effects with spirits, but it just isn’t that much fun watching a cartoon about people. And of course the very dark historical material puts a burden on the movie even though it plays out a little more like a fairy tale. This movie is probably better left forgotten, though I think it is a good example of animation from that time period between traditional animation and computer animation. I can’t give this more than a B-.
Written: 16 Dec 2012
Owned on: Digital