Anastasia

Rating

Director

Don Bluth, Gary Goldman

Screenplay

Susan Gauthier, Bruce Graham, Bob Tzudiker, Noni White, Eric Tuchman

Length

1h 34m

Starring

Meg Ryan, John Cusack, Kelsey Grammer, Christopher Lloyd, Hank Azaria, Bernadette Peters, Kirsten Dunst, Angela Lansbury, Rick Jones, Andrea Martin

MPAA Rating

G

Review

When the preeminent animation house dominates the industry, it’s difficult to find animated films that can surpass the gold standard for the medium. Anastasia is another of Don Bluth’s attempts to wrest control of the genre that remains inferior in nearly every way, except one.

For his 9th animated feature, Bluth takes us on a different fairy tale adventure, one that looks like something Disney might have created, yet borrows not from literature, but from world history. The story of the collapse of the Romanovs in Russia is an oft-told tale of limited factual certainty. Bluth’s screenplay takes some of the most basic elements of that Russian story and mixes in fantastical elements to create a strangely appealing story about the mysterious missing Romanov heir, Anastasia.

Meg Ryan provides the adult voice of Anatasia who suffers from amnesia after an incident the occurred while fleeting the Russian Revolution. Believing her name to be Anya, Anastasia follows the instructions on a locket of unknown origins that says “Together in Paris.” As she attempts to flee Russia without proper documentation, she falls into the hands of Dimitri (John Cusack) and Vlad (Kelsey Grammer), two con-men hoping to pass off Anya as the Dowager Empress’ (Angela Lansbury) long lost granddaughter. Along the way, the sorcerer Rasputin (Christopher Lloyd), with his talking albino bat Bartok (Hank Azaria) by his side, attempts to thwart the happy reunion and insure the curse he put on the Romanov family remains intact.

As far as stories go, it’s difficult not to be impressed by what’s been crafted here. Based on the famous Russian legend of a survivor of the Romanov family, who were all assassinated during the Russian Revolution, significant liberties are taken with the narrative, weaving in fantastical elements such as the underworld and magic. It’s the kind of story that would have fit well within the Disney realm of animated stories perfectly. The difficulty is that Bluth’s animation style isn’t exactly rudimentary, but it’s not as polished as that of Disney’s master craftsmen.

Before computer animation became the dominant form of animated storytelling, hand-drawn animated features like Anastasia wove in elements of computer animation to try and create a sense of modernity. Beauty and the Beast famously did this with their gorgeous ballroom sequence and subsequent efforts attempted to employ computers to create breathing environments in which the characters could move. What helped Disney’s films avoid the pitfalls of blending computer and traditional hand-drawn animation was that they typically used it to create backgrounds rather than foreground images. Anastasia doesn’t avoid that trap and uses it for things such as the music box, thrusting it into the front-and-center of the audience’s vision and thereby sticking out to the audience and looking ill-used.

While the animation style is one of the key issues with the film’s inability to stand out, the voice acting shifts from the credible (Lansbury, Azaria, Grammer) to the craftless (Ryan, Cusack). Then there’s Lloyd whose over-the-top villainy is an ill-fit to the other more subdued work.

For fans of animation, it’s crucial to step outside the carefully curated image that Disney, and later Pixar, have created for themselves. Learning to appreciate animation requires finding films like Anastasia, Bluth’s All Dogs Go to Heaven, and Ralph Bakshi’s The Hobbit to find examples of how many styles and types of animation there are. Anastasia is oftentimes inferior to Disney’s 1990s renaissance films, but it has some charms. It’s better than Disney’s 2000s nadir of Home on the Range, but everything looks brilliant next to that. This film is for young children who are less picky than their adult counterparts. Yet, some of the imagery and subject matter might be a better fit for older kids. Either way, the film works well enough for the effort put into it.

Review Written

August 17, 2022