Anastasia

Borrowing liberally from the Disney Renaissance template, Anastasia plays as fast and loose with historical figures and events as the Mouse House’s own Pocahontas or Mulan. There’s the basics of names, a few historically accurate trivia tidbits thrown in, some musical numbers, and cutesy sidekicks (both rotund human and anthropomorphic animals). All of the correct parts are there, and it is solidly entertaining, but it never soars. It is merely good enough, with a few glaring problems.

Weird choices abound in Anastasia, beginning with an inconsistency in the vocal work. Meg Ryan and John Cusack speak with their normal voices, while Christopher Lloyd, Angela Lansbury, Kelsey Grammer, Bernadette Peters, and Andrea Martin do their best to perform in a slight Russian accent. The longer the film goes on, the more distracting it becomes that every other Russian speaks with the appropriate accent (or close enough approximation), but the two leads, one of whom is the long presumed dead princess, speak in their normal vocal cadences.

Then there’s the animation, which is uniformly strong for many of the more cartoonish supporting players, but the two leads frequently go off model. Cusack’s Dimitri is the worst offender of this problem, with his face obtaining extra lines and creases or generally looking “off” in several shots. Luckily the rest of the movie is strong enough to submerge this problem for long periods of time, with some lively character work for Rasputin being a particular highlight, especially his reemergence in the narrative as a figure living in a limbo state with a penchant for limbs falling off.

Although the two worst marks against Anastasia are the musical numbers and the insistence on Bartok, a quirky albino bat with a Midwestern accent that plays sidekick to Rasputin. Bartok’s presence in the film is clearly an aping of Disney’s style, but the choice to stick him with a strange voice that wouldn’t sound out of place in Fargo makes him stick out in stark contrast. Giving the villain a sidekick is not a bad choice, but it’s better if they’re more appropriately villainous or able to merge in with the general style and tone of the piece.

Then there’s the musical numbers, two of which are incredibly strong (“Journey to the Past,” “Once Upon a December”) and the rest are of a range between merely adequate to instantly forgettable. Rasputin’s big musical number is a low-light, with the churning, sub-par metal guitars and obnoxious keyboards feeling fairly laughable. If only more of the film had put as much time and effort into its musical numbers as they did in “December,” a simply gorgeous daydream/memory play with Anastasia dancing with the ghosts of her family and the royal court.  

Having gotten all of the problems out of the way, what works in Anastasia? Everything else, honestly. For the most part, the animation is strong, the pacing is solid, the vocal work is uniformly strong even if some choices are odd, and it uses the Ingrid Bergman film’s template as a solid foundation to build off into stranger territory.

Oh, didn’t you know? Yes, this version of the story is based upon Bergman’s triumphant (and Oscar winning) 1956 film of the same name, with the same basic premise: amnesic woman meets two con artists looking to cash in on the money offered for anyone proving Anastasia is still alive, only for the amnesic woman to really be the long-lost royal. Of course, Bergman’s film didn’t feature a zombie Rasputin and dark magic as primary antagonists, and nothing in it is as frightening or nightmarish as a few dream sequences.

Don Bluth was one of the few animators giving Disney a run for his money for a long period of time. His movies are frequently messy, many of them don’t hold up without the blinders of nostalgia, but a few of them are oddball gems. The Land Before Time and Anastasia being the most obvious examples of solid, if messy, works that hold up relatively well. Nothing here to rival peak Disney, but it’s certainly better than some of the Renaissance’s later years, and definitely better than much of the post-Renaissance years.