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AnastasiaRating:
Release Date: 01 January, 1999 Retail Price: $19.98 Sorry, this product is not currently available. Cast: Complete Cast (20 total) |
Anastasia Reviews
Absolutely Lovely
Looking back at all the childhood cartoon movies I had, I realize that Anastasia ranks among my favorites. It has a couple of faults, but I loved it and I still do.
There are two primary faults to the movie. Firstly, the animation struggles at times with capturing particular human expressions. Secondly, it is not clever historical fiction because of the sacrifices it had to make over facts.
However, I believe this movie to be greater than the sum of its parts. The songs were amazingly wonderful. The development between Anastasia and Dimitri pulls at heartstrings. The mystic Rasputin arouses the disdain only proper for a movie villian. This is altogether a wonderful movie I would like to own on DVD.
Anastasia
When I first watched Anastasia as a young child of eight, it didn't take much for me to fall in love with the movie. A romantic sap even then, I appreciated the skillfully written plotline and couldn't care less about the historical accuracy - or rather, complete disregard for historical accuracy.
After a couple of years, I outgrew typical Disney animation (which this movie isn't, by the way - it's Fox, their first animated feature) and lumped Anastasia along with that. Somehow, however, it got saved when we sold the majority of our animated films in our garage sale, and three years later on a whim I popped our dusty VHS copy into our VCR...and fell in love with it all over again.
The movie deals with the still-vibrant theory that, when the Bolcheviks under Lenin overtook Russia and executed the imperial family, the youngest daughter, Anastasia, survived. In this film, the Russian Revolution is set in the year 1916, with an eight-year-old Anastasia; already, the historical inaccuracies are present. It shows how Anastasia was able to escape the rebels who had come to kill her family, but has her falling to a train platform and losing her memory while still in St. Petersburg. Ten years later, she winds up an amnesiac orphan, who is picked up by a pair of conmen to pose as Anastasia for reward money offered by Anastasia's grandmother, the Dowager Empress Marie; of course, none of them know that she is the true Anastasia. It's fairly easy to guess what happens next.
The film follows a basic formula and includes the necessary romance, soul-seeking journey, and, of course, comically evil villain with equally comical sidekick. However, the way the story is presented is what makes it unique; the animation is fabulous and the heroine is intelligent and spunky. Some of the songs are fairly unremarkable, save the hauntingly beautiful "Once Upon a December" and the inspiring "Journey to the Past", but the score is beautifully well done. The plotline is strung together well and the romance is mature and believable.
Most complaints that I've heard about this movie is that it's very much a fictitious story and that children are confused when their parents say it's true. However, that doesn't act as a critique for the movie or its creators, but rather for the parents who cannot coherently convey to their children the difference between fact and fiction. The filmmakers have created a beautiful journey from a tragic history, and while it's highly unlikely that this truly happened, it's nice to suspend disbelief for awhile and pretend that the princess does always live happily ever after.
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