MarzGurl Loves Don Bluth: Anastasia

(Clips from the movie are shown)

MarzGurl (vo): You have no idea what a huge relief that the movie Anastasia truly poses after movies like Rock-a-Doodle, Thumbelina, A Troll in Central Park and The Pebble and the Penguin. With the studio backing of Fox, the movie was almost sure to be a success, and indeed, it saw box office success. In fact, it's, thus far, Don's highest grossing movie ever. But does the movie necessarily live up to the beauty and charm found in some of Bluth's earlier works? For starters, just looking at the animation alone is enough to make your jaw drop. While Don Bluth is amazing in animating animals, I always adored his incredibly realistic human animations. I may have mentioned before that most of the human animations are most likely rotoscoped, but at the same time, I've seen some really scary looking rotoscoping in my day and Bluth's human animations look the most natural and fluid while still looking like a pretty cartoon. It doesn't give me that terrifying, uncanny valley feeling, where I feel uncomfortable because it appears too real. The unfortunate reality, however, is that there's too terribly many instances where 2D characters are set on top of 3D rendered backgrounds. The two things put together often look really jarring. The music, however, is really quite good and the voice cast is varied and talented: Meg Ryan, John Cusack, Kelsey Grammer, Christopher Lloyd, Hank Azaria, even Jim Cummings shows up to lend his singing voice.

Rasputin: (singing) My curse made each of them pay, but one little girl got away

MarzGurl (vo): So on the whole, it's a pretty good, successful movie. So, what's the problem? My biggest problem, personally, is the inclusion of the character, Rasputin. The story takes place in the Russian palace starting in 1916. Historically speaking, the events around this time are kinda sorta lining up, but realize, of course, that quite a lot of artistic liberties have been taken. Rasputin is told by the Tsar to leave the palace and he does, and by selling his soul to ensure that the Romanov family is completely and utterly destroyed, this supposedly causes all of Russia's utter chaos, leading to the events where the entire family is killed, but firing up the legend that somewhere out there, the youngest daughter, Anastasia's still alive. If that was the only purpose Rasputin served in the movie, I could be okay with that. The problem, however, is that in this story, Anastasia lives and Rasputin is obsessed with finding her and destroying her, too. Now if that's all the movie was about, then Rasputin's role would be okay. However, the story is very much a My Fair Lady tale. In the beginning of the movie, a young boy named Dimitri helps Anastasia escape safely from the palace. Ten years later, Dimitri and his friend, Vlad are looking to find the perfect girl, who's the exact perfect image of Anastasia in order to receive reward money from her grandmother. In all that time Anastasia's been missing, in reality, she's been stuck in an orphanage with amnesia and calling herself Anya. She randomly acquires a puppy (Pooka), and with only a pendant saying "Together in Paris" to guide her, she goes off to St. Petersburg with hopes to travel to France. She has a few flashback moments, including one really quite beautiful musical number.

Anya: (singing) Dancing bears, painted wings, things I almost remember...

MarzGurl (vo): This is when Dimitri and Vlad find her. They don't yet see the actual princess Anastasia, but rather money. They decide to cart her off to France and teach her how to be Anastasia. Anya's completely unaware that this is a scam, in which at the end of it, Dimitri would wind up obtaining a reward, so she goes along with it. This narrative right here would be fine on its own, but then, Rasputin keeps showing up, who has since found himself somewhere in limbo and has become something of a gag villain, with body pieces falling apart and stretching out all over the place, not to mention his weird sidekick bat, Bartok. He's even less necessary than Rasputin is, and he does a total of nothing over the course of the movie. Rasputin pulls all kinds of crazy magic tricks: trying to get Anya to sleepwalk off the side of a boat, destroying the train tracks their train is on, all kinds of crazy stuff, and in the midst of everything else going on, it feels really unnecessary. Anya and Dimitri are busy falling in love, despite all the challenges to turn her into royalty, and over the course of having been shown many fake princesses, Anastasia's grandmother becomes sick of even being presented with anyone claiming to be Anastasia. Wait, come to think of it, if Rasputin wants the family dead so bad, then why is this grandmother still alive? Uh, well, maybe he just figured she was old and not worth his time. In any case, Anastasia overhears that it was originally a clever plan to earn money and storms off away from Dimitri. But of course, over the course of the movie, Dimitri has finally realized that Anya is most definitely the young girl he helped escape the palace ten years ago. So he hijacks a car with Russian royalty inside and races her to meet with Anya, where together, they discover that she's the real deal. The family is together again and Dimitri ends up rejecting the money he originally was so interested in having, and when Anastasia learns that Dimitri didn't take the money, she goes after him to be with him. Sounds like a pretty solid end to a decent narrative, even if I've somewhat heard it before, right? Wrong, this is where Rasputin decides to show up one last time and try and kill Anastasia. Luckily, the scene doesn't last terribly long, as she steps on Rasputin's green magical glowing rave trinket, thereby destroying him. Anastasia and Dimitri are free to be together now, but then this happens.

(Bartok is dancing around when a pink female bat appears)

Pink bat: Hmmm.

Bartok: Uh, hello...

(The female bat kisses him and starts to dance with him)

Bartok: Wow! I tell you what, whoa!

(The female bat kisses him again on the cheek; he sputters and then pulls a black screen down)

Bartok (vo): So long, everybody!

MarzGurl (vo): What? Why? Did we ever care about Bartok? Who's this pink, sultry little number? Why did she appear out of nowhere and just start throwing herself at him? Why are we supposed to be happy about that?! I'm so confused.

Basically, at the end of it all, if you can ignore the majority of Rasputin and Bartok's involvement in the movie, it's very much a My Fair Lady / Taming of the Shrew story, featured on an historical background of the huge artistic license taken. It's pretty to look at, has catchy, swaying music, and pretty much doesn't have a single bad voice actor, only bad characters, and even the crazy amounts of CG backgrounds couldn't keep me from actually enjoying the movie. On the whole, it actually stands up pretty well and its financial success speaks loudly in its favor, too. So how could you mess this up? Well, unfortunately, there was a direct-to-video sequel, and also unfortunately, Don Bluth himself actually was involved. When next we meet, we'll be discussing Bartok the Magnificent.

(Credits are shown)