According to Wikipedia, there was a 1956 movie based on a 1952 French play based on the idea that Anastasia survived. Also, the phenomenon of people claiming/pretending to be Anastasia is real, and the play is based on the most famous of these. (The story continues to evolve: a 2016 stage musical included some of the same songs and characters, but substituted or added others.)
The rags-to-riches plot of this 1997 movie makes it feel like a standard Cinderella tale, but now that I think about it, the story may be more like Pygmalion (or My Fair Lady): a man fabricates an identity for a woman, then falls in love with her. That arc fits better with the 50s versions, though: in the 90s cartoon, the woman really was a princess all along. (Edit: It’s not my imagination… again, according to Wikipedia, they actually considered adapting My Fair Lady and deliberately took elements of Pygmalion. But I noticed the similarity myself.)
I don’t know how many times I’ve seen this movie; not a lot. But at some point, I think fairly soon after the movie came out, I bought a CD of the soundtrack, so I feel like I’ve watched this movie a lot more than I actually have.
What I like:
- The music in general. I like all three versions of “Journey to the Past” and also the end-credits song “At the Beginning.” Plus, there’s a very peppy villain song.
- The villain’s sidekick, who, it turns out, isn’t actually evil, has some great deadpan comic relief lines.
- The knight in shining armor tries to save the girl, but he gets knocked out and she saves him instead, which seems appropriate since it’s her name in the movie title.
- The heroine gets everything she dreamed and more: not just a home and family, but also a fortune, social position, and romance.
- The movie does a great job setting up the moment when all seems lost: the feeling of betrayal, which is the result of hiding the truth, is real and painful.
What I don’t like:
- The villain is literally a rotting corpse who keeps literally falling apart. The villain song involves dozens of choreographed cartoon bugs. Eeew.
- The random dog follows them for the whole movie! Some totally unnecessary woodland creatures are shoehorned in at one point.
- Nostalgia for czarist monarchy. I mean, it’s sad that Anastasia lost her parents and siblings (the truth about their murder is horrifying), but if history teaches us anything, it’s that absolute power never changes hands peacefully.
What I’m ambivalent about:
- The choice to graft an undead historical person wielding a magical curse onto a legend about another historical person.
- The conflation of “princess” and “grand duchess“. I guess it’s good that the movie used both the familiar term and the technically correct one.
Did you know?
The animation is a combination of techniques: hand-drawn (with rotoscoped humans), but assembled and colored using software, with some 3D computer-generated bits that give vehicles a technical feel (as in the crushingly expensive Treasure Planet (2002)) and give the camera the ability to rotate through architectural spaces, as in Beauty and the Beast (1991), a movie I like more than this one.
