Last Updated: May 31, 2000
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One of five winning entries by Stephen Hunter of The Washington Post
that won the criticism writing category of the 1998 ASNE Distinguished
Writing Awards.
Friday, November 21, 1997
Little-known fact about Stalinist Russia, 1926, courtesy of "Anastasia":
There was no food but there was a surprising abundance of Maybelline eyeliner.
How else to explain the almond definition of Anastasia's vaguely Orientalized
eyes in this beautiful idiot of an animated movie? She doesn't look like
a Russian princess at all, but more like the teenage Cher.
Though it's from 20th Century Fox, "Anastasia" shows us a very Disney
Russian Revolution, so Disney that, oops, they forgot the Communists. The
movie is a dream, a peach and a lie. It works fabulously as spectacle,
at least marginally as story, and as history it's bunk.
Of what importance is history, you ask, if it makes my little girl smile?
There's no answer to this question, really, but one must ask directors
Don Bluth and Gary Goldman why they chose to call it "Anastasia" and set
it in the century's central drama if they meant to completely ignore that
history. They could have called it "The Missing Princess" and set it in
Graustarkia, Ruritania, or on the Island of Guavabuto.
Bluth and Goldman are ex-Disney animators who left the studio in a huff
in 1979 because it had abandoned the classic, voluptuous, painterly stylistics
of "Snow White" and "Dumbo" for a cleaner, cheaper modern look. Since then,
they've bounced from studio to studio trying to out-Disney Disney, and
this is one time they may have succeeded.
On the other hand, they may have cheated.
The hardest thing to animate convincingly is human movement. But it
becomes considerably easier if you trace it -- and, using human beings
as "live action reference," Bluth and Goldman have clearly filmed some
of the film's complex action, then based their images on those sequences.
So the movie is an odd hybrid: It seems animated, it has all the stylizations
of animation, yet the human movement is so realistic that your brain picks
up on it subconsciously, sending little signals of weirdness up to the
conscious. It's continually . . . not annoying, so much, but noticeable.
The story is an infantilized, sanitized version of the 1956 film starring
Yul Brynner and Ingrid Bergman (she won an Oscar). A White Russian finds
an orphan to pass off as the only survivor of the murdered Romanov clan,
making her heir to a treasure that her father, Czar Nicholas II, had hidden
in Paris banks before the revolution. To qualify, she must pass muster
before another surviving royal, the dowager empress. But what seems a mere
scam soon proves troublesome: She may be the actual princess and the con
man may be in love with her.
With Meg Ryan and John Cusack voicing the roles, Anastasia and Dimitri
have been simplified from the Bergman-Brynner cosmopolitan wariness into
twenty-somethings, with faces as uncomplex as Ohio cheerleaders. It's not
particularly believable, but it certainly makes box office sense.
The movie evokes the terrifying events beginning in 1916 in highly spurious
form, then cuts to 1926, where the con man Dimitri is recruiting a young
woman to play Anastasia in his scam. Fate throws him together with the
amnesiac orphan Anya, and they journey from St. Petersburg (which was then
called Leningrad, though the movie never notices) to Paris and the scrutiny
of the dowager empress, along the way bedeviled by the spirit of the Mad
Monk Rasputin, who in limbo has sworn to destroy the Romanovs. (More historical
absurdity: The Romanovs promoted him; it was nobles who murdered him.)
One can see the material's fascination for the animation team: great
set-pieces of the lavish glories of Czarist Russia, the thrills of escape,
the tenderness of young love, the mystery of the girl's identity, the melancholy
of a lost world, the chance to re-create not merely "St. Petersburg" in
1926 but, more promisingly, Paris.
But there are pitfalls, too: the depressing business at Ekaterinburg
in 1918 when Bolshie goons took Mr. and Mrs. Czar and all the little czars
and czarinas into the cellar and spattered their brains on the bricks.
Not exactly your typical musical number.
So Anastasia is peeled off from her family at the railway station and
the fate of her parents and siblings is never referred to again; they're
simply gone. That seems okay. But the actual revolution itself is strangely
handled. It's ascribed entirely to the curse by the mad monk, who "spread
unhappiness through the land." Other than a hammer and sickle on one guard's
babushka, there's not a single reference to the political system that replaced
Mr. and Mrs. Czar and its monumental cruelties. There's no reference whatsoever
to the Romanovs' culpability in the debacle, or to the idiotic blood bath
known as World War I, which made the whole thing possible and set the century
up for 80 more years of conflict. The brothers Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin
go unmentioned.
This creeps me way out. The museum of history is full of tragedy, cobwebs
and corpses. Somehow attention must be paid to the great campaigns of death
that shaped the century and haunt us to this day. To pretend it's not there,
even in so innocent a vehicle as this, feels indecent, as if a reliquary
is being burgled by hucksters.
But let's put that aside. As a colorful spectacle, kids under 10 will
love "Anastasia," though the very young might find the final confrontation
between Anastasia and Rasputin on a Paris bridge somewhat intense, as it
borrows elements from both Prince Charming's battle with the dragon in
"Sleeping Beauty" and the "Night on Bald Mountain" from "Fantasia."
The vocal performances are okay. Ryan and Cusack are incongruously American
-- every other Russian character speaks with an accent -- but as there's
no requirement for internal logic in animation, it's not bothersome. Ryan
hardly registers as anything beyond generically spunky; Cusack over-registers
as Cusack, so you see his own face, not Dimitri's visage, when he speaks.
The musical numbers are all right but they have a '50s feel to them, a
sense of the static; the numbers in such recent Disney products as "Beauty
and the Beast" or "The Lion King," driven by dazzling editing, are much
better.
So here's my quote for the movie ad blurb: " `Anastasia' isn't terribly
bad! In fact, it's almost all right!" 20th Century Fox advertising department,
go for it!
Anastasia, at area theaters, is rated G and features no objectionable
material but several intense sequences that might prove unsettling to the
very young.
