Just watched this movie because I was in the mood for late 90s animation. After viewing I searched for it on hexbear and found comrade Tachanka’s comment about it here https://hexbear.net/post/231131/comment/2954918. Everything there is accurate and correct, but I have more to say.

This movie was so bad and weird. 86% critic 77% audience score. It easily deserves half on both counts. Its premise made such little sense. It starts with everything being perfect in the royal palace where all the fancy people of the day gathered to dance. It was perfect until Rasputin strikes, that is! He’s a Maleficent type villain in that he shows up and curses the Romanovs, but unlike Maleficent he’s a total loser. Rasputin’s angry with the royal family, but the why is never explained except for that Nicholas II “betrayed” him. That’s it. That is all that explains his “Dark Purpose.” This betrayal was so infuriating to him that he somehow cast a spell over all of the land which caused… a revolution? As best as I can tell, that’s what happened. Most of the royals get killed, and the empire falls. Anastasia fails to flee and has a little fall on the train platform.

The bolsheviks and Lenin are never mentioned, not even indirectly. It’s a communist revolution but it’s never depicted as such, except that life sucks and people are rude to each other, more or less. There is an unmemorable song about being a working person in St. Petersburg, and that provides most of the flavor of communist life in the 1920s.

Beyond the initial setup, the basic plot is that Anastasia somehow forgets her memories of her family and early childhood, and ends up growing in an orphanage under the ward of Comrade Phlegminkoff (get it?). After coming of age, she leaves and sets off to find out more about herself with her one clue: a necklace which directs her to Paris. This is 10 years after the revolution. Her journey leads her to two con men who plan to present a fake Anastasia to the dowager queen to claim a reward. Of course they meet none other than the real amnesiac Anastasia, groom her (not in the pedo way that is all the rage these days) discover her true identity eventually, and finally decide to do the right thing and end the Romanov bloodline once and for all return her to her grandmother in Paris. Of course the leading male, who happens to have been a kitchen servant who saved her life during the revolution when they were children, and Anastasia fall in love, too. Throughout the film we get cuts to Rasputin who will send his minions to do his Dark Purpose bidding, but of course they always fail to kill her, which would complete his curse and let him finally die.

The reason the movie’s so weird isn’t that it’s ahistorical. It’s because Anastasia, the character, get the full Disney Princess treatment. She almost immediately meets an adorable companion dog, and in one scene while she’s being groomed trained to act royal birds literally come and put little flowers in her hair or something like that. I deleted the movie, and can’t fact check the minor details. This treatment of a (super fictionalized) real person is so weird to see. They make it sound like Anastasia is a perfect princess, deserving of the royal lifestyle that was taken away from her, and that everything would be better if only Emperor Nicholas II hadn’t been killed by evil Rasputin and his magical revolutionary peasants.

I don’t wanna write about this much longer, so I’ll just say the animation kind of sucked. It looked weird because it relied on rotoscoping, which almost gave it a realistic presentation. Almost. Also the songs sucked. None of them were anything as good as the contemporary 90s Disney movies. The movie was really boring, too, which is its biggest crime. At some point the con men reunite Anastasia with her grandmother, and the big misunderstanding that she’s not just another impostor is resolved, and the main guy finally makes the grandma see he’s no longer just in it for the money (if she’d only just listen to his honest pleas!). It really feels like the movie could end here when these misunderstandings get cleared up. But no. Did the audience forget about Rasputin? He’s the main villain of the story, yet everything that involves him feels like the B-plot, and his role doesn’t resolve before the A-plot, so… get ready for another 15 minutes of him deciding to do the deed himself, confront Anastasia, and then lose. Again. I almost didn’t finish the movie when the resolution of the B-plot began, but alas… I wasted that time.

Anyway, don’t get curious to see this movie. It will not entertain you. It’s entirely forgettable. I would imagine myself forgetting about it but since I’ve posted about it I can at least now revisit my written thoughts in the future.