Anastasia

Starring the voice talents of Meg Ryan, John Cusack, Christopher Lloyd and Kelsey Grammar At the turn of the century Imperial Russia was undergoing the throes of revolution. It didn't take long for Tzar Nicholas Romanov and his family to be murdered and replaced by the Bolsheviks.

That was the end of Tzarist Russia in 1917.

But this film is something else entirely - a beautiful romance between a peasant palace worker and the impetuous and excitable Anastasia Romanov. This is a journey through life, a quest for truth on a road less traveled.

Young Anastasia has no recollection of her past, but she is soon won over by a charming swindler who takes her to Paris to meet up with the Empress of Russia. Action, adventure and romance awaits!

The best way to watch a movie is with suspension of disbelief - Just trust what the producers present you with and don't question it. With that, "Anastasia" is one of the most delightful movies I've seen in some time. It's like an old musical, with people spontaneously erupting into choreographed dance, but with modern dialog (And funny, at that!), an enjoyable romance, and action sequences to keep things moving. The music, while nothing to remember to the point of distraction, was perfect for humming, and even worked to advance the plot - Unlike so many animated songs put in for the sake of having a song. So it wasn't historically perfect - if it were, there'd be no story. Go ahead and feel smug that you know what really happened, but don't turn to comment to your neighbor, lest you miss one minute of the wonderfully unfolding plot.

The last time I saw this, I thought there were maybe too many songs in it that distracted the feel from the movie. But now that I've seen it again, it's clear that the songs are well written, along with the storyline.

This is not based on a true story, only loosely on a few rumors that the real Anastasia survived the killing of her family. The heroine Anya is like a Disney princess who is desperate to find out who she is and where she belongs, after suffering from amnesia following the separation of her family. The villain is the brilliant Rasputin, back from the dead, intent on extracting revenge on the Romanovs, thus starting the Russian Revolution. Dimitri and Vladimir at first are looking to find the ideal Anastasia look alike in order to get the riches from her real mother in Paris.

A lot of Bluth's films revolve around a journey and a couple involving some history on Russia. I really enjoyed the songs that played over the end credits, "At the Beginning" and "Journey To The Past" sung in her own way by Aaliyah, the beautiful angelic voiced R&B singer who left way too soon.

Brilliantly animated for its time and enjoyable for adults, Anastasia remains a classic family film.

Some of the most beautiful animation and backgrounds in recent history are a central ingredient of "Anastasia", a charming full-length feature based on the famous title character and set against the period of the Russian revolution. Expert vocal work by Angela Lansbury (Dowager Empress), Meg Ryan (Anastasia), John Kusack (Dimitri) and many others, make the characters seem more dimensional than in most animated features. Particularly Dimitri and Anastasia, whose love-hate relationship seems startlingly real given the superb animation.

The score is studded with some Oscar-nominated music and the sinister moments have the kind of villain you love to hate (Rasputin). Some of the scenes might be too intense for small children--as well as a realistic railway scene on a runaway car--but all in all, should delight young and old. Angela Lansbury's voice is especially effective as the Empress. The art of animation doesn't get any better than this! This Don Bluth/Gary Goldman production is as good as anything Disney might have attempted.

In the late 1990s, we had two animated movies that were based on a certain event in a country's history. In 1995, Disney gave us an American "history lesson" (and I use that term loosely) with Pocahontas, but in 1997, 20th Century Fox did exactly what Disney did, except give us a look at a bit of Russian history (again, using the term "history" loosely) about the daughter of Czar Nicholas II, Anastasia Romanov, simply called...well...Anastasia. However, one thing to consider when going into this film is that this is a family picture ("kids movie" for short), so if you're looking for a true-to-life history lesson a la a PBS or History Channel documentary, you might as well throw that out the nearest airlock.

In this film, Anastasia, voiced by Meg Ryan, is a princess that went missing for several years after the attack on the Romanov family during a party, which was led by the Romanov's former confidant Rasputin, voiced by Christopher Lloyd of Back to the Future fame, who is an undead, evil sorcerer in this movie. Anastasia, now with a case of amnesia and dubbed Anya, eventually joins two con men, Dimitri (John Cusack) and Vladimir (Fraiser's Kelsey Grammar), who are convinced that she really is the missing Romanov princess, and travel to Paris, France, where her grandmother, the Dowager Empress, resides, to hopefully reunite them, all while Rasputin is seeking her unfortunate demise.

I won't judge this movie on historical accuracy, as all (or most) of us can tell that the general audience for this film is younger children, though adult audiences will also be entertained, since there was a lot of effort put into the creation of this film. That, and I wouldn't dismiss it as a "Disney knockoff" right away, because the directors of the film, Don Bluth and Gary Goldman, were former Disney animators, so it's easy to confuse this for a Disney picture like Beauty and the Beast. As a family film alone, it is pretty damn good. The artwork and animation is great, the songs are enjoyable, and the voice acting is pretty decent.

The film was such a success that it became co-director Don Bluth's comeback after a slew of mediocre to bad animated films he directed throughout most of the decade, and his highest grossing film to date. Not only that, but it warranted a direct-to-video follow up film starring the villain's sidekick, Bartok the Bat (voiced by The Simpsons' Hank Azaria in both films).

Overall, the film serves as a great choice to have playing during a family movie night, unless you're extremely picky on historical accuracy, in which case, go do something else for 97 minutes.