Word: anastasia
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Suffering from amnesia about her pre-Revolutionary childhood, she is raised near Petrograd as an orphan named Anya, rather than being brutally murdered by the Bolsheviks. Indeed, the Fox flick barely mentions that neither Anastasia's parents nor siblings survived the Revolution. Running into a pair of con artists--who, in Fox's twist on history, are looking for an Anastasia impostor to claim the Romanov fortune--Anya leaves cold, miserable Russia and discovers her own identity as Anastasia as everything ends up happy in Paris...
Enter Fox's spanking new Anastasia. Very roughly based on the real Anastasia Nikolaevna, Fox's young lady lives out a modern rags-to-riches Cinderella tale--whereas the real Anastasia was born in 1901 and murdered in 1918 along with the rest of her immediate family by the Bolsheviks in Yekaterinberg...
Like Disney's Pocahontas, Fox Studio's new animated release is therefore best described as a historical fantasy. A fun and beautifully illustrated film, if lacking an overarching stylistic cohesion, Anastasia is symptomatic of the problems that can arise when art and history meet...
...orgy of unsubtle Russophilia, the Fox production scarcely attempts to stick with even the broadest historical facts regarding the fate of the Romanov dynasty and Anastasia. The only part of the film that even attempts to ground itself in history is in a short opening prologue, occurring during an unmentioned First World War, one year after the Russian Revolution in 1916. Somehow, Anastasia, born in 1901, is only eight years old in 1916. With the help of a servant boy, Dmitri, Anastasia manages to escape from Rasputin and his revolutionaries, but falls off a train, hitting her head...
...even so, Anastasia would seem a particularly welcome release. Along with Dreamworks' upcoming Prince of Egypt (the story of Moses!) and Warner Brothers' Camelot, Anastasia promises to break Disney's long-held hegemony over animated features. Unfortunately, Fox has made the mistake of attempting to make a Disneyesque film better than Disney and in doing so, has made the same, crucial mistake as Disney: substituting historical fantasy for pure fiction, as in Disney's Pocahontas. With such great creative minds at their disposal, Disney and Fox opened unnecessarily problematic territory when they entered into the realm of historically inspired...