Word: anastasia
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...film's basic structure, Anastasia tries its best to mimic the Disney style. Here, it does astonishingly well, and sometimes even surpasses its predecessor. The musical numbers, in particular, are startlingly good. "Journey to the Past," the show-stopping solo for Anastasia, will linger in your head for days as will Rasputin's personal ode to evil...
...Since the revolution, our lives have been so gray." The staging itself doesn't have any delusions about its purpose: hundreds of Russian peasants drop their work, disperse from their bread line and take up synchronized folk dancing in one of the more laughable spectacles of the film. Yet Anastasia--unlike Pocahontas, for example--makes no pretense about adhering to history, and we accept it all in good...
...masterpiece of Anastasia is the brilliant "Once Upon a December," which beats anything we have seen in recent Disney efforts. Anastasia is wandering around the old palace, beginning to have flashbacks about her regal past. She begins her solo and the audience settles back in their chairs, expecting a cheesy introspective. Suddenly, however, the cliche explodes: ghosts emerge from every corner of the palace, descend onto the ballroom floor and join in a moving and luminous spectacle...
...brief moment, we realize the potential of Anastasia and animated features to transcend the boundaries of reality and create an inspiring emotional fantasy--something we haven't seen in a while. As an audience, we don't particularly care which company provides such powerful entertainment. But Fox here has proven its mettle, giving characters we can empathize with in a fantasy where we do more than just chuckle at some genie's pop references...
Aside from the manner of her death, Anastasia Nikolaevna Romanova, Grand Duchess of Russia, should have no particular reason to stand out in the history of European royalty. But her extraordinary murder, combined with a string of confusing propaganda and poorly conducted investigations, opened the door for numerous impostors seeking to lay claim to the Romanov name and fortune. Indeed, Anna Anderson, as the most famous of these impostors came to be known, kept up her charade for years, through the press and even the German court system, until her death...