Word: anastasias
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...love story would work just fine standing alone. Meg Ryan does a magnificent job breathing life into Anastasia, giving the starry-eyed princess the touch of quirkiness that she needs to be believable. But there is little character development for the heroine--all her emotions are more asserted than dramatized...
Angela Lansbury, similarly, uses her voice to infuse the dowager, Anastasia's grandmother, with remarkable realism. We feel her pain as each impostor pretending to be Anastasia appears before her--the animation of her facial expressions coalesce with Lansbury's multifaceted voice to provide the most revealing portrayal of character...
...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...