Word: disneyized
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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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
Anastasia and Pocahontas, however, fail to fall within the basic parameters of historical dialogues on their subject. Commenting on Pocahontas, Douglas B. Rand '98, one of Harvard's veteran Disney watchdogs and self-styled Disneyologist, has observed, "Pocahontas is not even revisionist history. It is not even debating the legitimacy of our current historical paradigm, because Disney is not even entering the realm of debate. Whereas we can have a scholarly discourse on what lens we use to view reality, Disney is going so far afield that they are concocting their own reality...