Anastasia

Anastasia

Hey, remember that Fox animated movie when they were trying to get into the field of more "Disney princes" style characters? Yeah.. You may remember this..



I have to admit that I always hated this move because it depicts Soviet people as some sort of fat monsters.

In 1916, Tsar Nicholas II hosts a ball at the Catherine Palace to celebrate the Romanov tricentennial. At the ball, his mother, the Dowager Empress Marie Feodorovna (Angela Lansbury), gives the eight-year-old Grand Duchess Anastasia (Kirsten Dunst) a music box and a necklace reading “Together in Paris” to ease her favorite granddaughter’s loneliness while she is away in Paris. The ball is suddenly interrupted by the arrival of Grigori Rasputin (Christopher Lloyd), a power-mad sorcerer who was banished from the palace by the Tsar. Rasputin sells his soul in order to cast a curse on the Imperial family that sparks a revolution as revenge.

In the film there's an entire song and dance number where a bunch of workers and peasants talk about how horrible life is in the new Soviet Union and how they all long to feel the gentle embrace of the Tsar again.

I'm curious to know if the movie was made before or after that lady in Virginia who claimed to be Anastasia was proven to be just some crazy cat lady. Because I feel like this movie ended with the suggestion that the girl wasn't shot and left in a ditch outside the winter palace and that's why nobody talks about it anymore.

Not to mention the revolution scenes in the film being all sorts of comedy levels of fucked up. And yet many Russians praised the film for its art and storytelling and saw it as "not so much a piece of history, but another Western import to be consumed and enjoyed." Which you have to admit is the real fucked up part of it. We can't even make a RED DAWN 2 with Chinese people as the imperial force without getting shit for it.

Sure, they make old Rasputin look evil, but did you know that he helped the hemophiliac imperial prince by getting his doctors to stop giving him aspirin since it made clotting harder to achieve as it's a blood thinner. Not to mention that his opposition to the war might have saved the regime if some young brash and stupid nobles hadn't killed him and bragged like idiots about how he was tougher than most demons to kill.

You know, this movie is actually a really good portrayal of a turbulent period in Russian history. For example, did you know that Rasputin was a supernatural wizard with a talking bat? The more you know. The talking bat was so popular that it got his own sequel movie as well.