(4 of 5)
Well, Quasimodo wasn't alive at the end of Victor Hugo's Hunchback, and Pocahontas wasn't all that much of a babe, and DNA tests proved that the woman widely believed to be Anastasia was not. But animated movies aren't built for lectures; they are supposed to move, and move people. Anastasia comes close to doing that with its coming-of-age tale of the orphan who could be a princess.
Ten years after the Rasputinolution, Anya (Meg Ryan) is 18 and alone. She meets Dimitri (John Cusack), a onetime palace servant with a 10 million-ruble scheme: to take a suitable young woman to Paris, persuade Marie that the girl is Anastasia and pocket the reward money. The usual complications ensue--boy hates girl, boy loves girl, girl keeps tripping annoyingly over scarf, dead monk tries to kill girl--accompanied by lilting melodies.
The extensive rotoscoping (using live-action scenes as the basis for the artists' sketches) lends a stiffness to some of the animation; kids may well complain, "Too many humans!" But there are lovely memory and nightmare scenes that help create a wistful, trystful, tristeful mood. These are lovers who, to win a heart, must renounce their dreams. If there are any lovelorn six-year-olds out there, this is the movie for them.
There probably aren't, so what is Anastasia's target audience? "We wanted our story to appeal to adults," says Mechanic, "particularly women who are most likely to take their kids to the movies." To keep Bluth from wandering too far into his trademark whimsy, the Fox creative brass kept tight reins on script and character development. They also insisted that he and Goldman give up their old-fashioned Rostrum camera and use Silicon Graphics computers in the studio Fox built for them in Phoenix. Says Goldman: "They pulled Don and me into the 21st century, kicking and screaming."
The storytelling technique, though, is pure 20th century--1937, to be exact, when a young woman, surrounded by funny dwarfs, faced up to an evil sorcerer, cheated death and found her royal destiny. Snow White was a family film, but so were most movies, and it was a musical when perhaps a third of all films had songs. Now there's only a niche family market and virtually no other films are musicals, but the format is unaltered. That was then, and this is then too.
In the time of the niche market, it's both presumptuous and enthralling for animators to try making a movie that touches everyone. That is the glory and the limitation of the Disney-style cartoon. "I'd like animated features to venture into adult territory," says John Canemaker, a leading historian of the form. "Why not do an animated Sweeney Todd? Or head in a totally different direction? Very few animated features have tried something original and unique, often with mixed results: the 1954 version of Animal Farm, the Beatles' Yellow Submarine, the X-rated Fritz the Cat. But most studios will probably try emulating Disney's success."