Anastasia (1997 film)

Anastasia is a 1997 American animated musical historical fantasy film produced and directed by Don Bluth and Gary Goldman from a screenplay by the writing teams of Susan Gauthier and Bruce Graham, and Bob Tzudiker and Noni White, and based on a story adaptation by Eric Tuchman. It features songs written by Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens and a musical score composed and conducted by David Newman. The film stars the voices of Meg Ryan, John Cusack, Kelsey Grammer, Christopher Lloyd, Hank Azaria, Bernadette Peters, Kirsten Dunst, and Angela Lansbury. The film shares its plot with the 1956 film Anastasia, which in turn was based on a play by Marcelle Maurette. Unlike those treatments, this version adds Grigori Rasputin as the main antagonist.
Anastasia was the first 20th Century Fox animated feature to be produced by its own animation division, 20th Century Fox Animation, through its subsidiary Fox Animation Studios. The film premiered at the Ziegfeld Theater in New York City on November 14, 1997, and was released in the United States on November 21. The film received generally positive reviews from critics, who praised the animation, voice performances, and soundtrack, though it attracted criticism from some historians for its fantastical retelling of the Grand Duchess. Anastasia grossed $140 million worldwide, making it the most profitable film from Bluth and Fox Animation Studios. It received nominations for several awards, including for Best Original Song ("Journey to the Past") and Best Original Musical or Comedy Score at the 70th Academy Awards.
The success of Anastasia spawned various adaptations of the film into other media, including a direct-to-video spin-off film in 1999 and a stage musical in 2016.
In 1916, at a ball celebrating the Romanov Tricentennial, Dowager Empress Maria “Marie” Romanov, gives a music box as well as a pendant that says "Together in Paris" to Grand Duchess Anastasia Romanov, her youngest granddaughter. Grigori Rasputin, the Romanovs’ former royal advisor who was exiled for treason, interrupts the ball and warns Tsar Nicholas II that his family will die within a fortnight. Having sold his soul in exchange for a powerful reliquary, he uses his newfound dark powers to cause dissent among the people, which ignites the Russian Revolution. As Bolsheviks storm the palace, servant boy Dimitri directs Maria and Anastasia through a secret passageway and pockets Anastasia's music box. Rasputin confronts them outside on the frozen Little Nevka River but drowns underneath the ice. Maria escapes aboard a moving train, but Anastasia falls and hits her head on the platform, consequently developing amnesia.
Ten years later, Russia is now the Soviet Union, and rumors in Saint Petersburg abound that Anastasia may have escaped her family's murder, so Marie offers 10 million roubles for her return. Now a conman, Dimitri and his assistant Vladimir plot to obtain the reward with an imposter. The actual Anastasia, now going by "Anya", leaves the orphanage where she has lived since developing amnesia and, accompanied by a stray puppy she adopts and names Pooka, resolves to head for Paris to rediscover her family, but finds herself unable to depart without an exit visa. She encounters Dimitri at the abandoned palace, where, impressed by her resemblance to the "real" Anastasia, he and Vlad invite her to Paris and convince her of their plot to reunite her with her grandmother, unaware of her true identity.
Witnessing the meeting, Rasputin's albino bat, Bartok, notices the reliquary revived by Anya's presence. It drags him down to limbo, where the undead Rasputin, enraged upon hearing that Anastasia survived, sends demonic minions from the reliquary to kill Anya. The minions attempt to sabotage the trio's train as they leave Leningrad by overheating the boiler of the train engine and later destroying a bridge, before eventually trying to lure Anya into sleepwalking off a ship headed from Germany to France. The trio unwittingly foil the attempts, forcing Rasputin to pursue Anya himself.
As Dimitri and Vladimir reteach Anya about court etiquette and her family's history, she and Dimitri fall in love. The trio finally arrive in Paris and visit Maria, who has lost all hope of reuniting with her granddaughter after facing numerous impostors. Despite this, Maria's first cousin and lady-in-waiting, Sophie, quizzes Anya to confirm her identity. Though she gives correct rehearsed answers, Dimitri realizes Anya is the real Anastasia when she vaguely recalls how he had helped her and Maria escape the palace. Sophie, also convinced, arranges a meeting with Maria at the Palais Garnier. There, Dimitri tries to get Maria to see Anya, but she declines, having heard of Dimitri's scheme. After Anya overhears the conversation and furiously departs, Dimitri abducts Maria in her car, presenting Anastasia's music box to coax her into seeing Anya. During their conversation, Anya recognizes the music box and recalls the associated lullaby. Finally recognizing Anya as the true Anastasia, Maria joyfully reunites with her granddaughter.
Maria offers Dimitri the reward money the next day, but Dimitri declines, planning to return to the Soviet Union and the Russian SFSR. At the celebration for her return, Maria informs Anya of Dimitri's gesture, leaving her torn between staying with Maria or going with him. Upon noticing Pooka escape to the garden maze, Anya pursues him to the Pont Alexandre III, where Rasputin attacks her, while Bartok abandons Rasputin. Dimitri returns to save Anya but is knocked unconscious by a Pegasus statue enchanted by Rasputin. She eventually manages to get hold of and smash the reliquary, causing the minions to turn on and destroy Rasputin.
Anya and Dimitri elope, with her choosing to forgo her royal heritage for love, greatly pleasing Maria, who declares it a "perfect beginning" for the pair. Anya sends a farewell letter to Maria and Sophie, promising to visit them. Meanwhile, Bartok falls in love with a female bat and briefly breaks the fourth wall to bid the audience goodbye.
Victoria Clark, Billy Porter, Patrick Quinn, J. K. Simmons, and Lillias White were among the ensemble and character voices.
In May 1994, Don Bluth and Gary Goldman had signed a long-term deal to produce animated features with 20th Century Fox, with the studio channeling more than $100 million in constructing a new animation studio. They selected Phoenix, Arizona, for the location of Fox Animation Studios because the state offered the company about $1 million in job training funds and low-interest loans for the state-of-the-art digital animation equipment. It was staffed with 300 artists and technicians, a third of whom worked with Bluth and Goldman in Dublin, Ireland, for Sullivan Bluth Studios. For their first project, the studio insisted they select one out of a dozen existing properties which they owned where Bluth and Goldman suggested adapting The King and I and My Fair Lady, though Bluth and Goldman said it would be impossible to improve on Audrey Hepburn's performance and Lerner and Loewe's score. Following several story suggestions, the idea to adapt Anastasia (1956) originated from Fox Filmed Entertainment CEO Bill Mechanic. They later adapted story elements from Pygmalion with the peasant Anya being molded into a regal woman.
Early into production, Bluth and Goldman began researching the actual events through enlisting former CIA agents stationed in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Around this same time, screenwriter Eric Tuchman had written a script. Eventually, Bluth and Goldman decided the history of Anastasia and the Romanov dynasty was too dark for their film. In 1995, Bruce Graham and Susan Gauthier reworked Tuchman's script into a light-hearted romantic comedy. When Graham and Gauthier moved onto other projects, the husband-and-wife screenwriting team Bob Tzudiker and Noni White were hired for additional rewrites. Actress Carrie Fisher also made uncredited rewrites of the film, particularly the scene in which Anya leaves the orphanage for Paris.
For the villains, Bluth also did not take into consideration depicting Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks, and initially toyed with the idea of a police chief with a vendetta against Anastasia (an idea which the musical adaptation revived in the form of Gleb Vaganov). Instead, they decided to have Grigori Rasputin as the villain with Goldman explaining it was because of "all the different things they did to try to destroy Rasputin and what a horrible man he really was, the more it seemed appetizing to make him the villain". In reality, Rasputin was already dead when the Romanovs were assassinated. In addition to this, Bluth created the idea for Bartok, the albino bat, as a sidekick for Rasputin: "I just thought the villain had to have a comic sidekick, just to let everyone know that it was all right to laugh. A bat seemed a natural friend for Rasputin. Making him a white bat came later – just to make him different". Composers Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens recalled being at the Au Bon Pain in New York City where Rasputin and Bartok were pitched. They were dismayed at the decision to go down a historically inaccurate route; they made their stage musical adaption "more sophisticated, more far-reaching, more political" to encompass their original vision.
Bluth stated that Meg Ryan was his first and only choice for the title character, but Ryan was indecisive about accepting the role due to its dark historical events. To persuade her, the animation team took an audio clip of Annie Reed from Sleepless in Seattle and created an animation reel based on it which was screened for her following an invitation to the studio. Ryan later accepted the role; in her words "I was blown away that they did that". Before Ryan was cast, Broadway singer and actress Liz Callaway was brought in to record several demos of the songs hoping to land a job in background vocals, but the demos were liked well enough by the songwriters that they were ultimately used in the final film.
After he was cast, John Cusack openly admitted that he couldn't sing; his singing duties were performed by Jonathan Dokuchitz. Goldman had commented that originally, as with the rest of the cast, they were going to have Ryan record her lines separately from the others, with Bluth reading the lines of the other characters to her. However, after Ryan and the directors were finding the method to be too challenging when her character was paired with Dimitri, she and Cusack recorded the dialogue of their characters together, with Goldman noting that "it made a huge difference".
Peter O'Toole was considered for the role of Rasputin, but Christopher Lloyd was hired because of his popularity from the Back to the Future trilogy. Bartok was initially written for Woody Allen, but the studio was reluctant to hire him following revelations of his relationship with his ex-partner Mia Farrow's adoptive daughter, Soon-Yi Previn. Martin Short was also considered, but Hank Azaria won the role ten minutes into his audition.
The film score was composed, co-orchestrated, and conducted by David Newman, whose father, Alfred Newman, composed the score of the 1956 film of the same name. The songs, of which "Journey to the Past" was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song, were written by Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty. The first song they wrote for the project was "Once Upon a December"; it was written during a heatwave "so [they were] sweating and writing winter imagery". The film's soundtrack was released in CD and audio cassette format on October 28, 1997.
20th Century Fox scheduled for Anastasia to be released on November 21, 1997, notably a week after the re-release of Disney's The Little Mermaid. Disney claimed it had long-planned for the re-release to coincide with a consumer products campaign leading into Christmas and the film's home video release in March 1998, as well continue the tradition of re-releasing their animated films within a seven-to-eight year interval. In addition to this, Disney would release several competing family films including Flubber on the following weekend, as well as a double feature of George of the Jungle and Hercules. To avoid branding confusion, Disney banned television advertisements for Anastasia from being aired on the ABC program The Wonderful World of Disney.
Commenting on the studios' fierce competition, Disney spokesman John Dreyer brushed off allegations of studio rivalry, claiming: "We always re-release our movies around holiday periods". However, Fox executives refused to believe Dreyer's statement with Bill Mechanic responding that "it's a deliberate attempt to be a bully, to kick sand in our face. They can't be trying to maximize their own business; the amount they're spending on advertising is ridiculous... It's a concentrated effort to keep our film from fulfilling its potential".
Nonetheless, the film has been confused to have been made by Walt Disney Animation Studios due to similar style. This is not helped by the fact that 20th Century Fox, the film's primary distributor, was eventually purchased by the Walt Disney Company in 2019, thus adding the film to the studio's library and increasing confusion even more.
Anastasia was accompanied by a marketing campaign of more than $50 million with promotional sponsors from Burger King, Dole Food Company, Hershey, Chesebrough-Ponds, Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, Shell Oil, and the 1997 U.S. Figure Skating Championships. Overall, the marketing costs exceeded that of Independence Day by more than 35 percent. For merchandising, Fox selected Galoob to license dolls based on Anastasia. Many storybooks adapted from the film were released by Little Golden Books. In August 1997, the SeaWorld theme parks in San Diego and Orlando featured a 40-foot-long, 20-foot-high inflatable playground for children called "Anastasia's Kingdom".
After the acquisition of 21st Century Fox by Disney, in December 2022 Disney released its first merchandise based on the film in the form of a mug to honor its 25th anniversary.
On April 28, 1998, April 6, 1999 and November 16, 1999, Anastasia was released on VHS, LaserDisc and DVD respectively and sold eight million units. The film was first rereleased on February 19, 2002 as part of the Fox Family Features lineup alongside Thumbelina and FernGully: The Last Rainforest. The film was again rereleased on a two-disc "Family Fun Edition" DVD with the film in its original theatrical 2.35:1 widescreen format on March 28, 2006. The first disc featured an optional audio commentary from directors/writers Bluth and Goldman, and additional bonus material. The second included a making-of documentary, music video and making-of featurette of Aaliyah's "Journey to the Past", and additional bonus content. The film was released on Blu-ray on March 22, 2011; this included Bartok the Magnificent in the special features.
Following Disney's acquisition of 20th Century Fox on March 20, 2019, Anastasia became available on Disney+. In the U.S., it was removed from Disney+ on March 1, 2022, and transferred to Starz on March 18; contrary to popular belief, the film's disappearance bears no connection to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine (Disney had suspended theatrical releases in Russia such as the then-upcoming Turning Red, which led to confusion that Anastasia's withdrawal was related). Anastasia eventually returned to Disney+ on June 2, 2023.
Anastasia received mostly positive reviews from critics. Review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a score of 83% based on 58 reviews and an average rating of 7.1/10. The website's consensus reads: "Beautiful animation, an affable take on Russian history, and strong voice performances make Anastasia a winning first film from Fox Animation Studios". On Metacritic, the film has a score of 61 out of 100 based on 19 reviews, indicating "generally favorable reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A−" on an A+ to F scale.
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times awarded the film three-and-a-half out of four stars, praising "the quality of the story" and writing the result as entertaining and sometimes exciting. Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune gave Anastasia three stars, calling the lead character "pretty and charming" but criticized the film for a lack of historical accuracy. Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times wrote: "Though originality is not one of its accomplishments, Anastasia is generally pleasant, serviceable and eager to please. And any film that echoes the landscape of Doctor Zhivago is hard to dislike for too long". Todd McCarthy of Variety noted the film was "dazzlingly colorful", but that "all the ingredients thrown into the pot don't congeal entirely congenially, and the artistic touch applied doesn't allow the whole to become more than the sum of its various, but invariably familiar, elements". Margaret McGurk, reviewing for The Cincinnati Enquirer, described the film as "charming" and "entertaining", and calling Anastasia as a tasty tale about a fairy-tale princess. Lisa Osbourne of Boxoffice called the film "pure family entertainment". Awarding the film three out of five stars, Empire's Philip Thomas wrote that it has historical inaccuracies, but is charming.
Several critics have positively compared Anastasia and the Disney films released during the Disney Renaissance, with similar styles of story and animation. Marjorie Baumgarten of The Austin Chronicle awarded the film three out of five stars. Baumgarten wrote that Anastasia "may not beat Disney at its own game, but it sure won't be for lack of trying. ... [t]his sumptuous-looking film clearly spared no expense in its visual rendering; its optical flourishes and attention to detail aim for the Disney gold standard and, for the most part, come pretty darn close". The Phoenix's Jeffrey Gantz jokingly stated: "[I]f imitation is indeed the sincerest form of flattery, then the folks at Disney should feel royally complimented by Twentieth Century Fox's new animated feature about Tsar Nicholas II's youngest daughter". Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly wrote that Fox has a beautifully animated musical that can challenge Disney's peer, but also said that Anastasia has inferior animation style compared to Disney's and lacks its magic.
Critical reception in Russia was also mostly positive aside from artistic liberties with Russian history. Gemini Films, the Russian distributor of Anastasia, stressed the fact that the story was "not history", but rather "a fairy tale set against the background of real Russian events" in the film's Russian marketing campaign so that its Russian audience would not view it as a historical film. As a result, many Russians praised the film for its art and storytelling and saw it as not a piece of history but another Western import to be enjoyed.
Some Russian Orthodox Christians found Anastasia to be an offensive depiction of the Grand Duchess, who was canonized as a new martyr in 1981 by the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia. Many historians echoed their sentiments, criticizing the film as a sanitized, sugar-coated reworking of the story of the Czar's youngest daughter. Its filmmakers acknowledged the fact that "Anastasia uses history only as a starting point", but others complained that the film would provide its audience with misleading ideas about Russian history, which, according to the author and historian Suzanne Massie, has been falsified for so many years. Similarly, the amateur historian Bob Atchison said that Anastasia was akin to someone making a film in which Anne Frank "moves to Orlando and opens a crocodile farm with a guy named Mort".
Some of Anastasia's contemporary relatives also said that the film was distasteful, but most Romanovs have come to accept the "repeated exploitation of Anastasia's romantic tale... with equanimity".
A limited release of Anastasia at the Ziegfeld Theatre in New York City on the weekend of November 14, 1997, grossed $120,541. The following weekend, the wide release of Anastasia in the United States earned $14.1 million, ranking second behind Mortal Kombat Annihilation. By the end of its theatrical run, Anastasia had grossed $58.4 million in the United States and Canada and $81.4 million internationally. The worldwide gross totaled up to about $139.8 million, making it Don Bluth's highest-grossing film to date and beating out his next highest-grossing film, An American Tail, by about $55 million. This was Don Bluth's first financially successful film since All Dogs Go to Heaven.
The film was nominated for two Academy Awards, for Best Original Musical or Comedy Score and Best Original Song (for "Journey to the Past"). The R&B singer Aaliyah performed the pop version at the ceremony.
Anastasia on Ice is a licensed adaptation produced by Feld Entertainment's Ice Follies that ran from at least 1998 to 1999.
In 1999, a direct-to-video standalone spin-off titled Bartok the Magnificent was released which focuses on the character of Bartok.
Hartford Stage developed a stage production of Anastasia, with the book by Terrence McNally, lyrics by Lynn Ahrens, music by Stephen Flaherty and directed by Darko Tresnjak. The production ran from May 13 through June 19, 2016.
It is an original musical combining both the 1956 Arthur Laurents film and the 1997 animated film. The musical features six songs from the animated film and 16 new songs. Additionally, there have been some newly rewritten characters including Checkist secret police officer Gleb Vaganov (in the place of Rasputin), and Lily, who has been renamed in the place of Sophie. McNally said: "This is a stage version for a modern theatre audience... The libretto's 'a blend' of old and new... There are characters in the musical that appear in neither the cartoon nor the Ingrid Bergman version".
The Hartford production featured Christy Altomare as Anastasia / Anya, Derek Klena as Dimitri, Mary Beth Peil as The Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna, Manoel Felciano as Gleb Vaganov, John Bolton as Vladimir, Caroline O'Connor as Lily, and Nicole Scimeca as Young Anastasia. The musical transferred to Broadway with much of the original Hartford cast, opening on April 24, 2017, at the Broadhurst Theater to mixed reviews.