Anastasia (1997)

  Okay, I still have a lot of love for this movie especially the soundtrack but it has not held up as well as I would have liked.  It's killing me to admit that but it's true.

In 1917, the evil monk Rasputin (Christopher Lloyd) curses the Romanov family with death.  Only the Dowager Empress (Angela Lansbury) and 10-year-old Princess Anastasia (Kirsten Dunst) escape the revolution but are separated at the train station.  Anastasia is lost.  Ten years later, with the promise of a huge reward from the grieving grandmother in Paris, con men Dimitri (John Cusack) and Vlad (Kelsey Grammar) have come up with a foolproof plan to hire a girl, teach her the right things to say, and fool the empress.  Finding the right girl for the part proves daunting until Anya (Meg Ryan), an orphan with no memories of her childhood, falls into their laps.  Of course, she's the actual Romanov heir, which causes Rasputin's curse to reactivate, returning him to the land of the living in order to complete his vengeance.

Most of this movie is wonderful.  The music, the voice cast, the animation...all great.  Here are the problems:

1)  The voice cast does not match up with the singing cast.  I get it.  Bluth wanted star power.  They had to compete with Disney's yearly masterpiece any way they could.  I just wish there wasn't such a huge discrepancy between the main actors' voices and the singers.  It's even more glaring because you have Angela Lansbury, Bernadette Peters, and Kelsey Grammar doing all their own singing.  Was it really so impossible to find leading actors with Broadway training?  You have Lacey Chabert, another young up-and-coming actress, doing the singing voice of Young Anastasia.  Did you honestly need to also have Kirsten Dunst to speak the four lines of dialogue for that character?

2)  The bits of CGI.  There are a couple of objects that were done in CGI instead of hand-drawn animation and boy, can you tell.  The music box that ends up being a plot point is so jarringly rendered that it practically leaps out at you which sucks because the rest of the film is so beautifully done.  It was just the limitations of the technology at the time but it dooms the film from being truly timeless.

3)  "Based on a true story."  Now that's just criminally misleading.  The film obviously couldn't have known at the time it was made but Anastasia Romanov's body was found and ID'd with DNA in 2007 in a mass grave along with the rest of her family.  The story of the film is very loosely based on a woman named Anna Anderson, a German mental patient who claimed to be the Grand Duchess Anastasia in the late 1920s and capitalized on the notoriety, even though most of the real Anastasia's relatives denounced her as a fraud.  Saying this movie is "based on a true story" is like saying that JFK was killed by aliens because he was too close to discovering their secret base on the moon.  It might get the names right but that's about as close to truth as it gets.

And yet, like I said at the top, I love this movie.  I hadn't seen it in several years and I was disappointed, sure, but not enough to make me disown it.  You have to accept it warts and all but I promise it's worth it.