Anastasia was a sort of landmark picture, in its own ironic way. It was a production that showed you what animation really could be, and simultaneous;y demonstrated why it probably wouldn't happen in the foreseeable future. The story of Anastasia (as it was laid out in the 1950's play) is made beautifully, brilliantly, thrillingly. Grafted onto it, in an all-too-obvious and sadly misguided commercial strategy, is the bizarre subplot of the supervillain Rasputin and his sidekick, the albino bat Bartok. The movie-studio logic that instigated this bit of narrative frankensteining is patently obvious:
animation means child audience children need good and evil to root for Evil needs a sidekick to talk about his evilness with Merchandising needs a character to sell to the boys (Bartok) or it'll just be a girl-flick and we'll lose half the money.
Alas. Movie studios have to chasae a buck, they need it to keep making movies. Sometimes, they do it intelligently and great film-making results. This is the other way they pursue it, studio logic at its most craven and cowardly. The entire Rasputin-Bartok aspect of the movie is godawful. The notion that Bartok might somehow be appealing is appalling. The integration of the two aspects of the movie is virtually non-existent. Large animation projects are generally executed by several different teams working concurrently, and integrating the the different segments with some stylistic consistency is part of the art of the supervising team. It is utterly absent here. In a way, that's a good thing, because it keeps the "bad movie" from tainting the "good movie."
But the message is all too clear: "we can't just make a good drama or romance in animated form, because we can't trust anyone over the age of 9 to come to an animated film. So if it's animation, we have to pander to children." And in their eagerness to pander, they made the supposedly kid-friendly part of the film so bad it's insulting to any audience of any age.
Which is a real pity, because the Anastasia story, the real one, is an excellent movie that advanced the art of animated narrative.
animation means child audience children need good and evil to root for Evil needs a sidekick to talk about his evilness with Merchandising needs a character to sell to the boys (Bartok) or it'll just be a girl-flick and we'll lose half the money.
Alas. Movie studios have to chasae a buck, they need it to keep making movies. Sometimes, they do it intelligently and great film-making results. This is the other way they pursue it, studio logic at its most craven and cowardly. The entire Rasputin-Bartok aspect of the movie is godawful. The notion that Bartok might somehow be appealing is appalling. The integration of the two aspects of the movie is virtually non-existent. Large animation projects are generally executed by several different teams working concurrently, and integrating the the different segments with some stylistic consistency is part of the art of the supervising team. It is utterly absent here. In a way, that's a good thing, because it keeps the "bad movie" from tainting the "good movie."
But the message is all too clear: "we can't just make a good drama or romance in animated form, because we can't trust anyone over the age of 9 to come to an animated film. So if it's animation, we have to pander to children." And in their eagerness to pander, they made the supposedly kid-friendly part of the film so bad it's insulting to any audience of any age.
Which is a real pity, because the Anastasia story, the real one, is an excellent movie that advanced the art of animated narrative.