Anastasia is a sentimental retelling of the legend surrounding the Grand Duchess Anastasia Nicholaievna, the youngest daughter of Tsar Nicholas and Tsarina Alexandra. While the tale has long captured the imagination of the public, the film's sentiment is surprisingly subdued and effective. This is helped by the way the script occasionally mocks some Disney-style clichés that occasionally pop up in the dialogue. Only the character of Pooka, the dog who serves as Anastasia's guardian angel, tends to be a bit cloying; but this is mitigated by the fact that he largely remains in the background and doesn't speak.

The History
The public's fascination with Anastasia largely centered on the case of Anna Anderson, who surfaced in Berlin in 1920 claiming to be the lost princess. Her claim gained some credibility due to the Soviet government's cover up of the slayings of the royal family in 1918. They initially only admitted that Nicholas had been killed. The Soviet silence was prompted by political considerations, as they did not want to offend Germany, with whom they had just signed a World War I peace treaty. Alexandra was, after all, a German princess before she became a Russian tsarina. Interestingly enough, an examination of the royal family's remains unearthed in 1991 showed the remains of Anastasia and her brother, the Tsarevitch Alexei, to be missing; however, a DNA analysis of Anderson's tissues indicated she was not the Grand Duchess.

Anderson's story served as the basis for a number of books, plays and scree treatments. The most familiar are based on Guy Bolton's English-language adaptation of the Maurette play. The 1956 Fox film (which served as the vehicle for Ingrid Bergman's return to Hollywood), a 1967 Hallmark Hall of Fame TV movie (for which Lynn Fontaine came out of retirement to play the Dowager Empress), and even a musical, I, Anastasia, which was staged in Miami, are all adaptations from this source material. The current film is based more on the 1956 film version directed by Anatole Litvak, rather than the original play, though it obviously takes considerable liberties with its source material, changing it from a drama into a high flying, romantic adventure comedy. In particular, the writers latched on to the Pygmalion aspects of the older film, which can be seen in the relationship between Yul Brynner and Ingrid Bergman. Bluth's character design for Anastasia is heavily based on Audrey Hepburn, who starred in the screen version of My Fair Lady, to which he pays homage in one shot in the second half of the film.

The vagabond orphan Anastasia unknowingly wanders past a portrait of herself as a child. © Twentieth Century Fox.

Don Bluth, along with his long-time collaborator Gary Goldman, has had a checkered career, which initially generated considerable passion and enthusiasm; however, much of this enthusiasm waned among some aficionados, who felt his later films betrayed his promise of reviving the classic Disney style and techniques. While their initial feature effort, The Secret of NIHM, did not do well at the box office, their next two, done for Steven Spielberg - An American TailThe Land Before Time (co-produced by George Lucas) - went head-to-head with Disney in the mid-1980s, and lived to tell the tale. Bluth then broke with Spielberg. His subsequent efforts, made in Dublin, seemed to flounder both artistically and financially, as the animation renaissance, which he and his partners helped start, seemed to pass him by.

Thus, when Bluth and Goldman were set up as principal producer/directors at the new Fox Animation Studios in Phoenix, the buzz around Hollywood was often less than positive. But in the end, 20th Century-Fox's gamble would appear to have paid off. Bluth's success with Anastasia seems due to a strong script, a first-rate pair of songwriters in Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty (who concurrently wrote the songs for the stage version of Ragtime), and the support of animation-wise executives, many of whom were Disney veterans.