VA - Dusty Fingers - The Complete Collection 1997 - 2008
Gualberto Estrada
So Anya and the Grand Duchess meet, and it all works out in the end because Anya has the key (her pendant) and the Grand Duchess has the music box, handed off to her by Dimitri. Dimitri watches from outside and does that cape-shrug thing I mentioned and happy endings for everyone except Dimitri!
Anya remembers who he is as Rasputin ices over the bridge, or something. And then his green gremlins attack her and the bat is finally like man, this is too much and leaves. Rasputin breaks the bridge to dump Anya into the river, but Dimitri shows up in time to keep her from falling in. Rasputin magics him to the back of a winged horse statue, which comes to life in dodgy CG and attacks him. Dimitri fights the GIANT STONE HORSE THAT CAN FLY with a piece of rebar and gets knocked out, but points for effort. Rasputin tries to push Anya into the river himself, but she tackles him and wrestles the reliquary off him. It rolls away. Pooka grabs it and Anya smashes it with her heeled shoe. Love it.
I know I promised Ladyhawke last time! Alas, my DVD is region 1; it\u2019s not on any of our streaming services (WTF?) and my new region 2 copy only just popped through the mail slot on Tuesday. So, because I mentioned Anastasia in a previous essay, I decided to indulge myself and run it through the M&M machine instead.
What even is this movie? The concept isn\u2019t so far-feched, I guess; it\u2019s certainly not the first Anastasia film ever made. But the execution. The decisions. The zombie wizard. The incredibly hot cartoon dude. I just don\u2019t know. But I sure like it.
We open with some CG that looked a little suspect even in 1997. It\u2019s a music box, and Angela Lansbury is narrating about how great life was in 1916, in Russia. Gorgeous palaces, big parties, fun fun fun! Yes, this is the first example of many of this film\u2019s tenuous relationship to, you know, historical fact. But hell, Russia in 1916 was probably pretty fun if you were the Tsar\u2019s mother.
So, we\u2019re in the midst of a party, celebrating the 300th anniversary of the Romanov family\u2019s tenure on the throne, and Anastasia, about eight, runs up to Grandmama and hands her a drawing of one of her sisters. (Which is based on a real drawing by the real Anastasia, because that is 110% how this movie rolls.) Meanwhile, a kid who is clearly very much not on the official invite list runs around in the background eating an apple. Grandmama gives Anastasia the music box and the key to open it, which is engraved \u2018together in Paris\u2019. Grandma sings the music box song. Someone grabs the scruffy kid.
BUT PLOT. All of a sudden Rasputin dramas himself into the party, Maleficent-style. He curses Tsar Nicholas II and then\u2026 uh, sells his soul \u2018for the power to destroy\u2019 the Romanovs and, oh hey, THIS IS WHY THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION HAPPENED.
This movie sort of slides uneasily past hundreds of years of horrific living conditions for an entire country of people and instead, \u2018the spark of unhappiness in our country\u2019 is caused by\u2026 little green monsters that Rasputin raises. There are some Communists later, and a joke about the colour red, but mostly this film just pretends that magic caused the Russian Revolution and let\u2019s just not think about the rest of it.
Back to the palace. Everyone\u2019s trying to flee but Anastasia has to run back to her room to grab her music box. Happily, scruffy kitchen boy helps Anastasia and her grandmother escape through a secret passage, even though she still leaves her music box behind. (The kid grabs it.) A white bat voiced by Hank Azaria narcs on them to Rasputin, who gives chase but falls through a hole in some ice, and the white bat is left with Rasputin\u2019s magical glowing reliquary as Anastasia and Grandma run off. But\u2026 somehow, Grandma gets on a train and Anastasia doesn\u2019t. She falls and hits her head and is knocked unconscious.
Somehow, we\u2019re left to understand that the rest of Anastasia\u2019s family is also dead, though its never explicitly stated. \u2018And my beloved Anastasia\u2026 I never saw her again,\u2019 Grandma says sadly, as we zoom in on a portrait of the royal family. AND THEN we get JOYFUL HAPPY MUSICAL MUSIC as the title opens up before us. Because I guess we\u2019re done with the sort of retelling of actual history (which is horrific and bloody) and moving on to the FUN HAPPY POST-REVOLUTION MUSICAL LOVE-STORY. With zombies!
We open by sweeping through snowy post-revolution Leningrad\u2026 I mean, St Petersburg, because that\u2019s what it\u2019s still called because Communism doesn\u2019t exist in this film, and we\u2019re about to get a giant happy dance number. Also it\u2019s ten years later. So, everyone sings about how miserable their lives are but hey, they love gossip, and the best new gossip is that Anastasia is still alive. Oooh, just saw a Communist soldier on a horse. He looks mad. Probably because people are calling it St Petersburg. We follow an older guy with a cool hat as he runs around St Petersburg, and then\u2026 oh shit, the hottest cartoon guy this side of Li Shang from Mulan joins him. OH HAI THERE DIMITRI. They\u2019re con-men and they sing about their con: they\u2019re going to find a girl who looks like Anastasia, take her to Grandma in Paris, get the reward, and live happily somewhere besides Russia. Also Dimitri is the scruffy kitchen boy and he has Anastasia\u2019s music box.
So, one of the things I really, really like about this utterly bonkers film is the fact that it delights in being an old-school musical, but an animated one. So the entire cast drops everything to sing and dance as the camera pans up and around the set, which is some proper old-school musical movie magic. In the 1990s, musicals like these simply didn\u2019t exist. Not even Disney committed to the old fashioned musical spectacle the way this film does. This is a musical number in the most wonderful, insane sense of the word: it\u2019s immense, it\u2019s over the top, it involves everyone, and it\u2019s absolutely hugely stupidly joyful.
Anyway! We open up on an orphanage and meet our heroine, now an eighteen-year-old dressed in rags. Her name is Anya, and she has no memory of her past, we learn from Madam Mim, I mean, the Orphanage Lady. Anya\u2019s voiced by Meg Ryan, America\u2019s 1990s sweetheart (pace Julia Roberts). Anyway, her choice is: go work in a fish factory or strike out and find out what her pendant means. It reads \u2018together in Paris\u2019, you\u2019ll recall, because it\u2019s the key to the missing music box. She sings an \u2018I Want\u2019 song, meets a small dog named Pooka, and heads off to St Petersburg to buy a ticket to Paris. Along the way, she pulls off her hat and we\u2019re introduced to one of this film\u2019s enduring mysteries: Anya\u2019s hair. Here it\u2019s short, and in the second half of the film it\u2019s waist-length, and I think it\u2019s meant to be up in a messy knot in the first half of the film, but who the fuck knows.
I\u2019ve already mentioned how old-school this film is in many ways; another way is this. It\u2019s rotoscoped, which is an old-fashioned animation technique whereby actors are filmed doing what the animated characters are going to do, and then that film is traced over to create the animations. All the old studios did it, but Bluth (who cut his teeth at Disney, which is why his films all looks like 70s/80s Disney films) had a way of doing it that incorporated the smoothness of Disney animation with the almost uncanny naturalism of Ralph Bakshi\u2019s films. Nowhere is that more beautifully on display than in this film, where the animated characters do strange, unnecessary little things that a human in a live-action film would do, but which are absolutely extraneous in an animated film, where literally every frame represents hours and dollars worth of work. Anya\u2019s \u2018I want\u2019 song ends with her overlooking St Petersburg and giving a little hitch to her body as she concludes her final note; later, her hair will get caught on her necklace, or Dimitri will give a funny little shrug in his cape \u2013 these are things a human actor would do unthinkingly in a live-action film, but which rarely translate to the screen in animated films\u2026 except for this one.
Anya can\u2019t buy a ticket to Paris because she doesn\u2019t have an exit visa but, helpfully, the old lady in line behind her tells her to go talk to Dimitri at the palace. Cue Dimitri and Vladimir (voiced by John Cusack and Kelsey Grammer, btw), concluding their unsuccessful auditions for an Anastasia look-alike (say it with me: Grandma, it\u2019s me. Anastasia.) and then returning to the palace.
It\u2019s the former Winter Palace, and it\u2019s still full of valuables and furniture and stuff. Let\u2019s not think too hard about that. Anya wanders around with a strange sense of d\u00E9j\u00E0 vu, and (because this is a musical) sings a song about her feelings, which leads to a lovely sequence where the art on the walls bursts into life and joins her on the dance floor. This was a really fun scene to see on the big screen.
Dimitri catches her, and then notices how much she looks like the child Anastasia, and he and Vladimir exchange some looks and wiggle their eyebrows at each other as Dimitri circles her, biting his thumb, which is weirdly, and I\u2019m so sorry about this, super hot. Dimitri learns that Anya has no memory of her life before ten years ago, and convinces her that she might be Anastasia, and since they\u2019re all going to Paris anyway\u2026 why not come along and meet the Grand Duchess and see if she\u2019s actually Anastasia? Anya agrees and off they go, with forged papers.
MEANWHILE, Bartok the bat is in the palace next to Rasputin\u2019s dusty reliquary. Which, the moment Anya agrees to go to Paris, starts glowing and trembling, and then like, crosses the boundary between life and death to go hang out with Rasputin in\u2026 Limbo. Which is an infinite green cave filled with tiny, uh, planets made of bones. Sure, why not.
b37509886e