Sharon Movie: Anastasia (1997)

Anastasia (1997)

Director: Don Bluth and Gary Goldman
Writers: Susan Gauthier and Bruce Graham
Genre: Animation/Adventure/Drama/Family/Fantasy

Story

Anastasia (Kirsten Dunst) is a young princess living in the early 20th century with her family when an evil sorcerer named Rasputin (Christopher Lloyd) curses the royal family. The curse is supposed to kill off every member of the royal family including Anastasia, but she gets away with the help of Dimitri (John Cusack), a young servant of the palace. While fleeing from the evil Rasputin, Anastasia falls and loses her memory. Later when she grows up, she is trying to find her family in Paris where her necklace says to go. Dimitri is now looking for a ticket to the good life and holding auditions for people who could be Anastasia so he can get the reward. When the real Anastasia finds Dimitri (neither knows she is the real Anastasia) and they head for Paris to meet the grandmother, Rasputin comes back to try and finish what he started. Although Anastasia has no idea she is a Princess they are ironically trying to prepare her to be the Princess to trick her grandmother into thinking she is really Anastasia. (Sorry this seemed unnecessarily longwinded)


Everything Else

The directing is hard to talk about with most animated films, but the character interactions seemed to work fairly well in Anastasia. There were times in the story that did not seem to line up very well or were just a bit to coincidental, but this is an animated kids movie so what do you expect. Overall the directing was sound and the animation was good enough to keep the excitement up. There were only a few times that the movie lulled into an uneventful moment, but even my two and a half month old daughter enjoyed most of the movie.


The voice acting on all parts was good; although I can’t think of any animated film where the voice acting was not good. It was interesting that the young Anastasia was Kirsten Dunst and the older Anastasia was Meg Ryan. I am not sure there was much need for the two different voices, but it worked well either way. John Cusack was good as the voice of Dimitri and then there was the obvious Angela Lansbury. Christopher Lloyd was the voice of Rasputin and may have had the most challenging voice acting part, but still it seems like voice acting is hard to mess up or at least compared to live action.


The music in Anastasia was good and the songs seemed short and quick which was a good change of pace. It was a musical with all of the song and dance, but each time they really got into it they got it over with quickly. This made the movie seem to flow along much quicker than a lot of the live action musicals I have seen recently.

The Real Deal

I can enjoy a good animated film from time to time, but as an adult I haven’t liked many animated films that weren’t computer generated. Anastasia was good, but the animation almost seemed dry and out dated. It was much like I remember Aladdin or Beauty and the Beast being, but now it looks rough compared to the computer generated animation out there. This was a great movie for the whole family though since I thought it was pretty good and even my baby girl enjoyed it (or at least most of it). The one major complaint I have was the anticlimactic ending. It just didn’t really do anything for me.


Sharon’s Take

I have to apologize to David and to all of the loyal readers out there. I'm sure Sharon Movie May does not appeal to the masses. I was in middle school when Anastasia came out, and I was so excited about seeing it. It didn't disappoint me, and was a wonderful rags to riches to true love over-coming all story with great music. In fact, I purchased the piano music so I can play the songs myself.

The Short Version

Raw Score: 722,981
Sharon Movie? Yes

Dave's Movie Reviews is the place to find movie

reviews and discuss your thoughts.
Join the community by
Subscribing!

RSS feed or Email

Why Spider-Man 3 Is One Of The Worst Movies I've Seen

This is a little harsh, but there is a reason for my harshness.  I liked Spider-Man when it came out.  I thought that it did a great job of recapturing and showing what Spider-Man was all about, but it was not a great movie.  It was fairly good, but it was rife with problems.  For one, it was thrown into a market already being pummeled with movies made after comic books.  I like to see those, but is it really necessary to have so many right now.  The makers seem to be more in it for the money than they are for true filmmaking.  Secondly, the CG was overused and made Spider-Man look like a stretchy piece of rubber flipping around widely. What ever happened to real stunts and real objects; they always look so much better when they are done right.  They used CG to save some money and allow more freedoms, but it cost dearly to the visual realism and hurt the overall experience (and it really did not get much better in the second and third film).  This is what leads us to Spider-Man 3 being such a horrible movie.

The Spider-Man series has had its problems from the start, but the first one was a new idea with at least some passion poured into it.  The second struggled to survive with the newness of the first movie fading away completely.  Then they made the third one and it seemed as though everyone involved could not have cared less about the movie or story or their performance for that matter.  Tobey Maguire was the worst of the acting, but there were few others besides Kirsten Dunst to hold the acting together.  This only left the writing and directing which of course had taken a terrible turn for the worse.  It was only a couple of minutes into the movie that I was overwhelmed with this sudden feeling that I had made a mistake when I decided to go see it.  There were moments that I actually had to burst out with laughter at how awful the movie was.  Honestly, if there had not been so many big names and big money put into the movie and there were not two before it then maybe I would not have been so quick to laugh.  However, there were two movies made before this one in the series and they had already set the standard.  I did not need to see another movie like the other two; rather I needed to see a movie that was better than the other two.  

What I had received for my loyalty to the series was a complete disappointment.  The movie was actually so bad that it made me like the first two movies much less.  It is like the Matrix Trilogy.  The Matrix was good and entertaining and the logical choice was to make a sequel (money, money, money), but if they had left it with only the first one it would have been much better.  When they shot Spider-Man 3 they must have been thinking that it did not really matter how well they made it because it was guaranteed to make a lot of money.  This showed in the performances of the actors and actresses and therefore reflected negatively on the rest of the movie as a whole.  Shame on you Sam Raimi, we expect so much more from you (then again, maybe he just wanted to make it harder to make a fourth film). 

Therefore, Spider-Man 3 is one of the worst movies I have seen in a long time (it was not as bad as Deck the Halls, Street Fighter, or Year of the Dog though if that helps ease your pain at all).  I can only hope that they give up on the idea of making yet another movie in the series and spare us further degradation of a much loved comic hero.  I mean even Sam Raimi has bailed out and he was on board for all three.  Unfortunately Spider-Man 4 is in the works and will likely get to the big screen.  Hopefully they will find some people that are truly interested in making a god film and are not just in it for the money; or better yet, cut their losses and just scrap the idea entirely.

This rant has now come to an end.