anastasia – Steel Phoenix Studios

prokopetz:

gehayi:

gryffindorbeth:

diagonally:

The premise for the movie Anastasia is so ridiculous but somehow they turned it into a work of beautiful timeless art it’s astounding

Anastasia is a cinematic masterpiece with almost no actual historical facts in it that I will love and defend until the day I die

Oh, yes, it’s definitely historically inaccurate, and Don Bluth tossed in a fair number of fantasy elements as well. (Undead Rasputin, talking bat, and singing bug army from Hell, anyone?) But at the same time, the premise for the movie–that an amnesiac woman could actually be a surviving daughter of the Tsar–is pretty much the real-life case of Anna Anderson, who claimed (falsely) to be Anastasia.

One of my very favourite things about Anastasia is that not only are zombie Rasputin and his talking bat goofy as hell, they’re almost completely irrelevant to the actual plot.

Seiriously, trace his path. Rasputin appears at the beginning of the film, takes credit for the Russian Revolution (which, historically, would have happened anyway), then promptly falls into a river and doesn’t intersect with the protagonists again until the very end of the film. Sure, he sends demons to assassinate them at a couple of points, but their influence manifests as seemingly mundane misfortune that our heroes manage to evade without ever becoming aware of Rasputin’s involvement.

From the perspective of anyone other than the audience, the final confrontation with zombie Rasputin is utterly inexplicable. Sure, it makes sense to us, because we’ve seen him posture and bellow and claim credit for all the bad stuff that happens to the protagonists, but from their perspective, he comes right the hell out of nowhere.

(Heck, the 2016 stage adaptation manages to cut Rasputin’s part entirely without changing any essential element of the plot!)