Anastasia

Don Bluth and Gary Goldman’s 1997 animated feature is not a Disney production, the point most often got wrong. It was made at Fox Animation Studios, which 20th Century Fox set up in Phoenix in August 1994 expressly to compete with Disney’s feature animation arm. Three hundred artists worked there. It released two films, Anastasia, which reached 139.8 million dollars worldwide, and the failure Titan A.E., then closed on 26 June 2000, ten days after Titan A.E. opened. At the 70th Academy Awards it drew two nominations and lost both: Original Musical or Comedy Score went to The Full Monty, and Original Song, where it stood with Journey to the Past, to My Heart Will Go On from Titanic. History is the weak side. Rasputin was killed on 30 December 1916, months before the Tsar abdicated, yet the film makes him a supernatural avenger who sets the revolution going. The question of Anastasia closed with the 2007 discovery of a second grave: DNA work concluded no member of the family survived the execution on the morning of 17 July 1918. A good fit if you can treat fairy tale machinery like Rasputin’s curse as a requirement of the form rather than a mistake. Not for anyone expecting 1917 explained by its politics; here power changes hands through a curse.