Etcetera OG ✎ COMPLETE

; my childhood loves: 'anastasia'

                Dear everyone who probably doesn't care to learn any more about me than you already know, I'm about to tell you another useless fact about me.  Ever since I can remember, I have been in love with a string of movies that have all played some kind of part in my odd upbringing.  I'm about to talk about one of them (and I will probably at some point tell you about all of them...just not tonight because, you know, I have a paper on Larry Stylinson to write).

                So anyway, if you ask me now what my favorite Disney movie is, I will say without a moment's hesitation that it is Peter Pan, followed closely by Hercules.  Probably between seven and ten years ago, however, I would have said Anastasia.  The obvious reason for the change is that Anastasia is definitely not a Disney movie.  It's a 20th Century Fox movie.  Poor, poor ignorant me.

                (But it's actually directed by two former Disney animation directors, so I can't be too hard on myself.)

                For those of you who have no idea what Anastasia is, here is the IMDb official description:  The last surviving member of the Russian Royal Family joins two con men to reunite with her grandmother, the Dowager Empress, while the undead Rasputin seeks her death.

                Essentially, it's a play on the legend of the Grand Duchess Anastasia escaping the execution of her family (although historically, it wasn't actually Anastasia who had survived, it was one of her sisters, and then I'm pretty sure she ended up dying as well anyway soon after).  Anastasia's father was Tsar Nicholas II and the Dowager Empress is his mother.  The movie has a ton of historical inaccuracies, so if that kind of stuff really bothers you when watching movies, you should probably avoid this one.  But if you can look past that and just take this new version of the story as it is, watching this movie will be much more enjoyable.

                But yeah, so the movie follows the orphaned Anya, newly eighteen, as she tries to find her family and/or home with the help of a little puppy named Pooka and a necklace she's had since before she can remember that says "Together in Paris."  Meanwhile, the Dowager Empress is offering a large sum of money for the return of her missing granddaughter Anastasia, and con men Dimitri — who used to work in the palace before the Russian Revolution — and Vlad are trying to find a woman to pretend to be Anastasia in order to get the Dowager Empress's reward money.  He bumps into Anya, who was told to find him if she wanted to get to Paris, and so Dimitri and Vlad decide to turn Anya into Anastasia, unaware that she actually is Anastasia.  While all of this is happening, Rasputin, the man who sold his soul to destroy the Romanovs in the beginning of the movie, is trying to kill her since she had escaped him the first time. 

                I will probably have to include some spoilers, but I'm going to do my best to keep them to a minimum.  It's just that there are some things in this movie that I need to discuss with y'all  I'm going to put them into list form to keep this more organized, but just...  I beg you to watch this movie.  I beg you.  Especially if you love Disney movies, because if this was produced by Disney (and was exactly the same as how it is now) it would easily be Disney's greatest creation, I just...

                So anyway.

Reasons this movie is one of the best things that's ever happened to me:

Meg Freaking Ryan

·         It's no secret that When Harry Met Sally... is one of my favorite movies ever, so you can imagine my excitement when I figured out that the queen behind Sally voices Anya.  One of Anastasia's biggest assets is how sassy and snarky Anya is, and I'm pretty positive that nobody could pull it off the way Meg Ryan does.  If you don't see this movie for any other reason, do it because of Meg Ryan's Anya.