#Really putting the 3D in paint 3d and BOY does it look janky

[quohotos]

Have you heard about Sagan 4? (It may be in need of an owl analogue...an anowlogue...)

WOW there is a lot of lore. I did the best I could to make this anowlogue fit in with the other similar fauna on the planet, but still with features that would make it clearly Owl.

[theycallmeshaggyrogers]

Essay One: ‘Anastasia’ Probably Could Have Been Great

This post will contain spoilers. There, I'm guiltless.

Have you ever heard a premise or logline to a movie that sounded so promising that there was no conceivable way in your mind that it could fail? And were you absolutely bewildered when you watched said movie your hopes were slowly choked out of you? Well, that's what watching Don Bluth's 1997 animated musical Anastasia feels like. Now, despite being a 90s fetus and having grown up watching French-dubbed Disney Renaissance films from relatively the same time period this film was released, I had not watched Anastasia until last December. It was the Tuesday night before my final exams/presentations/seminars went into full swing, and rather than dutifully studying like a good boy trying to retain his scholarship and federal grants so he can attend an out-of-state college for half the price, I decided to watch a couple animated movies that had been on my bucket list for well over a year at that point (though I only got around to watching two). 

The first was Ralph Bakshi's Fritz the Cat, and while Fritz's plot is kind of a disconnected mess, it was quite enjoyable thematically and aesthetically. I had also went in with very little context. Sure, I saw the opening scene of those dumb college girls fawning over the crow dude just cause he was African-American, I knew it was famous for being a raunchy, animated movie intended for adults, and on more than one occasion I have had to draw in Robert Crumb's style for class, but that's all I really knew about Fritz.

Anastasia on the other hand has perplexed me. I knew of it, which is to say, all I knew was the premise, that of the sole surviving heir of the Romanov Dynasty living in secret after the Bolsheviks deposed her father during the Russian Revolution. I don't recall watching it as a child. However, as I got older and began transitioning into high school, I started taking an interest in the Edwardian period, Tsarist Russia, World War I and tons and tons and tons amateur alternate history stories I found online. I specifically became curious about what led to the fall of the 300 year-old Romanov dynasty.

 I even wrote a similar story going off Anastasia's premise because I was so infatuated with the idea that the Romanovs were able to survive such a violent deposition effort, just as the House of Bourbon did following the French Revolution (the first one at least). Like your average American Civil War buff, I like this idea of putting a “what-if?” spin on history that is fairly recent in the grand scheme of things, but has long since left cultural memory on account of those living at the time slowly dying off, and it seems that modern American media agrees with me on that sentiment, even if the more maintstream content is centered almost exclusively about Nazis and World War II.

But yeah, Anastasia has a premise that I'm sold on, is set in a country that I love for a bajillion and one reasons during a rather recent period in European history that I am genuinely fascinated by.

And guess what? It sucks.

Anastasia, for all that it does stylistically to emulate the story, aesthetic and pacing of a Disney film, is just mediocre, its premise wasted. It very much feels like a knock-off or a mockbuster with an extraordinarily high budget to match that of your average 1990s animated feature. Those who have watched Anastasia before reading this post probably assumed that the film's budget was remarkably lower than that of other big-budget animated movies being produced at the time, and I am here to dispel that assumption with the help of a series of simple Google searches.

For context, 1995's Pocahontas had a budget of $55 million, 1991's Beauty and the Beast had approximately half the budget of Pocahontas, and 1994's The Lion King, arguably the most well-remembered of the Renaissance Disney films according to my generation in particular, had a budget of $45 million. Anastasia had a budget of $50 million. And I am using Disney films as a comparison because Anastasia is very much trying to look and feel like a Disney film, and it's falling embarrassingly flat. Its character designs look like Disney knock-offs, its score feels like imitation-Alan Menkin, and even its use of 3D renders feels like Don Bluth was trying to 1-up the technological marvels done well by Beauty and the Beast. Hell, you can even tell based off Anastasia's character designs who fits into which archetype in your big-budget kids movie. 

The titular Anya is the unquestionably feminine but nonetheless strong-willed female lead, as well as the “Princess™”, and her design by the third act of the movie reminds me strongly of 1953's Cinderella. Vlad is the obligatory comic relief because... well, cause he's older and fat. You think he's gonna be the protagonist? As much as that would have been cool, considering his background as a former member of the exterminated nobility and the emotional implications the Russian Revolution may have left on him and all, this movie had to be marketed towards kids, ergo, young leads in their twenties. But I digress. That annoying little dog-looking creature (whose name I forget even after re-watching the movie to write this) is the mute comic-relief animal sidekick who can be pushed heavily in the marketing, and Bartok is the other animal sidekick who is cute enough to be memorable and/or marketable for the movie's sake, but not cute enough to make you forget that he's technically an antagonist. Bartok's master Rasputin is self-explanatory, though that said, the over-exaggeration of facial features to make the antagonist inhuman is kind of par for the course regarding animated movies from this time and the eras preceding it. I don't feel that I need to explain myself in too much depth here, especially since the Don Bluth take on Grigori Rasputin has the emotional depth of the Sea of Azov.

However, Dmitri appears to be the exception to this rule of taking  well-established Disney archetypes and making knock-off characters from them. Obviously he's the dude half of this movie's forced breeding pair on account of his youthful charm (that translates into hideously rotoscoped facial features), but I don't think he really embodies any direct resemblance to a male Disney lead or even the generic handsome princes characters of Snow White, Cinderella and The Little Mermaid. Maybe he's meant to be modeled off all those lookalike, generic handsome prince characters with a hint of Aladdin on account of his street smarts and non-royal status. Or maybe, just maybe, Dmitri's design makes him less an archetypal Disney rip-off and instead, a carefully-crafted prettyboy meant to catch the eye of the average preteen girl in 1997, one who probably listened to a lot of boy bands with pasty, broody, Dmitri-looking skinny white dudes on the cover with his exact haircut. This is honestly just speculation with no further research on my part, but I genuinely think Don Bluth was going for a 90s-boy band look for his strapping male lead, or was otherwise convinced by some focus group during pre-production that this was a sound decision. And I have to repeat myself here: it's shame that in trying to capture the essence of a moody bad boy, Bluth went the extra mile and made him as awkwardly-animated as possible, which is saying something considering how awkwardly-animated every other proportionally-realistic character is to begin with. 

The animation quality of Anastasia is probably the most glaring indicator that you're not actually watching a Disney movie, not because it's awful, but because its quality varies from character model to character model. Dmitri's character design is probably the closest in resemblance to a real person, but that benefit, if you can even call it that, is immediately squandered when you put a more stylized character like Vlad (or really any one-note side character from the film) in the same shot. Members of the royal family suffer from this issue too. Their designs seem to be based off real models rather than possess the stylization Don Bluth is famous for. Nicholas II and Anya's sisters in this regard are alright since they are minor characters with only a few speaking lines if any at all, but in the case of Empress Marie, a major supporting character, she ends up animating in the same janky manner as Dmitri. I don't think Bluth could decide whether or not to go with the exaggerated caricatures he is so accustomed to, or committing to realistic character models that would likely be hard to animate consistently. The end result that was reached seems to be this loose middle-ground where everything just feels awkward and inconsistent.

I also wanna touch on the liberal use of 3D animation a bit too, because it is probably my biggest issue with this movie's overall aesthetic. This isn't to say I have an issue with 3D, and if you can make it work in your movie, then more power to you. This issue with 3D in Anastasia however is simply the fact that it does not mesh well with the 2D setting at all. This movie has all these beautiful hand-painted backgrounds for nearly every shot but once we've moved on from the abandoned Catherine Palace (why wasn't that touched at all by the Bolsheviks again? It's been a solid decade post-timeskip right?) and onto the the train, the fact that the entire locomotive itself is a CG render will not be able to leave your head, because it is just that obvious. The one time the CG isn't blatantly tacked-on is the opening shot, depicting two music box figurines of the tsar and his wife, and that's where I think this then-budding animation technology worked the best. It did not work for a model as big as an noticeably unmanned ocean liner being battered by painstakingly-animated 2D waves.

Now, this isn't to say that CG animation was not viable for animated motion pictures of the 1990s; it very well was. The Hunchback of Notre Dame uses it quite excellently throughout the film to render large crowds of Parisians as well as various exterior shots of the eponymous cathedral itself, and are perhaps the most memorable shots of that movie. Beauty and the Beast famously used the new technology to great effect as well during the famous ballroom scene. But in these two particular cases, the 3D was used largely as a backdrop to save the animators time when working on a particular shot. They were not necessarily the point of attention in the shots they appeared in; the protagonists were.

When Quasimodo is expressing his desire to attend the Festival of Fools at the beginning of Hunchback and is climbing all about the cathedral singing all angelically and whatnot, he is always the center of attention in each shot. Meanwhile, in Anastasia, many of the ship scenes during the storm are wide shots which go on for long enough that the viewer is able to identify that these backgrounds, are in fact, 3D. In all of these instances, 3D rendering was used as a crutch that made production easier. In the better-executed examples however, the directors demonstrated a degree of restraint.

Don't even get me started with that CG pegasus statue either.

Now this entire post so far has been me harping on the technical blunders of Anastasia, but if a movie looked a bit goofy at times due to inexperienced animators, the grandiose expectations of a director, time constraints or experimental technology that just wasn't there yet, it can probably make up for that with a cohesive and engaging story, of which Anastasia does not have any of these things. My first glaring issue going into this movie was how the movie introduces and frames Rasputin. There is no explanation given as to how or why he's a necromancer. In fact, necromancy seems inappropriate for Rasputin's character considering from a historic basis, he was believed to be a spiritual healer blessed by God, who I'm pretty sure frowns upon pagan magic regardless of one's denomination. I will admit that it is an interesting take on Rasputin's character given the fact that he is remembered pretty negatively by history, but with that said, if he was a necromancer, how would he have been able to convince the extremely religious, extremely superstitious Tsarevna Alexandra that he was in fact this God-blessed mystic who could cure her son of hemophilia? What could have made this work was if Rasputin was in fact used his infamously adept persuasion to convince the tsar that his dark powers were actually good powers, allowing the suspicions held by his detractors in court to appear far less warranted than they were in reality.

Regardless, the nature of Rasputin's powers go unexplained in the movie and is hand-waived by Empress Marie as “oh, we trusted him but he turned out to be hella fake lol”. It is also never explained in Anastasia how Rasputin lost favor with the Russian court, which is arguably the inciting incident of the film and happens within the first five or so minutes of its runtime. That is an issue in of itself. These thoughts immediately came to mind as I was watching Anastasia, breaking the immersion even more with each raised question gone unanswered. Would I have known Dmitri was going to be an integral character from the split-second shot where he was introduced? That's the biggest issue with the plot of Anastasia itself: it does not give you any breathing room. 

The first five minutes throw story beat after story beat at you; Russian aristocrats are celebrating the 300th anniversary of the Romanov Dynasty, Dowager Empress Marie confides in her granddaughter that she will be leaving for Paris and hands her the plot-device music box, Rasputin storms in, crashes the party, curses Tsar Nicholas II, the Bolsheviks immediately attack the Catherine Palace, and Anya escapes, only to contract amnesia while fleeing. Ideally, these beats are meant for the first half of a first act, spanning about ten to fifteen minutes at most, not the first five!

The opening scenes of this movie feel insanely rushed, and it just keeps happening and happening. Rasputin destroyed the train? Fuck it, Anya, Vlad, Dmitri and Annoying Dog will just walk to the nearest port city instead, and it'll be a merry old trip where Anya's groomed for her inevitable reunion with her grandmother! Not a single beat in this story felt organic, which in turn, as someone who has watched enough family-friendly animated features as an adult to pick up on particular narrative beats, made it predictable. By the time the climactic confrontation between Anya and Rasputin had commenced, I was so disinterested with what was happening because I knew where this story was going: Rasputin was gonna die in some way, be it through hubris, being outwitted by Anya, or a deliberate fake-out (guess what, it was behind door #3!). My only respite throughout this entire movie was the fact that Anya and Dmitri's endless exchange of sarky retorts never got tired for me for some odd reason. I understand that giving both of these characters sardonic, witty personalities was  meant to show chemistry between the two, but it all feels like filler dialogue when their inevitable union at the end of the movie barely feels earned, especially when I'm 20 minutes into the movie and I still can't figure out if this animated musical is supposed to be an intense historical drama or a romantic comedy. I can barely remember anything about Anya's personality beyond her snark. She's humble, pretty without trying, and a well-meaning person, but so was Cinderella. She's witty and sharp-tongued to a degree, but so was Beauty's Belle and Hercules' Megara.

Finally, no criticism of Anastasia is complete without examining the ethics behind basing a story off a violent major event in a nation's already violent history. Anyone who has read up on the causes of the Russian Revolution would be made aware of the empire's horrible mismanagement at the hands of Nicholas II. They would know that at the time of World War I, Russia was bankrupting itself, it was conscripting young men my age into a losing war without even being provided the proper equipment, and the Romanovs were effectively sitting on their hands the whole time. Listening to a grandiose opening musical number sung by the citizens of St. Petersburg bemoaning their lives under Soviet leadership all the while exchanging hopeful whispers of Anastasia's survival just puts a bad taste in my mouth. 

Moreover, on the opposite side of the social hierarchy, I was hoping to see surviving members of the old regime expressing how they felt after losing their power, and how it might have changed them, namely Vlad as well as Anya's grandmother, Empress Marie. I was hoping, from premise alone, that this movie would explore some more mature themes about power and how one comes to terms with losing it. Family-friendly movies don't have to be sanitized to be family-friendly, no matter what the hypersensitive, suburban white mom may tell you. Hunchback approached themes of infanticide, emotional manipulation, racism and religious zealotry through its villain, Claude Frollo, while Beauty and the Beast confronted hypermasculinity and human cruelty through Gaston. With that in mind, why did this film, predicated on a violent revolution with horrifying consequences in the form of a civil war, purges and genocide, have end up as thematically sterile as it did?

Admittedly, what I was hoping from Anastasia was probably too much for the production team at Twentieth Century Fox to get away with, because after all, when you make media that is meant to have a broad appeal, it means you have to make thematic sacrifices mandated by corporate. Sometimes, you can't write the story you want to write. I was expecting the very same story I wrote for myself all those years ago, one of a lost royal who must come to terms with the fact that the old empire has fallen and things will never be the same again. I was hoping that the true villain would be a former revolutionary or a member of Lenin's cabinet whose hatred of the monarchy spurred him to ruthlessly pursue any Romanov survivors, and not the one-note Rasputin whose motivation we don't even completely understand. 

Apparently, Bluth never considered to use Bolsheviks as the antagonist faction of the film, though at one point it was bounced around that a fictional vigilante police officer with a grudge towards the old regime would be the central antagonist rather than Rasputin. And you know what? I'd dig that! But while a communist police officer taking the law into his own hands doesn't seem nearly as menacing as a corrupt priest turned-evil wizard, I definitely think it would have been a step in the right direction. If the writers went for the “vigilante police” angle, I think that aspect alone would be enough to warrant less egregious comparison to Disney at the time, at least from a characterization standpoint. We could probably have had this officer villain be multifaceted a villain with a complex sense of justice, or even a redeemable one at that! Not even Hunchback's Frollo had that narrative luxury! 

I honestly think this movie could have been great, but it could only have been great had it chose to stand on its own two feet instead. It tried to be a Disney movie at Disney's then-artistic height since the 1950s. it tried to make use of 3D, it tried to make use of diegetic, catchy musical numbers, it tried to play into appealing character archetypes right down to their designs, and it tried to copy the broad-appeal narrative trappings of your average well-received Disney film. I think what Anastasia proves the most about itself is that while the “Disney style” can easily be replicated on account of its ubiquity and impact on western culture, that doesn't mean imitating the formula will always be a successful endeavor.