Cast: Meg Ryan, John Cusack, Kelsey Grammer, Christopher Lloyd, Hank Azaria, Bernadette Peters
For complete cast info, see IMDb's Anastasia page.
I was so looking forward to this movie. They had a great cast (though I'm not a Meg Ryan fan), and the animation looked great. The animation was definitely better than any other non-Disney animated movie I've seen to date. However, that's the end of my praise for the movie.
The story was okay, but it could have been much better done. I'm not sure how they managed to get a G rating for a movie that had an animal being cut to pieces in it. I had been very excited about seeing Anastasia and saw it as soon as it reached our theaters. One of my friend's daughters was really looking forward to the movie, too. As soon as I saw it, I called my friend and told her to distract her daughter with thoughts of other movies and toys and to get her to forget the idea of Anastasia. Her little girl would not have liked this dark (and sometimes gruesome) animated interpretation of the story of Anastasia.
Anastasia had so much potential as an animated movie. I was very disappointed that they seemed to care more about making it dark and gross (and therefore separating it from Disney movies) than they did doing a good job with the story or making a movie that children (or their parents) could fully enjoy.
Grade: C
Labels: 1997, adventure, animated, Bernadette Peters, comedy, drama, family, John Cusack, Meg Ryan, movie
Reviewed by Kat at the 2:15 PM show | 0 screams