When Disney launched Disney+, they included "Anastasia," and, in one Tweet, tried to claim any nostalgia connected to Bluth's film for themselves. In 2019, when Disney bought out the Fox library for $71.3 billion - effectively funding Fox News for the next 50 years - they drove the final nail into "Anastasia's" coffin. Their own animated feature "Hercules" had already been released the previous February and wasn't a threat to "Anastasia," and with DreamWorks' "The Prince of Egypt" on the horizon, Disney needed to win this "fight." While "Anastasia" was building up steam in the popular consciousness, Disney whipped out their ace in the hole, which was, it turns out, the exact same film that they used to reassert their dominance over Bluth in 1989: "The Little Mermaid." In a massive act of programming spite, Disney elected to re-release "The Little Mermaid" on the exact same day as "Anastasia." Ads for the film, for instance, were banned on "The Wonderful World of Disney."ĭisney had little recourse to stop "Anastasia," however. One can only speculate which executive at Disney decided to launch a counterinsurgency against "Anastasia," or how such a blitzkrieg was worded, or how vitriolic Disney was intentionally trying to be, but we do know that Disney did not want "Anastasia" to succeed. "In the Dark of the Night," too, is awesome.ĭisney, however, has a long memory, and the animosity that Bluth felt toward the company was, it turns out, entirely mutual. Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty wrote the film's amazing songs, with their "Journey to the Past" eventually being nominated for an Academy Award. Hank Azaria played Bartok, Rasputin's anthropomorphic bat, and the cast boasted Bernadette Peters, Angela Lansbury, and Kelsey Grammar. Years later, the adult Anya falls in with a grifter and former servant to the Romanovs named Dimitri (John Cusack), who aims to re-install Anya on the throne. The Bolsheviks were able to take over Russia, according to the film, due to the aid of Rasputin (Christopher Lloyd), an evil sorcerer who had managed to cast a spell of immortality on himself. Bluth signed on to make several features with Fox, originally wanting to make animated versions of either "My Fair Lady" or "The King & I," but gravitated instead toward an animated remake of the 1956 Fox film "Anastasia."īased very, very loosely on actual Russian history, Bluth's version of "Anastasia" is about the lost princess Anya Romanov (Meg Ryan) who was presumed killed when the Bolsheviks came into power. What Bluth needed was something in the Disney mold - perhaps princess-based, and a light musical - but something that was also undeniably his.
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March 2023
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