7 Things ANASTASIA Teaches About Childhood Trauma

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"How did this get a G rating?" 90s Alan, it was the 90s😭

Animator here: a teacher once said the reason the animation looks weird in this movie is because everything is always moving. You need some still frames to hold the poses and to give good contrast with the movement. When everything moves all the time, the timing gets too even and unnatural. It's similar to what happened in the old Fleischer animations because they hadn't figured the "ease in" and "ease out" principles Disney animators established later.

Anastasia dancing with her dad ALWAYS, without a fail, makes me sob. So touching and heartbreaking at the same time

25:03 "Asking for help isn't giving up. It's refusing to give up." - The boy, the mole, the fox, and the horse

The OG haters to lovers animated movie

Can we talk about that slap she gave Dimitry? Smacked the Cusack straight out of him

Just one correction: IRL Anastasia (and her entire family) were NOT killed during "the siege" at all. They were all put under house arrest after the tsar's abdication in Tsarskoe Selo, then trasferred to Tobolsk (Siberia) and then finally to Yekaterinburg awaiting trial by the Bolsheviks, since they were considered very high value prisoners. The issue with the situation was that a counter-revolutionary Czechoslovak army started to rise to free (and possibly reinstate) the Royal family. As they were advancing on Yekaterinburg, the guards received an operative to execute the family. The family members were called down to the cellar in the middle of the night, telling them they need to put on their travel clothes as they will be transferred, but they were going to sit for a family photo first. For this reason, they were wearing their more valuable clothes and their jewellery underneath, as the last bits of their valuables. Instead of a photo shoot, the guards lined up and shot them on the spot, buried three of the girls, the tsar and the tsarina nearby; the bodies of one girl and the tsarevich were not found until much much later - also in Yekaterinburg, but at a different burial site. The tsar's abdication happened at the beginning of March 1917, and they were executed on 17 July 1918, over a year later. Just to clarify the historical aspect, it had very little to do with the movie. The survivors of the royal family (the tsar's sister Xenia and her direct family) were, at the time, not in St Petersburg, and they fled to Crimea from the Red Army, until the British royal family finally decided to send a rescue ship the HMS Marlborough to pick them up in 11 April 1919, almost a year after the execution of the royal family - Grand Dutchess Xenia's descendents still live in the UK, which is how the DNA testing was possible on the tsar's and his family's remains.

One of my favorite little moments in the movie is from “Learn to Do It,” when they memorize the names of the royalty, and Anya remembers a cat they never mentioned. Also, in the same song, just how naturally things come to her because she still has some of those motor skills, it’s just so fun watching her, and Dimitri as well, discover those parts of Anastasia shining through bit by bit.

During once upon a December, I love that she’s the only one that has a reflection on the floor

Fun Fact: Carrie Fisher, in addition to acting, would work part time as a script doctor. The whole Once Upon a December sequence was something she personally worked and oversaw, even suggested the idea that the ghosts of the Royal Court fly out of the paintings.

"which one are you talking about?" "both" Alan was so real for that

Animator here! I didnt work on Anastasia (i was a baby when it came out) - but it’s pretty clear to me that a LOT of the film was rotoscoped, especially the normal human characters (anastasia, Dimitri, etc… but not really Rasputin). A lot of the shots in the video make it clear that they relied pretty heavily on rotoscope over hand drawn animation from scratch. As a result, they’re relying more on existing live action footage than they are on the 12 principles of animation -which is what animators use to help really bring characters to life. The principles aren’t absent from these characters, but they are used more sparingly. One of the principles that you would miss the most is exaggeration. In a lot of 2d animation, especially this style, the exaggeration can be very subtle, but it is rather load bearing for the scene. The lack of exaggeration, especially in contrast to Rasputin and his dumb little bat (who do not seem to be heavily rotoscoped in this movie, and are far more exaggerated and cartoony), dips a lot of the main cast pretty deep into the uncanny valley, and their movement seems less cartoony and more real. From what I’ve heard through the grapevine about the production, it hit a lot of roadblocks, i think in part due to Anastasia being the first film Don Bluth produced in the United States after moving his production studio from Dublin, Ireland to Arizona, and the studio needing to find cohesion with a new cast of animators.

“In the Dark of the Night” is one of the most iconic villain songs ever. Jim Cummings nailed it.

For real though it’s so relatable when Alan says “I’d hit that” and then saying “both” and shrugging. He’s so real for that.

Now, I realized why I relate with ANASTASIA so much. "I'm a victim, now I'm a survivor, now I'm an advocate, now I'm me." - You're right I am empowered because I am able to use my past to help and reach out to others.

This movie had such a strong influence on me as a child that I named MY child Anastasia. I always loved the strong-willed, he decisive, survivor that this princess is. She went through unimaginable horrors and not only survived, but she was well on the way to healing before she ever met Dmitry.

It's interesting that Alexei (Anastasia's younger brother) still appears as child in the ballroom scene, her older sister have grown, but Alexei is still a child. I don't think I ever noticed that before. I assume it's a mix of Anastasia thinking of him always as the baby of the family, and also being able to imagine what her sisters might have looked like based on her own appearance, but not being able to picture how a male sibling might have grown up.

I think it's also very possible that besides the trauma she did originally remember things about her past, but when you're a poor girl in an orphanage spewing about being a princess people are going to tell you that you're crazy or making it up, making her distrust her already weak memories.

When I was a kid, my neighbors dog knocked me down to the ground in their yard. I hit my head on the ground. I had amnesia for most of the day. I was looking at my family and talking to them but in my mind they were strangers. I didn’t recognize them or our house. It was scary. Eventually it came back that day and I don’t remember much except feeling lost, confused, and afraid. It was crazy.