She is walking in her sleep on the savagely pitching deck of a ship buffeted by a roaring storm at sea. She is dreaming that her murdered mother and father and sisters and brother are calling to her from a placid sea in which they are all together again, happily out for a family swim.
As wild waves wash over her in this 20th Century fairy tale, a young con man named Dimitri finds himself trying to save this confused young woman named Anya, whom he has been coaching on the voyage to say that she is the lost Russian Princess Anastasia. And he is trying to rescue her with physical prowess perhaps beyond the abilities of flesh and blood.
It is a scene from Twentieth Century Fox’s animated version of the 1956 Ingrid Bergman-Yul Brynner romance classic “Anastasia,” created anew with the voices of Meg Ryan and John Cusack, as a $53 million challenge to Line King Disney.
It opens in Chicago on Friday.
Animated feature films have been among the greatest gold mines of modern times, but only for Disney — from “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” which has earned around a half-billion dollars since the first of its seven releases in 1937, to “The Lion King” of 1994, which has generated an estimated $1 billion in profits after marketing spinoffs, video sales and theatrical income abroad.
No wonder then that Twentieth Century Fox would spend that kind of money to try to open a gold mine of its own. “Anastasia” co-directors Don Bluth and Gary Goldman are the most successful makers of independent animated features. Bluth was an animation director and Goldman a character animator on Disney’s successful 1977 cartoon feature “The Rescuers” before they led a walkout of a team of key Disney artists in 1979 to make their own animated features: “The Secret of NIMH” (1982), “An American Tail” (1986), “The Land Before Time” (1988) and “All Dogs Go to Heaven” (1989).
So far, they have not had Disney seriously worried, and one of their strongest talents, John Pomeroy, has returned to Disney; still, Bluth and Goldman have survived as independent animators for 18 years.
Their newest project takes a fairy-tale approach to one of this century’s bloodiest deeds. It imagines a young man who initially enlisted Anya to help him con the survivors of the deposed Romanov dynasty out of some of their gold but who now wants to protect not only his investment but her, because he is falling in love. And it imagines that a young man forced into a choice between money and integrity might choose integrity.
In reality, Russia’s czarist Romanov family was shot to death July 16, 1918, by order of the Bolshevik revolution, though rumors have persisted to this day that one or more of the daughters were somehow spared.
But this is animation. No live-action camera could capture the illusion of extra speed and grace with which the young woman keeps her balance on the slippery deck; no flesh and blood actor is capable of the real movements it would take to save her from falling overboard. Though they speak with the voices of Ryan and Cusack, they are really a bunch of animated drawings doing the kinds of things that only animated drawings can do, to tell of the kinds of happy endings that the horrors of history mostly contradict, but that fairy tales keep insisting against logic.
“Anastasia” executive producer Maureen Donley, daughter of a City of Chicago electrical inspector and graduate of Resurrection High School and Marquette University, was an associate producer on Disney’s “The Little Mermaid” of 1987. (Ironically, “Anastasia’s” greatest competition this month is the 10-year-old “Little Mermaid,” which Disney re-released Friday for 17 days only.)
Donley says she saw something in the story and characters of “Anastasia” that she was convinced would make the contact with the whole spectrum of viewers that is necessary to make an animated film a hit — not only the kids and their parents who fill the theaters during the day but the dating crowd, 17 to 37, who are usually the least responsive to animated features.
“The basic emotional issue most fairy tales deal with is fear of abandonment,” said Donley. “From `Snow White’ to `Hansel and Gretel,’ the core issue is family attachment, separation and survival. I don’t feel it ever leaves you, to the day you die, and this is the angle we explore.
“If you are the most beloved of children, in the safest imaginable place — heir to one-sixth of the world’s wealth, and you lose it all — surely that’s the abandonment story of all time,” Donley said of the core story in “Anastasia.” “How do you grow up? For, at some point, you become responsible for building your own life. And that’s where Don and Gary pick up the story of Anya — who may be Anastasia.
“Anya is a survivor. The world she came from was gone with the wind. She had to find a life and a home postrevolution. So I hope that what kids will get from this film is that home is not necessarily a place. Home is the people you love and choose to live your life with.”
The spunk it takes to survive is, of course, practically a trademark of Meg Ryan characters from “Courage Under Fire” to the cheerfully determined women of “When Harry Met Sally” and “Sleepless in Seattle.” But to the Ryan voice, Bluth’s character designs had to wed an equally spunky cartoon body.
“How do we caricature the Meg Ryan look when Anastasia has long hair?” Goldman had asked Bluth. “The answer was, Don tied her hair in a knot on the top of her head so that it has the Meg Ryan short hair look.”
But even more Meg Ryanish is her spunky sparring with Dimitri. John Cusack, who supplied that voice, has specialized in characters who can be seduced by money ever since he played one of the Chicago Black Sox in “Eight men Out.”
“But this time,” said Bluth, “I wanted to tell a story about a con man who fights the battle to where he can take the money, he can win — but at the cost of never being true to what he really is. If he wants to be real, if he wants to be better than he has been, he has to turn his back on the money.”
As in all animated films that work, the strength of character must be in the character design.
“When I was designing Dimitri,” said Bluth, “Bill Mechanic said, `Don’t make him a super hero. Don’t give him too many muscles. Make him an ordinary guy.’ So I drew him as an ordinary guy who looks as if he may or may not back down for money. Lots of ordinary guys face similar choices.”
