The Tale of the Dead Princess

# The Tale of the Dead Princess

The Russian princess is a cartoon star. There was a legend that Anastasia Romanova escaped execution. There was Russian history. There was an order for a full-length cartoon musical. The result is “Anastasia”. Premiere: March 19 at Kodak Kinomir. About the new adventures of the Romanovs - Yulia Khomyakova.

Pollywood made a full-length cartoon about the last Russian princess, Anastasia Romanova. In the context of the current semi-scandalous negotiations on the reburial of the remains of the royal family, the cartoon is perceived, if not as relevant, then as extremely interesting in any case. But you shouldn’t go to “Anastasia” out of a desire to find out how the West reacts to Russian domestic political intrigues. The creators of the cartoon took advantage

the principle of Alexandre Dumas: they hung a story sewn from their own patterns on a hook of real historical events. I want to scream, like the theater director from “Beware of the Car!”: “Stop! Stop the gag! There were no Friend cigarettes in Hamlet's time!

Once upon a time there was Tsar Nicholas, and he had a daughter, Anastasia. But the villain Rasputin cursed the entire Romanov house. And everyone died - except for grandmother Maria, who left for Paris. And the eight-year-old princess Anastasia was lost somewhere in the snowy expanses. Now her adoptive mother calls her Anya. The only thing left from the past are vague memories of balls and gifts. And even a medallion given by my grandmother. And so, after ten years, Anya, already an adult, decides to find one of her relatives. That is, to find yourself. Find out who she is. Luckily for her, there are two more people - the former courtier Vladimir and the former errand boy Dmitry, who turned

aspiring to be a Hollywood handsome man - who are looking for a girl similar to Princess Anastasia. After all, her inconsolable grandmother, having heard that the princess was alive, promised a reward to the one who would find her and deliver her to the Parisian palace. Vladimir and Dmitry help Anya go abroad, teach her good manners, dress her in fashion... It turns out that poor Anya is very pretty! And Dmitry involuntarily falls in love with her. However, Rasputin, whose body is decomposing as he goes, but whose black soul still hungers for atrocities, will now stop at nothing to destroy Anya...

Everything is extremely cute: balls, like in “The Nutcracker” and “War and Peace,” outfits, serious passions, touching music, squirrels singing along, snow, snow, snow... Our locomotive is flying forward, stopping in Paris. The negative characters were especially successful: the evil Rasputin, from whose body every now and then a hand, a finger, or a head flies off, the funny bat Bartok is the villain’s assistant. The episodes with Bartok's participation are more “childish”. The cartoon, by the way, is quite politically correct: the servants of darkness - the Bolsheviks - appear only once: in the form of a lout policeman who does not want to give Anastasia a visa.

Typical material for commercial cinema: not quite true, not quite false; in a word - a strong script. Cartoon little Anastasia in the scene of a costume ball in Tsarskoe Selo (by the way, the interior of the palace and ballroom costumes fashionable at the beginning of the century ▶

Kino Anastasia

► a la russe recreated very carefully) turned out to be very similar to that real girl. The same cannot be said about other heroes. These are, in general, ordinary Disney characters with rather primitive facial expressions. However, “Anastasia” was not filmed where Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck are churned out.

In 1994, the studio “20th Century Fox” found the production of its own full-length cartoons. True, the studio's leading specialists are mostly former Disney employees with extensive professional experience. Including director and producer Lon Bluth and Harry Goldman. “Anastasia,” a cartoon with a fantastic budget of $53 million, is the studio’s first result in this area. The authors plan to break the record of “Lion King”, which collected 313 million. On the other hand, Steven Spielberg, one of the owners of the newly created DreamWorks studio (Spielberg-Katzenberg-Geffen), publicly announced his intentions to compete with Disney. Like 20th Century Fox, DreamWorks SKG has its own player on the other team: former Disney employee Katzenberg. The strategies of Spielberg and Fox are similar: the cartoons are voiced by star actors - Sandra Bollock and Wall Kilmer, for example. More than 300 animators are working on The Prince of Egypt. It's the story of the Exodus - how Moses led the Jews out of Egypt - on a budget of $60 million. The cartoon is scheduled for release at the end of 1998. If the classic cartoon format is 70 minutes, then both Spielberg and 20th Century Fox in Anastasia turn out to be about an hour and a half. From this alone we can conclude that cartoons are intended not only for children, but also for adults.

The heroes of “Anastasia” can easily be imagined in an ordinary feature film. Partly due to the fact that their movements (and there is a lot of dancing in the film) are very natural, and their facial features, no matter how