Anastasia (1997)
Don Bluth's lost-princess musical that a whole generation is sure was Disney. Meg Ryan's amnesiac Anya, a music box, Rasputin as an undead villain with an albino bat, and "Once Upon a December" — made in Phoenix by Fox, and released a week after Disney re-issued The Little Mermaid — a scheduling war Fox called deliberate.
Anastasia was 20th Century Fox's bid to build a Disney of its own. In May 1994 the studio signed Don Bluth and Gary Goldman to a long-term deal and spent more than $100 million on a new animation studio in Phoenix, Arizona, staffed by 300 artists, a third of whom had worked with the pair in Dublin. The idea of remaking its 1956 Ingrid Bergman drama Anastasia came from studio chief Bill Mechanic. Bluth and Goldman decided the real Romanov story was too dark for a family film, so the villain became Rasputin, who sells his soul for the power to destroy the family, even though the real Rasputin died a year and a half before the family was killed.
Meg Ryan was Bluth's first and only choice for Anya, and when she hesitated the animators built a reel around a clip of her Sleepless in Seattle dialogue to win her over. Liz Callaway's demo recordings were good enough to become Anya's singing voice. The songs were the film debut of Broadway's Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens, who wrote "Once Upon a December" first, during a heatwave. "Journey to the Past" was nominated for the Best Original Song Oscar.
Fox dated the film for November 21, 1997, and Disney answered with a blitz: a re-release of The Little Mermaid the week before, Flubber the week after, a George of the Jungle and Hercules double feature, and a ban on Anastasia ads during The Wonderful World of Disney. Mechanic called it "a deliberate attempt to be a bully, to kick sand in our face." Anastasia went on to about $140 million worldwide, the biggest gross of Bluth's career and his first real hit since All Dogs Go to Heaven. Critics mostly liked it; historians didn't, one amateur historian comparing it to a film in which Anne Frank "moves to Orlando and opens a crocodile farm with a guy named Mort."
The confusion the film courted has outlived it. Its Disney-style look meant audiences assumed Disney made it, and in 2019 Disney bought Fox, so Anastasia now streams on Disney+ beside the films it was built to rival. A direct-to-video spin-off, Bartok the Magnificent, followed in 1999, and a Broadway musical opened in 2017 with Rasputin replaced by a Soviet officer named Gleb.
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