Anastasia (Animation)/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Awesome Music: Rasputin gets a damn good Villain Song, "In the Dark of the Night", a soaring ensemble piece complete with an Ominous Pipe Organ and power chords. And backup. Sung by bugs.
    • I always imagined in my head "The Dark of the Night" backup being sung by some kind of Succubi or other female type demons.
    • This AMV mixes the song with Fantasia segments of Chernabog and his demons! It's really fitting and terrifying, although the anime girl that appears kind of ruins the atmosphere (It's Hikari, if you're wondering.)
    • And Rasputin's singing voice is provided by Jim Cummings.
    • "Once Upon a December". Both the in-film and Deana Carter versions.
    • "Journey to the Past".
    • "At the Beginning". Sure, it was in the credits, but I still consider it my favorite song - narrowly defeating "Once Upon A December".
    • Finale never fails to make me all warm and fuzzy inside.
    • "If I can learn to do it". The song is hilarious most of the time, and one point, it freezes to show shock when 'Anastasia' gets something right that the other two haven't gone over ("I don't believe we told her that.") Funny!
    • Prologue.
  • Complete Monster: Rasputin was meant to be this on a technical level, but he's often played for laughs.
  • Harsher in Hindsight: Even if the film was in no way meant to be a factual account of Anastasia and the Romanovs, those who would rewatch the film would find it a little depressing to know what had actually happened to Anastasia and her siblings, i.e. killed by the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight:
    • Rasputin's line before singing "In the Dark of the Night:"

"Now my dark purpose will be fulfilled, and the last of the Romanovs will DIE! *Dramatic Thunder*"

    • Back when the film was first released, casual audiences occasionally if not often mistook the film for a Disney production no thanks to its similar art style. They're now vindicated after Disney acquired 20th Century Fox in 2018.
  • Mexicans Love Speedy Gonzales: Anastasia was actually well received in Russia and a box office hit, since its distributors took care to market it as not history but a historical fairy tale, letting the audience watch it with a fair dose of MST3K Mantra. Not that it spared the film from any sort of criticism though—a number of Russian Orthodox Christians took umbrage at the fictional depiction especially as the real-life Anya was canonized as a new martyr in 1981 by the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, seeing the film's portrayal of the Dutchess as distorted and sugar-coated.
  • Tear Jerker: Anastasia's dance with the Czar, her father, during her Disney Acid Sequence dance.
    • No matter what opinion you have about the Czar, the flashbacks and visions involving the family, the mother, sisters, and a brother, strikes as heartwrenching considering what happened to the family in reality.
    • The reunion between Anastasia and her grandmother.