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princess-of-the-corner · 3 years

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Plans for Voltar in winx reboot?

Okay so in my reboot, Valtor got changed A LOT. The reasons for this are 1.) Because of the changes I made to the Ancestral Witches and 2.) Honestly? I think prettyboy here should be one of the charismatic manipulative bastards you don't realize is a villain at first.

So I'm gonna elaborate but some backstory on the Ancestral Witches thing:

A lot of the stuff about the Ancestral Witches and what happened to Domino was very... Confusing and contradictory in original Canon. So I adjusted things to make more sense to me.

Instead of a trio of ancient Witches, Ancestral is a more modern terrorist organization. It was a large group of all kinds of people. Witch, Faerie, and non-Magixae. Though the leader was a Witch named Blizzeta.

They attacked less than 20 years prior to Season 1. Most of the group and the people of Domino died.

There were a handful of survivors though. People who were away from home or managed to flee in the attack.

Now for Valtor!

Valtor was a noble on Domino, and a member of Ancestral. Giving thw group inside information.

However, he was never outed as a member. Instead, he plays the role of the tragic survivor, and has been in charge of what's left of Domino's people since.

Valtor is continuing Ancestral's plan of searching for the Dragon Flame. Getting sympathy from other realms by saying the search is so that one day his people's homeworld can be fixed and they could go back and rebuild.

He is a great actor. Charming. Manipulative. Good at talking people into getting what he wants. And though unsuccessful, he has gotten support from many Realms.

Of course by the end of Season 1 news about Domino's lost princess begins to spread. He will be mentioned during Season 2, as he's trying to contact Bloom under what seems to be fairly innocent "hey you're our princess" reasons. But Bloom is a bit preoccupied with the Season 2 plot to really talk to him.

Season 3 though....

Bloom's main plot in Season 3 will be about her trying to connect to the remaining people of Domino. And as Valtor is their default leader, she talks to him a lot.

Valtor has kept up with what's gone down in the previous two years. And he knows that either taking the Dragon Flame from Bloom by force, or using Magic to brainwash her into doing what he wants, will likely end badly.

So instead, he does what he does best. Manipulate, mansplain, manwhore.

Valtor pretends to be offering Bloom advice on how to run things. After all, he's been in charge of what remains of their people for the past 20 years.

But he's also preying on her insecurites. She might be Domino's princess, but she knows nothing of Domino. It's people, its culture, it all means nothing to her. She also has no idea how to lead people, as she was never trained for it. Growing up as a normal girl on Earth.

He also does his best to cause a rift between her and her friends. Some of it is by bringing up that Sky, Stella, and Aisha are all royals of other Kingdoms. Wouldn't those friendships comprimise any political atmosphere happening? Best to keep them at a distance!

He also uses other characters pasts against them. Darcy has since reformed and is a friend, but she was part of Ancestral's Revival. Is she really reformed? And Riven... Well. He says he doesn't know anything about his coincidental ties to Ancestral, but is he telling the truth?

Valtor also uses Icy. Telling her that he'll share his success with her if she helps him. So she'll stage scenarios for Valtor to look even more like he's a much more competent leader than Bloom could ever be.

The long term plan is for Bloom to give power to Valtor. Though he has many possibilities for /how/. She could transfer the Dragon Flame to him, officially giving up the throne to him. She could make a deal to listen to what he thinks is best for the Kingdom, basically being his puppet ruler. Another option would be similar to the last, but give him more direct power through a marriage.

Yeah that's a yikes. But the whole isolating her and making her feel worthless and such could work.

Thankfully it doesn't! By the end of Season 3 all this is revealed and the gang kicks his ass. But still. It fucks with her a bit.

#winx club reboot project

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prplzorua · 7 years

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Sleepless Night

Anxiety has always and will forever be a child of the night. No one could deny that. Decked out in his usual garb of all black, the facet could easily blend in with the 3am shadows, which is exactly what he was doing now. Queitley, he moved, hood up and headphones in, the fridge was his destination. This had been the routine for the past few days now. He'd stay in his room all day with the windows shut and the black curtains drawn. The room would be just dark enough, but yet he would not be able to fall asleep. At first, he assumed it was his insomnia, that's was on Monday, oh today was Monday too, huh- screw it time is an illusion. He ignored his inability to sleep up until Wednesday. On Wednesday he did fall asleep, only to wake up gasping and sputtering his way into awareness, the odd thing is, he couldn't even remeber the nightmare. Thursday, he didn't bother. Friday...what did I do on Friday? Oh right, stared at the ceiling then came down for some snacks. Saturday Morality dragged him out of bed, "you need to come spend time with us-", said the Parent. Anxiety sighed, he had only just closed his eyes. He was up all day. Sunday was movie night, Thomas had implemented it a couple months back, something about getting relax together as one? Something like that. They watched Sing together, it was quite amusing in his opinion. Prince obviously enjoyed it and so did Morality as both of them would sing loudly together at majority of the songs. Logic surprised him, of course the Teacher didn't sing, but he did clap along, as did Thomas. The movie night ended around 1am, everyone was asleep, except him. Digging around in the fridge he found some strawberry yogurt, shrugging he grabbed a spoon and sat down on his black, one man, leather couch to enjoy the semi-sweet confection. ----- Logic noticed it first. On Tuesday, Anxiety was far more lethargic than usual. The Teacher had greeted the younger facet only to receive a grunt and a small nod as a substitute for "good morning". It continued on into the afternoon, when Morality greeted him and he received a grunt in turn Logic was puzzled as to why Anxiety was being closed off with them, well more closed off than usual, but he chalked it up as the younger simply having a bad day. ------ Prince noticed it next. Wednesday he saw Anxiety sitting in the commons and typing away at his phone. "Greetings Anxiety" The younger stopped, looked up and grunted something akin to "good morning" Prince blinked. "Are you feeling well?" " 'M fine" And that was all the reply he got. Anxiety picked himself up and departed to his room. "Rude", pouted Prince. The Royal huffed and made his way to the kitchen, a nice breakfast would be would take his mind off Anxiety's gruff behavior. Unfortunately for him the same thing happened at dinner, the darker facet simply brushed, well trudged past him with out saying a word. Could he slouch any lower? ------ Thomas noticed too. He wasn't making a video per say, just a little idle camera testing, a new angle trick he wanted to try out. Of course anything new and different possibly warranted a negative out come and thus his need to summon Anxiety. The facet would be sure to tell him everything that could go wrong, which in turn would allow him to fix it, ah good old reverse physiology. But when Anxiety was summoned onto the stairs, he was queit. "Anxiety? You ok?" "I'm fine", he grumbled, sheesh, someone was grumpier than usual today. "Oookay, so what do you think-" "That angle is atrocious, why is it tilted so low? The lighting is too dark for that area, do you want people to see you? That needs to move over to the left..." ----- When Tomas finally finished fixing, well everything, he turned to his anxious side, he was going to ask the other what else might need adjustments... Anxiety was nodding off right where he sat. His head was propped up by his hand and he was leaning on the railings of the stairs. The facet was obviously exhausted, yet he kept fighting sleep. For every time his head bobbed, his elbow would slowly slide off his thigh.... His head bobbed. His elbow slid. His head bobbed. His elbow slid. His head bobbed. His elbow slipped. Anxiety jerked up, slightly startled, blinking and groaning slightly when he realized what happened. The facet stifled a yawn and rubbed his eyes. This was the first time Thomas realized that Anxiety wasn't wearing his eye shadow, those were actual dark circles under his eyes. When the facet turned to look at him, Thomas quickly faced the other way, whistling, the utmost epitome of innocence. ----- "Guys, have you noticed anything wrong with Anxiety?" "Well he's been queit-", shrugged Logic "And moody", piped Prince. "He hasn't been sleeping well" Thomas, Logic and Prince turned to Morality, the parent had a worried frown on his face. "Why?" "I'm not sure son-" "Not your son, but is the something wrong with him?" "I'm guessing you mean nightmares Thomas?" "It could be that Logic-" "Or he just can't fall asleep-" "That too Prince, but, why?" "Well, there could be a lot of reasons as to why Anxiety can't fall asleep-" "How 'bout we just help him fall asleep? Before he like, falls on his face? He already has bags the size of the moon-" "Roman be nice" "Sorry Dad" Thomas chuckled, Logic rolled his eyes, but there was a slight up tilt of his lips. ---- "Ok, so everyone agrees to the plan?" "Of course" "It seems applicable" "You bet!" Thomas laughed, "alright, operation bed time is a go!" ---- His eyes were closing on him again. Dammit. He almost face planted this morning while he was tell Thomas to fix the absolute disaster that was the living- aka video-room. He wanted to sleep, he really did, his body was tired and his brain was beginning to feel like mush. But every time he'd wake up from a nightmare he could not remeber. He was just about to give up and deal with the invisible nightmare, when he was summoned. The abrupt departure from his room to the stairs made him slightly dizzy. Blinking away the stars his eyes landed on his host and eveyone else. "Wha-?" "We're having a movie night!" Exclaimed Morality. "But it's not Sunday-" "It's not, that's why this is not a regular movie night, since we have nothing tommorow, we're going to see how many movies we can watch until we pass out-" "Ookay, what kind of movies prettyboy?" Prince smirked. Anxiety sighed, "We're going all out Disney marathon aren't we?" Logic nodded. Dad smiled, Prince had the biggest shit eating grin ever and Thomas was laughing at them all. And so it began, a Disney Marathon paluza, Morality and Logic cuddled up (though Logic would never admit it) on one couch, while Thomas, Prince and Anxiety were on the next. ------ It was about half way to midnight when Prince felt a weight on his shoulder. Anxiety was beginning to nod off. Gently the Royal maneuvered the younger facet to lay comfortably onto his chest. "Aww", gushed Thomas and Morality "Shhh! Don't wake him!", whisper shouted the fanciful side. Either Anxiety didn't care or was far too tired to care, the younger curled onto Prince, gripping his suit and burying his face into the elder's chest. "Awww" The Royal rolled his eyes before tentatively running his fingers through Anxiety's hair. The younger seemed to enjoy this as he leaned to the touch. Shrugging internally, Prince continued his ministrations, Anxiety's hair was really soft. ----- When morning came, Logic found him self shaken awake via Morality. He gave the other a questioning look but the he father simply pointed to his right. Following the Parent's gesture, Logic turned to see what was undoubtedly a cute sight. Thomas was asleep leaning on the arm of the couch, Prince was leaning on Thomas and Anxiety was curled up on Prince's chest. Morality chuckled quietly and took a picture, surprisingly Logic smiled and took one aswell. ---- AN:// there, I gave fluff! Rellllllllll take it, take it all XD Mobile won't let me use Italics and bold sooo.... life Anyway it's midnight rn so time to tag some peeps. @prinxietyhell @thebrightsun @prinxietys @anxietyismycuppatea Tell me if I missed anyone :)

#prinxiety #my fic #thomas sanders #sanders sides #rellllllllll take the fluff #XD #prince sanders #logic sanders #morality sanders #anxiety sanders

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bronanlynch · 3 years

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recent media consumption summary time

could’ve sworn the last one was only two weeks ago but apparently it was three. sorry for becoming unmoored from the passage of linear time

listening: you know when you use a song lyric as a fic title and then you get that song stuck in your head for the next week? anyway Whirlpool by Sea Wolf sure is a song that I enjoy and also have had stuck in my head for a week. I feel like I should have smarted musical things to say here but I like Sea Wolf, they’re nice to listen to, they’re sad man with guitar music without being identical to every other sad man with guitar band

reading: finished my reread of Crooked Kingdom by Leigh Bardugo, and my main thought this time around is that I love Kaz with my whole entire heart. also love a good multi-layered heist scheme. also also Wylan/Jesper is cute but I do think they don’t get nearly as much relationship development as the two m/f couples and like, I really like these books but that is very much a trend especially in sff YA these days

also finished Lord Seventh (Qi Ye) by Priest and. god I love the characters so much. a friend group can just be a bunch of horrible gay people pining for each other and betraying each other in order to save each other’s lives. extremely tasty. also,

(I would say that missed opportunity is my one complaint but like. my actual main complaint is that as much as I love the characters, I think that if the racism in your text is blatant enough that I, a white american with very little knowledge of the specific racial coding happening can pick up on it, then it’s uh. probably pretty blatant and that’s Not Great)

also did some pride month impulse purchases at my local indie bookstore, including Molly Knox Ostertag’s The Girl from the Sea, a lesbian selkie graphic novel, which did so many things to my heart. first of all the art is so pretty

second of all, I too have been lonely and starting to realize that I’m gay while living in a beach town with a summer tourism economy, drifting apart from a friend group that I didn’t feel like I was part of and wishing I was literally anywhere else even though I loved the ocean. third of all, gay selkies

also read The Witch King by H.E. Edgmon which I enjoyed even though I am definitely not the target audience for first person present tense novels, even if those novels are portal fantasies about fae power struggles and arranged marriages. I really enjoyed the three main characters and their relationships, and the worldbuilding was fun, though the twist at the end (and lots of parts of the ending tbh) felt a little bit abrupt to me. also, and this is a personal thing, but someday I would love to read a fantasy novel with a transmasc character that actually feels like it reflects my experiences. I guess that’s part of the problem with looking for this in YA, but that’s where I tend to see transmasc protagonists so here I am. anyway, valid for anyone but especially trans teens to want to read a narrative about someone being loud and open about their identity but that’s not my experience. which I think is why I tend to construct my own trans narratives around characters who like, aren’t canonically trans but have themes about lying and hiding and being defensive about their image because *that’s* a trans experience I actually relate to.

I’ve started In Deeper Waters by F.T. Lukens, which is not a book I intended to buy but 1) look at the cover

2) I am weak for gay people on the sea. it’s fun so far, I’m not expecting any sort of in-depth anything about royal power but it’s cute and light and I’m having a good time. my main complaint is again a personal thing, which is not actually a complaint about the book itself and more about twitter discourse about how there should never be homophobia in sff that takes place in different worlds and how we’ve had enough of that so everything should take place in a world where it’s fine and normal to be queer. and again, that’s fine! I do enjoy books like that! I am currently enjoying a book like that! but again, I have a harder time relating to characters whose queerness isn’t mediated by fear the way mine is (this book sidesteps that by making the main character a very anxious person, which helps increase the relatability, but also. there’s this whole thing about how people distrust him and there are rumors about his ~perversion and yeah it’s about his secret hidden magic but. felt very weird to have that set-up and then not have homophobia play any part in the way other people talk about him, y’know? like please, stigmatized magic as a parallel for stigmatized sexuality is Right There)

watching: finished Nirvana in Fire and am having lots of normal and moderate emotions about it. belongs in my mental categories of “media I want to consume over and over again and take it apart and figure out how to write like that” and also “things I want to rewatch when I have enough energy to appreciate it” because I do think if I weren’t so tired these days I could’ve tried to have predictions instead of waiting for the characters to explain their plans to me, as much as I do love it when attractive people smirk at the screen and monologue about their schemes

also watched most of Castlevania season 4 (I have 3 episodes left) and it’s. well. it’s not Good but it’s a lot better than season 3. however, I only care about a few of the plotlines and everything else is kinda boring. I like Alucard’s plotline and I like Greta and I liked the two scenes where Hector and Isaac interacted and I liked the vampire lesbians deciding that being gay was more important to them than doing war crimes. cannot be bothered to care about anything else though, especially St. Germain. more importantly, Alucard’s new look fucks. love the whole cape + tits out thing.

finally got around to watching the end of the first season of Elementary and once again, I enjoy it when people explain complicated plans to me. love a good mystery. also, predictably, I’m in love with Moriarty. her first two dates with Sherlock are about art forgery and Roman artifacts in the London sewers, how was I supposed to *not* fall in love with her. also every time she interacts with Joan after the reveal has extremely homoerotic energy. ladies is it gay to become psychosexually obsessed with a woman who outplotted you

also, very importantly, my roommate realized I’d never seen Tsubasa OVAs, and they sure are an experience. I read the entire manga in like two days in a fugue state last winter and remember very little of the plot of the second half of the story, so the second OVA which is like. a random section of the late plot was kind of a lot to try to process at once, though I do appreciate one of the main ships doing a Gift of the Magi thing except instead of selling treasured possessions to get each other gifts they’re sacrificing parts of themselves. however the first one is my favorite arc, because it should not surprise anyone that the post-apocalyptic vampire arc is my favorite. also, I don’t need to remember the actual plot to remember and appreciate how much of an Eliot-core character Fai is. look at him. prettyboy ice wizard pretending to be flirty and performatively useless to hide his trauma. also he’s a vampire. he sets off the cosplay and gender envy parts of my brain so much

playing: nothing new since last time, just more Tidepools and Beam Saber. maybe someday I will play a video game again

making: got to cook for just the two of us last week instead of having to find something that everyone would eat, so Zan and I finally got to make chicken marsala from this recipe and it was extremely good. next time we’re gonna double the mushrooms though I think, the recipe didn’t make quite enough compared to the amount of chicken

someday I will make non-food things again but unfortunately, when most of your energy has to go to either cooking and cleaning for other people or trying to get other people to cook and clean,

writing: posted three new fics: the Persona selkie AU, the Nirvana in Fire miserable sapphic makeout fic, and a slice-of-life Persona fic for an exchange, and worked on a couple of other things that are still secret for zine reasons

#dreaming.txt #tuesday no problem extended universe #long post /

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theycallmeshaggyrogers · 6 years

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Essay One: ‘Anastasia’ Probably Could Have Been Great

This post will contain spoilers. There, I'm guiltless.

Have you ever heard a premise or logline to a movie that sounded so promising that there was no conceivable way in your mind that it could fail? And were you absolutely bewildered when you watched said movie your hopes were slowly choked out of you? Well, that's what watching Don Bluth's 1997 animated musical Anastasia feels like. Now, despite being a 90s fetus and having grown up watching French-dubbed Disney Renaissance films from relatively the same time period this film was released, I had not watched Anastasia until last December. It was the Tuesday night before my final exams/presentations/seminars went into full swing, and rather than dutifully studying like a good boy trying to retain his scholarship and federal grants so he can attend an out-of-state college for half the price, I decided to watch a couple animated movies that had been on my bucket list for well over a year at that point (though I only got around to watching two).

The first was Ralph Bakshi's Fritz the Cat, and while Fritz's plot is kind of a disconnected mess, it was quite enjoyable thematically and aesthetically. I had also went in with very little context. Sure, I saw the opening scene of those dumb college girls fawning over the crow dude just cause he was African-American, I knew it was famous for being a raunchy, animated movie intended for adults, and on more than one occasion I have had to draw in Robert Crumb's style for class, but that's all I really knew about Fritz.

Anastasia on the other hand has perplexed me. I knew of it, which is to say, all I knew was the premise, that of the sole surviving heir of the Romanov Dynasty living in secret after the Bolsheviks deposed her father during the Russian Revolution. I don't recall watching it as a child. However, as I got older and began transitioning into high school, I started taking an interest in the Edwardian period, Tsarist Russia, World War I and tons and tons and tons amateur alternate history stories I found online. I specifically became curious about what led to the fall of the 300 year-old Romanov dynasty.

I even wrote a similar story going off Anastasia's premise because I was so infatuated with the idea that the Romanovs were able to survive such a violent deposition effort, just as the House of Bourbon did following the French Revolution (the first one at least). Like your average American Civil War buff, I like this idea of putting a “what-if?” spin on history that is fairly recent in the grand scheme of things, but has long since left cultural memory on account of those living at the time slowly dying off, and it seems that modern American media agrees with me on that sentiment, even if the more maintstream content is centered almost exclusively about Nazis and World War II.

But yeah, Anastasia has a premise that I'm sold on, is set in a country that I love for a bajillion and one reasons during a rather recent period in European history that I am genuinely fascinated by.

And guess what? It sucks.

Anastasia, for all that it does stylistically to emulate the story, aesthetic and pacing of a Disney film, is just mediocre, its premise wasted. It very much feels like a knock-off or a mockbuster with an extraordinarily high budget to match that of your average 1990s animated feature. Those who have watched Anastasia before reading this post probably assumed that the film's budget was remarkably lower than that of other big-budget animated movies being produced at the time, and I am here to dispel that assumption with the help of a series of simple Google searches.

For context, 1995's Pocahontas had a budget of $55 million, 1991's Beauty and the Beast had approximately half the budget of Pocahontas, and 1994's The Lion King, arguably the most well-remembered of the Renaissance Disney films according to my generation in particular, had a budget of $45 million. Anastasia had a budget of $50 million. And I am using Disney films as a comparison because Anastasia is very much trying to look and feel like a Disney film, and it's falling embarrassingly flat. Its character designs look like Disney knock-offs, its score feels like imitation-Alan Menkin, and even its use of 3D renders feels like Don Bluth was trying to 1-up the technological marvels done well by Beauty and the Beast. Hell, you can even tell based off Anastasia's character designs who fits into which archetype in your big-budget kids movie.

The titular Anya is the unquestionably feminine but nonetheless strong-willed female lead, as well as the “Princess™”, and her design by the third act of the movie reminds me strongly of 1953's Cinderella. Vlad is the obligatory comic relief because... well, cause he's older and fat. You think he's gonna be the protagonist? As much as that would have been cool, considering his background as a former member of the exterminated nobility and the emotional implications the Russian Revolution may have left on him and all, this movie had to be marketed towards kids, ergo, young leads in their twenties. But I digress. That annoying little dog-looking creature (whose name I forget even after re-watching the movie to write this) is the mute comic-relief animal sidekick who can be pushed heavily in the marketing, and Bartok is the other animal sidekick who is cute enough to be memorable and/or marketable for the movie's sake, but not cute enough to make you forget that he's technically an antagonist. Bartok's master Rasputin is self-explanatory, though that said, the over-exaggeration of facial features to make the antagonist inhuman is kind of par for the course regarding animated movies from this time and the eras preceding it. I don't feel that I need to explain myself in too much depth here, especially since the Don Bluth take on Grigori Rasputin has the emotional depth of the Sea of Azov.

However, Dmitri appears to be the exception to this rule of taking well-established Disney archetypes and making knock-off characters from them. Obviously he's the dude half of this movie's forced breeding pair on account of his youthful charm (that translates into hideously rotoscoped facial features), but I don't think he really embodies any direct resemblance to a male Disney lead or even the generic handsome princes characters of Snow White, Cinderella and The Little Mermaid. Maybe he's meant to be modeled off all those lookalike, generic handsome prince characters with a hint of Aladdin on account of his street smarts and non-royal status. Or maybe, just maybe, Dmitri's design makes him less an archetypal Disney rip-off and instead, a carefully-crafted prettyboy meant to catch the eye of the average preteen girl in 1997, one who probably listened to a lot of boy bands with pasty, broody, Dmitri-looking skinny white dudes on the cover with his exact haircut. This is honestly just speculation with no further research on my part, but I genuinely think Don Bluth was going for a 90s-boy band look for his strapping male lead, or was otherwise convinced by some focus group during pre-production that this was a sound decision. And I have to repeat myself here: it's shame that in trying to capture the essence of a moody bad boy, Bluth went the extra mile and made him as awkwardly-animated as possible, which is saying something considering how awkwardly-animated every other proportionally-realistic character is to begin with.

The animation quality of Anastasia is probably the most glaring indicator that you're not actually watching a Disney movie, not because it's awful, but because its quality varies from character model to character model. Dmitri's character design is probably the closest in resemblance to a real person, but that benefit, if you can even call it that, is immediately squandered when you put a more stylized character like Vlad (or really any one-note side character from the film) in the same shot. Members of the royal family suffer from this issue too. Their designs seem to be based off real models rather than possess the stylization Don Bluth is famous for. Nicholas II and Anya's sisters in this regard are alright since they are minor characters with only a few speaking lines if any at all, but in the case of Empress Marie, a major supporting character, she ends up animating in the same janky manner as Dmitri. I don't think Bluth could decide whether or not to go with the exaggerated caricatures he is so accustomed to, or committing to realistic character models that would likely be hard to animate consistently. The end result that was reached seems to be this loose middle-ground where everything just feels awkward and inconsistent.

I also wanna touch on the liberal use of 3D animation a bit too, because it is probably my biggest issue with this movie's overall aesthetic. This isn't to say I have an issue with 3D, and if you can make it work in your movie, then more power to you. This issue with 3D in Anastasia however is simply the fact that it does not mesh well with the 2D setting at all. This movie has all these beautiful hand-painted backgrounds for nearly every shot but once we've moved on from the abandoned Catherine Palace (why wasn't that touched at all by the Bolsheviks again? It's been a solid decade post-timeskip right?) and onto the the train, the fact that the entire locomotive itself is a CG render will not be able to leave your head, because it is just that obvious. The one time the CG isn't blatantly tacked-on is the opening shot, depicting two music box figurines of the tsar and his wife, and that's where I think this then-budding animation technology worked the best. It did not work for a model as big as an noticeably unmanned ocean liner being battered by painstakingly-animated 2D waves.

Now, this isn't to say that CG animation was not viable for animated motion pictures of the 1990s; it very well was. The Hunchback of Notre Dame uses it quite excellently throughout the film to render large crowds of Parisians as well as various exterior shots of the eponymous cathedral itself, and are perhaps the most memorable shots of that movie. Beauty and the Beast famously used the new technology to great effect as well during the famous ballroom scene. But in these two particular cases, the 3D was used largely as a backdrop to save the animators time when working on a particular shot. They were not necessarily the point of attention in the shots they appeared in; the protagonists were.

When Quasimodo is expressing his desire to attend the Festival of Fools at the beginning of Hunchback and is climbing all about the cathedral singing all angelically and whatnot, he is always the center of attention in each shot. Meanwhile, in Anastasia, many of the ship scenes during the storm are wide shots which go on for long enough that the viewer is able to identify that these backgrounds, are in fact, 3D. In all of these instances, 3D rendering was used as a crutch that made production easier. In the better-executed examples however, the directors demonstrated a degree of restraint.

Don't even get me started with that CG pegasus statue either.

Now this entire post so far has been me harping on the technical blunders of Anastasia, but if a movie looked a bit goofy at times due to inexperienced animators, the grandiose expectations of a director, time constraints or experimental technology that just wasn't there yet, it can probably make up for that with a cohesive and engaging story, of which Anastasia does not have any of these things. My first glaring issue going into this movie was how the movie introduces and frames Rasputin. There is no explanation given as to how or why he's a necromancer. In fact, necromancy seems inappropriate for Rasputin's character considering from a historic basis, he was believed to be a spiritual healer blessed by God, who I'm pretty sure frowns upon pagan magic regardless of one's denomination. I will admit that it is an interesting take on Rasputin's character given the fact that he is remembered pretty negatively by history, but with that said, if he was a necromancer, how would he have been able to convince the extremely religious, extremely superstitious Tsarevna Alexandra that he was in fact this God-blessed mystic who could cure her son of hemophilia? What could have made this work was if Rasputin was in fact used his infamously adept persuasion to convince the tsar that his dark powers were actually good powers, allowing the suspicions held by his detractors in court to appear far less warranted than they were in reality.

Regardless, the nature of Rasputin's powers go unexplained in the movie and is hand-waived by Empress Marie as “oh, we trusted him but he turned out to be hella fake lol”. It is also never explained in Anastasia how Rasputin lost favor with the Russian court, which is arguably the inciting incident of the film and happens within the first five or so minutes of its runtime. That is an issue in of itself. These thoughts immediately came to mind as I was watching Anastasia, breaking the immersion even more with each raised question gone unanswered. Would I have known Dmitri was going to be an integral character from the split-second shot where he was introduced? That's the biggest issue with the plot of Anastasia itself: it does not give you any breathing room.

The first five minutes throw story beat after story beat at you; Russian aristocrats are celebrating the 300th anniversary of the Romanov Dynasty, Dowager Empress Marie confides in her granddaughter that she will be leaving for Paris and hands her the plot-device music box, Rasputin storms in, crashes the party, curses Tsar Nicholas II, the Bolsheviks immediately attack the Catherine Palace, and Anya escapes, only to contract amnesia while fleeing. Ideally, these beats are meant for the first half of a first act, spanning about ten to fifteen minutes at most, not the first five!

The opening scenes of this movie feel insanely rushed, and it just keeps happening and happening. Rasputin destroyed the train? Fuck it, Anya, Vlad, Dmitri and Annoying Dog will just walk to the nearest port city instead, and it'll be a merry old trip where Anya's groomed for her inevitable reunion with her grandmother! Not a single beat in this story felt organic, which in turn, as someone who has watched enough family-friendly animated features as an adult to pick up on particular narrative beats, made it predictable. By the time the climactic confrontation between Anya and Rasputin had commenced, I was so disinterested with what was happening because I knew where this story was going: Rasputin was gonna die in some way, be it through hubris, being outwitted by Anya, or a deliberate fake-out (guess what, it was behind door #3!). My only respite throughout this entire movie was the fact that Anya and Dmitri's endless exchange of sarky retorts never got tired for me for some odd reason. I understand that giving both of these characters sardonic, witty personalities was meant to show chemistry between the two, but it all feels like filler dialogue when their inevitable union at the end of the movie barely feels earned, especially when I'm 20 minutes into the movie and I still can't figure out if this animated musical is supposed to be an intense historical drama or a romantic comedy. I can barely remember anything about Anya's personality beyond her snark. She's humble, pretty without trying, and a well-meaning person, but so was Cinderella. She's witty and sharp-tongued to a degree, but so was Beauty's Belle and Hercules' Megara.

Finally, no criticism of Anastasia is complete without examining the ethics behind basing a story off a violent major event in a nation's already violent history. Anyone who has read up on the causes of the Russian Revolution would be made aware of the empire's horrible mismanagement at the hands of Nicholas II. They would know that at the time of World War I, Russia was bankrupting itself, it was conscripting young men my age into a losing war without even being provided the proper equipment, and the Romanovs were effectively sitting on their hands the whole time. Listening to a grandiose opening musical number sung by the citizens of St. Petersburg bemoaning their lives under Soviet leadership all the while exchanging hopeful whispers of Anastasia's survival just puts a bad taste in my mouth.

Moreover, on the opposite side of the social hierarchy, I was hoping to see surviving members of the old regime expressing how they felt after losing their power, and how it might have changed them, namely Vlad as well as Anya's grandmother, Empress Marie. I was hoping, from premise alone, that this movie would explore some more mature themes about power and how one comes to terms with losing it. Family-friendly movies don't have to be sanitized to be family-friendly, no matter what the hypersensitive, suburban white mom may tell you. Hunchback approached themes of infanticide, emotional manipulation, racism and religious zealotry through its villain, Claude Frollo, while Beauty and the Beast confronted hypermasculinity and human cruelty through Gaston. With that in mind, why did this film, predicated on a violent revolution with horrifying consequences in the form of a civil war, purges and genocide, have end up as thematically sterile as it did?

Admittedly, what I was hoping from Anastasia was probably too much for the production team at Twentieth Century Fox to get away with, because after all, when you make media that is meant to have a broad appeal, it means you have to make thematic sacrifices mandated by corporate. Sometimes, you can't write the story you want to write. I was expecting the very same story I wrote for myself all those years ago, one of a lost royal who must come to terms with the fact that the old empire has fallen and things will never be the same again. I was hoping that the true villain would be a former revolutionary or a member of Lenin's cabinet whose hatred of the monarchy spurred him to ruthlessly pursue any Romanov survivors, and not the one-note Rasputin whose motivation we don't even completely understand.

Apparently, Bluth never considered to use Bolsheviks as the antagonist faction of the film, though at one point it was bounced around that a fictional vigilante police officer with a grudge towards the old regime would be the central antagonist rather than Rasputin. And you know what? I'd dig that! But while a communist police officer taking the law into his own hands doesn't seem nearly as menacing as a corrupt priest turned-evil wizard, I definitely think it would have been a step in the right direction. If the writers went for the “vigilante police” angle, I think that aspect alone would be enough to warrant less egregious comparison to Disney at the time, at least from a characterization standpoint. We could probably have had this officer villain be multifaceted a villain with a complex sense of justice, or even a redeemable one at that! Not even Hunchback's Frollo had that narrative luxury!

I honestly think this movie could have been great, but it could only have been great had it chose to stand on its own two feet instead. It tried to be a Disney movie at Disney's then-artistic height since the 1950s. it tried to make use of 3D, it tried to make use of diegetic, catchy musical numbers, it tried to play into appealing character archetypes right down to their designs, and it tried to copy the broad-appeal narrative trappings of your average well-received Disney film. I think what Anastasia proves the most about itself is that while the “Disney style” can easily be replicated on account of its ubiquity and impact on western culture, that doesn't mean imitating the formula will always be a successful endeavor.

#shaggy essays

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