Anastasia does for history what Bambi did for nature – simplifies it beyond reality, writes Nicci Gerrard
I have a dream: that Karl Marx – whose Communist Manifesto was published almost exactly 150 years ago – should come with me to see Rupert Murdoch’s 20th Century Fox’s latest offering, Anastasia, which launches Fox Animation Studios, out-Disneys Disney and adds risible new meanings to the word “liberty”.
In this century, while Marx has lain in Highgate cemetery in London, about two- thirds of the world’s population have been subjugated to the doctrines of communism laid down in his manifesto, and then seen it all collapse.
So long here, so quickly gone. Walls fell, borders shifted and countries split apart; revolutions undid earlier revolutions. Anastasia feels like an insult to all those years – I watched it slack-jawed, and was about to call it unbelievable, except that in a few years’ time I fear it will have become millions of children’s version of that apocalyptic period; and I was about to call it funny, until I reflected that these giant film corporations both lead and follow United States popular culture in their fatal lack of empathy with other imaginations, histories, lives. With Anastasia, the key event of this century becomes a fairy story in which the princess does go to the ball after all.
Time for a few crude historical reminders: Rasputin (that spooky mixture of mysticism, eroticism and fraudulence who held such sway over the Romanovs) was murdered in 1916. A year later Tsar Nicolas was forced to abdicate. In the summer of 1918, he and his entire family were assassinated (the children watched as their parents were mowed down, then were slaughtered themselves).
Anastasia herself was stabbed many times with a bayonet. Only her dog, a King Charles spaniel called Joy, got away. The bodies were dumped in an old mineshaft and sulphuric acid was poured over their faces.
In 1992 – after the collapse of the Soviet system that their deaths ushered in – the bodies were disinterred. DNA tests conclusively established their identity. It is inconceivable that Anastasia or any of her family could have survived.
The film opens on an evening in St Petersburg in 1916: a glittering palace; a ballroom full of chiming voices and dancers who twirl in their gowns. Outside the snow falls like beauty on a Christmas-card world. This is pre-revolutionary Russia: a glorious era, you understand, where everyone is happy and beautiful, the band plays mazurkas and samovars steam, and never mind that the Great War is ravaging Europe.
The evil Rasputin storms into the room. He has sold his soul for the power to curse the Romanovs – he is no longer a man but a sorcerer, a living-dead thing with red eyes of hate burning in his skull, skeletal hands, a bat (Bartok) hanging from his shrouding cape (he is identical to Disney’s stepmother in Snow White, Jaffar in Aladdin and Hades in Hercules). He shrieks his curse and the palace cracks apart. Only Anastasia and her dear old gran escape, although they are separated and the little girl is left an orphan in a terrifying land.
Thus – two epic years rolled up in one evening – begins the Russian revolution: you never see the people rise up, never set eyes on Lenin, never hear the word Marx or Bolshevik. It’s all the devil Rasputin’s fault. For although he goes into limbo, pushed under the ice by plucky Anastasia, the great land has fallen under his wicked curse.
The world turns dirty grey. Soft snow becomes cruel and splintery. Rasputin- lookalikes with tombstone teeth police orphanages or railway stations. Everyone else is a prisoner, made to stand in lines, dreaming of the old days. The only thing that can light up their day is the whispered rumour: Anastasia is alive, oh hooray. “Have you heard the singing on the streets?” Everyone breaks into traditional Russian dance.
In 1956 Ingrid Bergman played a young woman who, confused and unhappy, so wants to be Anastasia that she comes to believe she is. Anastasia utterly corrupts this psychologically acute drama; its heroine so wants to be Anastasia and then remembers that she really is. So with a familiar Disneyesque trio (Dimitri the con man redeemed by his love, Vladimir the avuncular plump aristo, Pooka the dog) she goes to Paris to find herself, and ends up defeating Rasputin – who is by this time a grotty assortment of disarticulated bones and organs – and choosing love over royal fortune.
Children will love it; as Anastasia says: “I guess every lonely girl would hope she was a princess.” But then children love chocolate, white bread and unlumpy jam. (But parents of the world unite: don’t take them.)
Where’s history in all of this? Nowhere, that’s where. I don’t want to sound too snooty. Treat history as a pedantic antiquarian exercise and it dies on us. Shakespeare has no sense of distance and respect when he dramatises historic characters; it is as if he knows them and engages with them as living, complicated people. Increasingly, history has lost its great objective weight and become something more entrancing and intimate for us.
Biographers edge towards the novel; novelists recast history, as Simon Leys in his haunting and strange The Death of Napoleon. History catches fire because of its relevance to the present.
AJP Taylor (in his introduction to The Communist Manifesto, in fact) says that history is a “great school of scepticism”, but Simon Schama (writing about Hollywood’s nostalgic recasting of the past and of its prideful ancestor worship) agrees with Thomas Macaulay that history is part poetry and part philosophy – that it negotiates between the familiar and the strange, wonderfully mixes the analytical and the romantic.
It is not just the way that Fox uses and abuses the familiar Anastasia fantasy; that it kills Rasputin by drowning rather than poison; that its dates are addled; that the revolution becomes a singing and dancing backdrop to a mawkish love story; that the war is forgotten in all the excitement of the family affair.
What’s so disturbing is that the Identikit blockbusters now being churned out by Hollywood erase all difference in the history they use – make it so familiar and user-friendly that all that is left is Americana (in Titanic, that other Murdoch- funded film, Kate Winslet can give the finger in derisive modern contempt and Leonardo DiCaprio comes fresh from the class of 1996). So we are left with a tired and noisy collection of clichs in which nothing is foreign or threatening, nothing challenges our contemporary self- satisfactions.
Russia is already like a fictional land, full of tales and magic. For all its vastness, its history can read like a folk story, with vivid characters (Catherine the Great, Rasputin, Lenin, Stalin …). Russian artists have often treated the country as splendid source material. Napoleon appears quite casually in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, all of Eisenstein’s films are sumptuous historical pageants.
Some films or novels take off from history; Anastasia lands on it like a thick blanket, swamping it entirely. It does for history what Disney’s Bambi did for nature. There the skunk plays with the deer, and nature is tamed for our comfort. Here the universal language of kitsch suffocates all social conflict at birth. It’s like a psychological disease in which everything looks like everything else: these cartoons aren’t faithful to history but to each other.
The Arabian Nights, the Greek myths, the history of the 20th century are squashed together. The next project should be an animation of The Communist Manifesto. The Rasputin figure is ready-made for the spectre haunting Europe. You can do anything with history once you cease caring about it.