Journeys of Initiation: Femininity and Self-Stylization

Sometimes, the observation of popular releases and their impact on audiences leads to profound insights into the mechanisms of history – more particularly, of recent, palpable history – which might possibly deliver understandings of times yet to come. One such popular release is the animated musical movie Anastasia from 1997, produced and directed by Don Bluth and Gary Goldman. Based on Marcelle Maurette’s (1903-1972) eponymous play from 1952, which drew on the story of Anna Anderson, the best known of the many Anastasia impostors and/or impersonators who emerged after the Russian imperial family were killed in July 1918, and which brought Maurette international recognition by being subsequently adapted into the 1956 American period drama movie of the same name directed by Anatole Litvak with a screenplay by Arthur Laurents, the 1997 animated version of Anastasia, released by Fox Animation Studios and distributed by 20th Century Fox Animation Studios, became in time the most profitable release of the combination, earning over 140 million USD worldwide over a production budget of 53 million USD. On the one hand, the historical background of the 1990s after the collapse of the former Soviet Union and the renewed sense of hope in the world instilled by the end of the Cold War, inspired an atmosphere of awe related to cultural products reinvigorating Russia and questioning the subsequent communist era. On the other hand, Anastasia’s animation style, its musical score and the manner in which they are combined to reveal another type of a “princess’ story” significantly contributed to its initial success and consequent status of a reference animated movie, as the main character Anya is not the typical “damsel in distress” marketed by popular Western animation companies, waiting for the marvelous prince to save her from her – self-induced or not – difficult situation, but a strong-willed young lady, determined to figure out her way in life and to find clues to the only thing connecting her to a past she cannot remember: a pendant with the inscription “Together in Paris.”

Origins and Development

The animation movie’s plot follows Anya’s quest from Sankt Petersburg to France’s capital, loosely based on Marcelle Maurette’s eponymous play from 1952 which had quickly turned into the French playwright’s most famous – and lucrative – creation: as previously mentioned, Maurette’s Anastasia was adapted into a movie of the same name in 1956, after having been translated and modified by Guy Bolton (1884-1979): subsequently to its mise-en-scène in England by Mary Kerridge (1914-1999) and John Counsell (1905-1987), it was shown on television in 1953, prompting Vivien Leigh to recommend it to her husband Laurence Olivier for a London production at the St. James’s Theater. Despite St. James’s Theater’s reputation of an unlucky theater, it kickstarted Anastasia’s success, as it opened in New York on Broadway at the Lyceum in early 1955, followed by presentations at Falmouth Playhouse in Massachusetts with the Mexican actress Dolores del Río throughout 1956 and continued with a tour of seven other theaters throughout New England. 20th Century Fox won the acquiring of the adaptation rights of ca. £20,000 (currently approx. USD 223.000) for the movie in 1956, over Warner and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which resulted in a live-action movie version of Anastasia, directed by Anatole Litvak (1902-1974) and written by Arthur Laurents (1917-2011) with Ingrid Bergman (1915-1982) in the lead-role. The initial play and the live-action movie were inspired by the story of Anna Anderson (1896-1984, real name Franziska Schanzkowska), the best known of the many Anastasia impostors and/or impersonators who emerged after the Imperial family including the last Tsar and Tsarina of Russia, Nicholas II and Alexandra, and their five children Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia and Alexei were killed on 17. July 1918 by Communist revolutionaries in Yekaterienburg, Russia, with the location of the bodies unknown until 2007.

The animation movie expands the historical setting of interwar France from the play and live-action movie to Russia’s Sankt Petersburg in the first half, and follows Anya’s, Dimitri’s and Vlad’s journey to Paris in the second half: in Paris, Anya is supposed to encounter the Dowager Empress Maria (Marie) Feodorovna and to convince her that she is legitimately the surviving Anastasia, so that Dimitri and Vlad can collect the advertised reward. The animated version includes a series of fantasy elements and deeply inaccurate historical aspects, such as the presence of Grigori Rasputin (1869-1916) who had been a Russian mystic and self-proclaimed holy-man, best-known for having befriended the royal family of Nicholas II, the last emperor of Russia, through whom he gained considerable influence in the later years of the Russian Empire, but appears in the animation release as a sorcerer and former royal advisor exiled for treason, who has sworn to destroy the imperial family and its legacy. In reality, Rasputin was already dead when the Imperial family was assassinated. In addition to this, Bluth created the idea for Bartok, the albino bat, as a comic sidekick for Rasputin, in order to move away from the dark history of real-life Anastasia and the Romanov dynasty towards a more light-hearted romantic comedy. At the end of the movie, Bartok even falls in love with a lady bat, thus adding to the general sense of the animation release Anastasia as being a fantastic story which shares with historical events only superficial data. Furthermore, in creating Anya’s/Anastasia’s character, Bluth and Goldman took over story elements from George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion (1913) as well as its most notable adaptations in the eponymous, highly acclaimed movie from 1938 (with Leslie Howard as Professor Henry Higgins and Wendy Hiller as Eliza Doolittle, under the direction of Anthony Asquith and Leslie Howard, on music by Arthur Honegger), the 1956 musical My Fair Lady (with book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner and music by Frederick Loewe) and its critically and commercially extremely successful 1964 movie adaptation (directed by George Cukor, based on a screenplay by Alan Jay Lerner, with Rex Harrison and Audrey Hepburn in the lead-roles as Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle, respectively), in the process of molding the peasant Anya into a young lady of – ostensibly – noble origins.

Journeys of Initiation: the Question of Self-Discovery

On the background of the 1990s with its fresh sense of liberation and unlimited possibilities, in the 1997’s animated version, it is Anya’s/Anastasia’s character that takes over the narrative development. In previous adaptations of the Anastasia topos, the focus was mainly on three elements: the impostor dimension of the impersonation, the greed of those keen on the reward money, the resulting conflict between the Dowager’s painful investigation and the ruthless cynicism of those exploiting her hopes of reunion with at least one member of the assassinated family. Within the dramaturgic logic of such an approach, the Dowager’s disappointed expectations added additional layers of suffering to the loss of her beloved family while highlighting the cruel realities of Imperial Russia with its blatant inequalities while simultaneously reflecting the post-WWII pro-Communism ideologies held by French intellectuals. In Bluth’s and Goldman’s version, the focus moves towards the main character Anya’s quest for her past and her family as well as family history, which is not motivated by greed – as the ending clearly indicates – but by a very natural instinct. Therefore, the animation movie follows Anya’s exploration of her absent memories: not incidentally, the two major songs A Journey to the Past and Once Upon a December, since the movie’s release having turned into popular songs in themselves, address precisely her questions, her determination to find the truth and her indistinct memories.

In classical journeys of initiation, the male hero sets off on a pathway of self-discovery during which he must overcome hardships and gradually learn to achieve results therefore metamorphosing slowly but with certainty from an innocent young man with no knowledge of the world whatsoever into a full-fledged grown-up: self-secure, self-sufficient, and responsible, able to actively contribute to the community he belongs to. The various rites of passage he encounters are meant to strengthen him physically, mentally, emotionally, and to give him a univocal understanding of who he truly, unabashedly, is. On the contrary, Anya’s journey leads her to the past: bereft of any memories or sense of who she might be apart from the years spent in the orphanage, Anya does not remember anything. It is suggested that her amnesia is part of the human complex emotional-mental construction to protect the individual from extremely traumatic events which might jeopardize his/her survival by inducing despair and its related ills such as the inability to act, to protect oneself, to move forward, to look for shelter and essential necessities. From such a perspective, Anya’s resolute but slightly carefree attitude is both encouraging and motivating: eventually, it is irrelevant whether she does find the answers to the quest or whether she is the missing Anastasia or not; what matters is that she starts to grasp the potentialities of her inner self and that she can work towards manifesting them in real life. Up to the climax in which she defeats Rasputin, she had been repeatedly in situations in which she had either to be “given signs” – as when she had to decide which way to go, to the left to the fishermen’s village where the orphanage headmistress had found her a job in a can factory, and Pooka, the pet-turned-stray dog miraculously shows her to head, instead, to the right, to Sankt Petersburg – or to be rescued – as when Dimitri catches her from the fatal fall into tempestuous waters under Rasputin’s evil mind-control. As it turns out, Anya’s journey was not so much about her past as it was about finding her own self and her own inner potential. The decision to elope with Dimitri, as romantic as it might sound, appears in the dramaturgic logic of the animation movie as a liberation and empowerment statement for girls and women all over the world: it does not matter if one is born into royalty or not, as history can strike at any time and take away literally everything – what really matters is staying alive and true to one’s deep sense of self.

Symbolic Secondary Characters

Throughout her development, secondary characters serve several roles: Dimitri, as a boy and as a young man doing his best to make ends meet in the Communist era, saves her life twice and shows her, repeatedly, which direction to follow. Anything but a stellar protagonist, he, too, evolves from a petty thug into a mature man, able to make grounded decisions which would allow him, in the long run, to keep on living with self-respect and in dignity. Interestingly, it is through his encounter with Anya and their subsequent interactions that he manages to glimpse inner positive qualities within himself such as kindness, compassion, generosity, which will guide him in his own developmental trajectory.

Likewise, Rasputin is the absolute antagonist, ridiculous in his groundless hatred towards the imperial family, revealing, at the same time, the deep-seated contradictions in Imperial Russia and in the interwar Communist Soviet society, religious entanglements included. The Dowager and Vlad are both symbols of two eras: the past with its glittering remainders perpetuating itself dimly and condemned to extinction in the new world based on the values of equality and freedom while allowing everyone to live a life of equanimity among others, and the future sprouting from that very past without either glamourizing or demonizing it. Fierce pragmatism is the new code-phrase, as well as clarity of goals and priorities. There are moments when the past and the future seem to collide – like the encounter at the Palais Garnier and Dimitri’s consequent kidnapping of the Dowager to force her to meet Anya –, but the future is always posed to win, as Anya’s final decision proves.

Historical Inaccuracy and Mass-Media

Lastly, the Russian Revolution is depicted rather neutrally, which might be connected with the rising leftist tendencies in the 1990s North-American cinema, animation included, and the French origins of the Anastasia topos: paradigm shifts are necessary and inevitable, but they do not need to be brutal. Obviously, for regular Russian citizens, the Bolshevik Revolution has not brought significant changes in their everyday life. Nevertheless, a return to the previous era is both unthinkable and undesirable. Therefore, everyone tries to come by and make the best out of the given situation: similar to the French Revolution, largely regarded as the inception point of modernity and as its ideological foundation with the ideals of “freedom, equality, brotherhood,” the Russian Revolution did not deliver what it had promised, being followed instead by decades of senseless atrocities and chaos.

The French “joie de vivre” praised in the song Paris Holds the Key to Your Heart towards the climax of the animated movie is a welcome contrast to the rather gloomy A Rumor in St. Petersburg from the beginning of the movie, but at the same time contains subtle indicators of the superficiality encompassed in apparent luxury as mindless consumerism and civic indifference. Products of popular culture are supposed to be contrarian and promote alternative values to prevailing historical trends and tendencies: one might argue that Anastasia’s major contribution to mainstream media rests in its depiction of female identity as a self-quest for self-understanding, self-development and self-expansion, and not its questioning of historical events, particularly given its factual inaccuracy. Among the numerous princesses and female characters in the annals of animation releases, Anya stands out spectacularly as a liberated empowered lady, able to pursue her own pathway in life and to inspire others to do the same.

Towards a World of Universal Benevolence

The Anastasia topos is a charged one: on the one hand, it echoes deep collective memories of blatant social inequalities, limitless luxury in contrast with bottomless poverty, and the historically materialized necessity to erase them; on the other hand, it delivers undeniable proofs of the meaningless brutality of masses led into destruction and bloodshed without substantial changes resulting in the aftermath – in fact, recent history shows that quite the opposite tends to happen after the demise of strong leaders, as autocratic and despotic as they might have been. Additionally, its popularity connects to the main site of development in the initial iterations – interwar Paris – as the intellectual-cultural center of the civilized world having emerged and flourished from the chaos of another history-changing event: the French Revolution. In critically observing the animated version and the live theatrical performance of Anastasia, two dimensions stand out: firstly, the feminine presence gaining contours and individuality against the background of the revolution(s), serving as a soft reminder that change does not have to be violent but can, in fact, occur in tones of peaceful conflict, both necessary and healthy; secondly, the shifting world order from a West-dominated one towards a pluri-centric one which would allow for parallel systems to coexist, perhaps even harmoniously, rather than relentlessly fight each other.

Eventually, in Bluth’s and Goldman’s version, Anya’s journey is not about socioeconomic gain: it is about understanding her own self. In 1997’s Anastasia, this personal journey reflects the preoccupations of the time, with feminism becoming increasingly intellectually relevant, questioning the male-regulated discourses of individual development and registering female life trajectories as equally important in the definition, perception, processing, appropriation and reiteration of role-models.

There is some almost transcendental grace in the gradual realization that upheaval does not have to be violent but can borrow smoothness from the femininity of transitions, organically unfolding as step-by-step processes and therefore allowing for events to unravel towards final goals which might transcend initially envisioned outcomes. The ending, in which Anya-turned-Anastasia chooses to elope with Dimitri instead of enjoying the privileges of her socioeconomic position, is, I would argue, the crucial secret beneath Anastasia’s enduring popularity despite the conventionality of the animated medium: life is a flow of events and there is always something which our limited consciousnesses cannot grasp. Releasing control and moving forward open-mindedly without constraining ourselves to what we already know grants the limitless potentialities of the world and of history to manifest naturally without our often violent intervention. It is in line with this vision of a more feminine, pluri-centric or rhizome-like, existence that the emerging global order seems to constitute itself: if we do not want a repetition of history as it cyclically reveals itself since times immemorial, we need to allow a feminization of history to enter the universal circuit as a complementary structure to the one familiar so far and largely promoted as unique and uniquely possible, stemming from the multi-millennial experience of the human race: not a replacement, but a peaceful harmonization of two essential architectures within the same conglomerate. In building up a coherent narrative of mutual acceptance, respect and understanding, without any attempts at overpowering each other, the world could start to move towards a multi-dimensionality of co-existent systems, instead of fiercely competing and continuously fighting each other. Ever since 1997, things have changed tremendously on the global stage, but the lessons of the past remain the same with the clear message, despite ideological deviations, that unless we learn and shift the paradigm towards universal benevolence, peaceful harmonization and creative permission for the organic manifestation of events, humanity is doomed