Anastasia (Animation)/Headscratchers

• What was the deal with place Rasputin went to when he died? Was it actually inside the Earth? Was it another dimension?
  • It was the center of the earth without doubt. Why? Er...because the Kool-Aid Man is red?
  • It was limbo. Rasputin went there because he couldn't die properly until he had killed every one of the Romanovs as a part of the deal he made with "the dark forces".
  • Okay. So why is Limbo full of singing bugs? I mean, it would make some sort of sense if they were realistically-sized insects infesting Rasputin's rotting body, but they're not. They're bat-sized... things... that just happen to hang around between Earth and Hell. What are they doing there?
    • Singing and dancing.
• Okay, let's move all the historical inaccuracies aside and assume that this is some kind of alternate universe. But the train station scene in the beginning... Who the heck would call an eight-year-old girl Anastasia in an informal situation? Yes, on some kind of ceremony, she would be referred to as Grand Duchess Anastasia Romanova, but here, in the fray, she would just be Nastya.
  • Convenience for the western audience no doubt. This troper had no idea that "Nastya" was the informal version of "Anastasia" and she doubts that many children who see the movie would, either.
• In the orphanage Anastasia was taken to, wouldn't they have taken that shiny gold necklace away from her? In that time period I doubt she would've been allowed to keep it considering how douchey most orphanage directors were back then.
• A little girl who looks exactly like Anastasia Romanova is found dazed and confused at a train station and NO ONE figures out who she is? She actually tells Dmitri "I was found wandering around when I was eight years old." That and seeing how many people were at the train station, how many people could have heard the Dowager Empress's cry of "ANASTASIA!" Seriously, how did nobody realize who she was?!
  • • If I saw that, I would say, "You know, she looks so much like Princess Anastasia. Weird, Huh?" not, "That must be Anastasia." No one really expects anything interesting to happen to them.
  • Well, everyone was kind of busy: Either getting the hell out of Russia or getting the good loot while it was still around, depending on what side you were on. Not to mention all the other yelling, the sounds of the train station...
  • Additionally, Anastasia was a popular name for Russian girls born around Easter, meaning "she who will rise again." It would be like hearing someone shout "Harry!" in a train station in England -- you wouldn't assume they were calling for the prince. Or for the Chosen One, for that matter.
  • Old train stations can be noisy if millions of people are trying to get out of there. Plus, the Dowager Empress didn't say 'GRAND DUCHESS ANASTASIA'! She just pronounced a name, for Rasputin's sake! AND there was no TV, the pictures were black and white, and most of the population didn't have access to even read a newspaper, so yeah...
  • Even assuming those who found her knew she was really the Grand Duchess, they probably didn't want to send her to her death and just ignored the fact.
  • Besides the necklace, which really doesn't prove anything, there is just a little girl wandering around some small town, they probably didn't have any reason to think she was Anastasia.
• So, if Rasputin needs to kill off all the Romanovs to fulfill the curse, why is the Dowager Empress apparently exempt?
  • • ... Senior's discount?
    • Or possibly it's because she's only a Romanov by marriage.
      • ...And her biological clock stopped a long time ago.
      • I think Rasputin meant people who were descended from the current Czar's line, and the Dowager Empress was his mother, so she wouldn't qualify.
    • Exactly. He specifies "the end of the Romanov line". Empress Marie wasn't of the line, so even if she'd still been young enough to have more kids later, none of them would have counted.
• Why does Anastasia's hair change length throughout the film? During the "Anya" scenes, while some of it is tied up, there is clearly a loose portion in the back that's about shoulder-length. Then, from the scene on the ship onwards, it's suddenly waist-length. That never made sense to me.
  • Clip-in extensions?
  • I think it was trying to show the passage of time. The "You Can Learn To Do It" sequence could have taken long enough for her hair to have grown out to waist-length. Her ponytail is arguably longer at the end of that sequence.
  • I have hair that goes past my waist, but when it's clipped up properly, it barely brushes the base of my neck. Totally possible that her hair grew out, but was kept in place with hair clips. Or bobby pins, or whatever she used.
  • Actually, if you look closely, the ponytail seems to be secured by a braid rather than a hair clip. So she could be braiding a good bit of it and wrapping it around.
    • That's pretty much it. I've done that hairstyle myself, when mine was long. From the look of it, she twisted it, pulled it up, and literally tied it in a knot, which is where the short bit of ponytail comes from. It's a convenient way to put it up without needing hairpins or anything, which a poor Russian orphan probably wouldn't have had access to.
• Vlad. Even though he is a genuinely nice guy, he was in on the plot to get the Dowager Empress's reward money. I find it rather funny that he is willing to deceive his "cream puff" whom he clearly loves very much. When Anastasia finds out about the con, Dmitri gets all the blame, but Vlad doesn't even get a mention. The next time he is seen, he's dressing up fancy for the party celebrating Anastasia's reunion with her grandmother. Talk about getting off the hook real easy.
  • Puts another dimension onto his character, doesn't it? He's an aristocrat turned con artist who is boning the Dowager Empress's cousin/assistant. With those connections and experience, it would be easy for him to weasel out of any tight situation.
    • This. He explicitly tells Anastasia that he was a member of the Imperial court. The Empress probably knew him. Maybe she figured he'd been caught up in the swindling plot not for money, but for a way to escape Russia.
    • That was probably part of their plan all along, actually. Given his former position in the court, he was hoping that he could lend credence to their claim that Anya was the princess, and that his word would be enough to help assuage any doubts the Dowager had.
  • I actually thought he was gay, and that his relationship with Sophie was just one of the usual super-flirtatious gay-guy straight-lady friendships that were pretty typical around that point in time. This is totally irrelevant, I know.
• The movie begins in 1916, and you soon skip ahead ten years to 1926. St. Petersburg was renamed Leningrad in 1924.
  • Probably either because St. Petersburg sounded better in the musical numbers or they didn't want to go too much into the Soviet thing. Or Did Not Do the Research, it could be any of the above.
    • Actually St. Petersburg was renamed Petrograd in 1914 and Petrograd was renamed Leningrad in 1924. It wasn't even accurate in 1916. Other than that, spot on.
  • The movie was made for kids who wouldn't know that bit of history and would be confused if the names were suddenly changed.
• Why doesn't the Grand Duchess just get a morganatic marriage with Dimitri? The Dowager Empress seems to like him well enough, and she seems to really want to keep Anastasia in her life. I don't imagine that there'd be any other problems, considering that the half-breed peasant-spawn won't be corrupting the inheritance pool. And that's assuming that Anastasia isn't herself the Pretender/Head of House (I'm not that familiar with Russian inheritance law), in which case she could do whatever the fudge she wants. I mean, yeah, it makes sense that Bluth wants to go the heartwarming "love over money" route, but the contrived stuff has to make sense at least. It's probably silly trying to apply logic and aristocratic house law to a movie that attributes the Russian Revolution to a demonic curse. I'm still curious as to whether there's a way to resolve it.
  • Anastasia wouldn't inherit the Russian throne even if by some impossible miracle the Romanovs were restored -- the inheritance law was male-only, and a male line of succession from Alexander II existed (and exists to this day) even despite the deaths of Nicholas II and his family. So no, neither she nor the Dowager Empress would be in the position to change the rules. That being said, the movie-verse is already far enough removed from anything resembling real history that anything can happen there.
• Dimitri realised that Anastasia was the real thing when she remembered how she had escaped from the palace. Why hadn't he told her this? When he said in the song that only he and Vlad could pull off the scam, I thought he was referring to the fact that they could provide extra details that other fakes couldn't. So, surely, such a piece of information - known only by him, the Dowager Empress, and Anastasia - would be invaluable? Maybe he just forgot to tell her, but when the entire point was to be convincing, that seems like a pretty stupid thing to forget.
  • He was knocked out right after their escape and fell pretty dramatically, I think we were meant to assume that he also had memory loss, due to the head trauma.
    • And when she said what had happened it jogged his memory? That does make a lot of sense, but it could have been made clearer (unless I just wasn't paying enough attention).
    • Also, this troper thinks it wasn't a question of memory, but of belief. At the beginning, Dimitri is only concerned with presentation; he and Vlad have extra info, yes, but that generally entails how to act the part as well as facts (as shown in "Learn to Do It"). He may really not have thought that "How did we escape?" would even come up as a question, and up until Anya remembers, he still doesn't believe that she's the real thing. Once she does, guilt kicks in.
    • I don't he was ever shows guilt over wanting to scam the Empress so that wouldn't be the reason for him not to tell Anya she was the lost Duchess. He had however fallen in love with a girl that had just become unattainable for him. He may have not wanted to lose her and in the process didn't act in her best interests.
  • Perhaps its one of those little details that was forgotten? Dimitri and Vlad were essentially teaching Anya everything about Anastasia/her former life, and in all the details and weeks/months that it took to do this, Dimitri forgot to include that part in his teachings.
    • • There's also how Dmitri had a visible Oh Crap moment when Sophie asked the "how did you escape" question. He forgot to tell Anya about the escape, or he had forgotten to tell her how they escaped.