Anyone who’s watched Anastasia knows that it’s a special film. A cinematic, gorgeous classic for countless reasons, with the romantic relationship between Anastasia and Dimitri at the top of the list. Most people who grew up to read (or write) romance novels can also probably pinpoint the exact moment when they realized the hate-to-love trope was a delicious treat that’d always hit.
There are other classics (like Beauty and the Beast), but none hit with the same gravitas as Anastasia. Between the music and the quiet moments, every beat in the film feels like it’s a journey. (I was going to try using another word here, but how can I? Siri, play “At the Beginning” by Donna Lewis and Richard Marx.) There’s also something to be said about what starts as a ruse—Dimitri’s motives in the beginning versus where we see them in the end and the invisible string that threads them together, with the detail that he was the boy who helped them escape during Rasputin’s initial attack.
The delicate combination of all these tropes, the voice work from Meg Ryan and John Cusack, as well as the animation, which sells the emotions beautifully, make Anastasia the timeless feature it’s always been.
I’ve sat down to write this article a few times in the past few years, but something always halts me from getting it right. Something I can’t exactly pinpoint, still to this day, about what makes the movie so special. Why is this romance one that I keep going back to? Why do these characters hit so hard? But it quite literally has it all, and that’s why it’s so hard to sum up, because as a kid, I never realized how much these tropes would hit even deeper down the line.
The scene where she’s fidgeting with the papers and he takes her hand to whisper that everything will be okay? The way he looks at her as she steps out in the blue dress for the first time? Every single time he holds her? It’s a breathtaking showcase of how love begins, slowly at first, then all at once. For a movie that’s only an hour and thirty minutes, it surprisingly supplies plenty of emotionally poignant beats to ensure that the love story hits as it’s meant to be. The familiarity with the tropes certainly helps, but it’s the execution that makes Anastasia so profoundly magical.
There’s also much to be said about how the animation allows for every emotional scene to stick the landing because we can see so much of their feelings written on their faces. Every push and pull, every stolen glance. It’s all about the actions and the dialogue and how seamlessly they weave together to create something sensational. I think a lot about how the relationship between Dimitri and Anya feels real, even when it’s so disconnected from history. That’s not what makes it gripping here, but rather the film’s careful means of drawing out their love story as the best thing they both find amid their search for something else. The realization that home isn’t always a place, but it’s the people. A person. And it’s always these stories that stay with longtime romance fans because they make us believe in the fact that these aren’t just fiction, but the reality of how love begins and endures.
First Featured Image Credit: ©20th Century Fox