Anastasia leaving Disney Plus has nothing to do with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine
The removal of the movie is tied to Disney's complicated deal with 20th Century Fox
Aux News Anastasia
As Vladimir Putin goes forward with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, many corporations are choosing to cut all ties with Russia. Publix and Kroger took Russian vodka off its shelves. Netflix shelved its adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, despite Tolstoy dying before the Soviet Union even existed and being an anarchist. Kirill Sokolov, a Russian filmmaker with Ukrainian roots, had his film pulled from the Glasgow Film Festival, too.
So when Disney+ Updates, an unofficial Twitter account that shares Disney Plus news, wrote in a since-deleted viral tweet that Anastasia (that, by the way, is not a Disney movie) was removed from the streamer in the United States, many believed the removal was part of the growing ban of Russian and Russian-related products.
The account later clarified that its removal is unrelated to the current war, but it was too late. Disney+ Updates failed to take into account that people on Twitter don’t tend to be big on fact-checking.
After all, that’s how thousands believed that Jeremy Strong of all people would be starring in a Stuart Little remake; Twitter users failed to notice that instead of being tweeted by Film Updates, the “news” came from “Film Updtaes.” (@filmupdtaes has since been changed to @kendilfroy because too many gullible people fell for it.)
As IndieWire explains, Anastasia leaving Disney Plus is tied to Disney’s deal with 20th Century Fox, “an extremely complicated deal that involved many films and shows that were co-produced with other studios.”
But if you’re outraged over the news because you just wanted to watch Anastasia and hear Liz Callaway sing “Once Upon A December” again, don’t worry. It’ll start streaming on STARZ on March 18, per What’s On Disney Plus, that first reported the news of Anastasia leaving the Disney streaming service.
Disney also recently announced that it will stop releasing films in Russia, including upcoming Pixar title Turning Red.
60 Comments
Some of the anti-Russia stuff is a little absurd. If bars and liquor stores already bought the Russian vodka, the Russian vodka companies have their money. I was listening to an interview on NPR last night about a popular NY establishment near Broadway started by Soviet defectors long ago who are now dealing with the fallout of Putin’s misadventures, simply because they have “Russia” in their name.But any bar that sells “White Ukrainians” or “Kyiv Mules” in lieu of “Russian” and “Moscow” and gives that money to organizations helping Ukrainian refugees is A-OK with me. And any western company still doing business in or with Russia can get fucked.
Doing business WITH Russia, sure. But doing business IN Russia is trickier. I was reading about IKEA closing their Russian stores, and I was trying to figure out what that will do, besides render some civilians unemployed. This isn’t a democracy, where they can convince people to vote Putin out. There’s no upside to an action like that.
You can’t allow Putin to hold all Russians hostage, though.
You can’t carry on business-as-usual with Russia – you just can’t. I’d be much more concerned with the innocent Ukrainians who are dying than the innocent Russians who go unemployed.
Except that way, way more innocent Russians will go unemployed than innocent Ukrainians will die.
I don’t see a downside to that.
This mentality that Putin alone is holding Russians hostage is what allows horrible events like this to happen because it waters down a complicated geopolitical situation to a Harry Potter-esque battle of good vs evil. It also brings to light how the media is twisted to make people think certain countries are Bad (Russia, China) while other countries engaging in human rights abuses are Good (Israel, Saudi Arabia).Why is it okay to boycott Russia, but not products made within Israel’s illegal settlements on Palestinian territory? Why has the US government tried to pass laws making boycotting Israel a crime?Why are they trying so hard to get you to focus on a single conflict thousands of miles away, while ignoring all the other conflicts?
I know this may be hard for you to fathom, but it’s possible to care about Ukrainians AND Palestinians at the same time.
I know! But many of us do!
For someone whose argument is ‘foreign affairs are complicated’, you don’t seem to really grasp that point.
Or are you just playing ‘Whatabout?’ and don’t really give a fuck?
True, but instead you likely get Russians with limited access to info on the war in the Ukraine just knowing they are out of work and the evil west did it, just like Putin said they would. Inconvenienced Russians are more likely to side WITH Putin as a result, rather than blame him.
The upside is that people in all the other countries on earth will feel good about going to Ikea. It’s strictly PR.
There’s not supposed to be an upside. We civilians and businesses are pawns or tools in this new unconventional form of the first salvos of modern war: socioeconomic politics & cyber-warfare. To be sure, economical tactics have been used before, sometimes to very small local scales but to great effect (e.g. literal scorched earth campaigns).The point here is that, indirectly or directly, our governments are involved in a war, and no war has ever been won honourably (probably), and none have ever been pretty.Despite international conventions, like the ban on unconventional weapons (chemical and bio as an example), it is foolish for us to believe that we will ever wage a war in which there is little to no collateral damage – deliberate or otherwise (though I’d argue “collateral” ceases to be just that when it’s deliberate, but whos’s to say). It doesn’t make it ok… But there’s a reason war sucks. It isn’t just death and destruction: it’s throwing people under the bus, and losing a bit of your soul in the process.
If bars and liquor stores already bought the Russian vodka, the Russian vodka companies have their money.Yes, obviously they couldn’t go back in time and prevent themselves from buying Russian vodka before the sanctions were placed (or before it became unpopular to buy Russian products). But buying vodka from a Russian company isn’t a thing a liquor store/bar does just once.
The problem with that is most of that liquor is “Russian” in name only. Many US, Canadian and European distributors make “Russian” vodka. Like how not all yogurt is Greek or cheese Swiss. People pouring out Stoli are pouring out a Latvian product.
I’ll quote the relevant part of the OP’s comment:Some of the anti-Russia stuff is a little absurd. If bars and liquor
stores already bought the Russian vodka, the Russian vodka companies
have their money.The implication there is that boycotting Russian companies doesn’t matter because you already gave them money in the past. This is nonsense, since absent the sanctions/ostracization, buyers would have continued giving these Russian companies money, but with the sanctions, they will stop giving them money, and the Russian companies will thus be harmed by the sanctions.It doesn’t help that he pivots in the same paragraph to talking about a totally unrelated issue, which is that of people misidentifying a business as being owned by either pro-Putin Russians, or business that operate in Russia, when in fact the business is neither.
My bad, I mean to reply to Soylent.
I got fukking Kinja’d!
KINJA?!!!! *incoherent screaming*
‘The implication there is that boycotting Russian companies doesn’t matter because you already gave them money in the past.’
or it means dont throw away a products you already bought but dont buy more from them in the future
Throwing away the already-purchased product obviously doesn’t refund the money you paid for it, but it can still be a symbolic action: you’re so upset/annoyed by the company’s behavior that you’d rather sacrifice what you already bought than actually use it. I don’t know if it’s even possible to quantify how effective such a symbolic act is, but I wouldn’t dismiss it out of hand as totally ineffective.
Personally, ill fully dismiss the symbolic gesture but if you want to create garbage and waste your businesses money more power to you.
either way , my point was that they never said or implied ‘boycotting Russian companies doesn’t matter’
Wait…my fries are still French, right?
You some kind of commie socialist justice warrior, libtard, do-gooder?
All fried potato sticks made in the USofA are called Freedom Fries™ or American Fries™(2003)! Freedom! Eagle! War! America! Woooo!
Brava
They might as well call them White Freedoms as performative as it is.
That’s why they need to also give the money to aid groups helping Ukrainians run out of their homes.If there’s any way they can give it to people actively fighting to defend Ukraine, I’m down with that, too. I just don’t know how legal that is.
Yeah, especially as the vast majority of Vodka in the US does not come from Russia.
“And any western company still doing business in or with Russia can get fucked.”Or state. For instance, Alaska legislature refuses to part with Russian investments funding the Permanent Fund Dividend. This controversial amount? 0.2% of $81.5 billion of total investments.
That’s right, Alaskan lawmakers along with our Trump-ass kissing governor, refuse to let go of $163 million in Russian investments despite having a banner year in oil sales and a budget surplus of $1.6 billion. Because Gov. Dunleavy doesn’t want the public to think he’s jeopardizing Alaskan PFD checks (he really wants to get re-elected).
https://www.alaskasnewssource.com/2022/03/02/alaska-legislators-call-permanent-fund-divest-162-million-russian-assets/https://gov.alaska.gov/newsroom/2022/02/17/governor-dunleavy-re-emphasizes-priorities-for-the-2022-legislative-session/
I think if the last couple years has taught us anything it’s life is easier if we just cut each other a bit of slack. We’re human, we don’t have all the right answers immediately, and most of us are just doing the best we can.
So a war starts, Russia/Putin is clearly in the wrong, and people are just looking for something, anything they can do. For some that’s travelling over to Ukraine and fighting with the resistance (we’ve all been invited to). For others it’s pouring the Russian vodka they have down the drain. If it makes sense to them, let them have it. We all didn’t want this war to start, but since it has we all just want this war to end ASAP. If symbolic gestures and related PR campaigns are a byproduct, then so be it.
The idea is to punish FUTURE revenue of Russian suppliers, like in the alcohol business example you describe. This has “tangible” effects on economic indexes, stocks and investment. I put that in quotes because people should know half of that financial/macroeconomic stuff is arbitrary anyway….. So when something upsets the established order, even when highly localized to a single area like Russia, and causes massive perturbation, it causes too much uncertainty. Markets don’t like that. Hence the boycotts and asset seizures.
Not that there’s much reason to watch this Disney-lite romantic fantasy anyway. I really, really want to love Don Bluth’s films more, but they tend to be very uneven in multiple areas of production; even the two that I really like (The Secret of NIMH and Titan A. E.) have rough patches.
Since we had never seen it, we almost watched it just a few days ago, but decided we would rather watch Encanto again. Had we known it was leaving, we probably would have watched Anastasia. I appreciate that Netflix tells you that a movie is going away soon. We don’t have Starz.
Does anyone have Starz?
Surprised nobody’s asked wtf it is (with an lol added).
I love the novel that NIMH is based on (O’Brien’s Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH) in part because I’ve worked at the NIH and know the NIMH institute, but I could never get into the movie because of the mystical things Bluth added for some reason. The novel is completely rational (if you can accept the concept of superintelligent rats created by experiments).
I greatly enjoy the book, too; if I had read it before watching the cartoon, I probably would have been extremely put out by all the mystical mumbo-jumbo added by Bluth and co. When watching the movie now, I have to accept it as almost an in-name-only “adaptation”, but on those terms I’m still able to go along with it, weirdly out-of-place magic and all.
“The novel is completely rational…”Are you Russian? LOL! I’m messing with you.
Well I mean…how can you not?
Don Bluth was supposed to be the guy who saved animation and, in the end, the Disney he left did a better job at that than he did.I think it comes down to the fact that he was an excellent animator but not a great storyteller (or a good businessman, while we’re at it!) As you said, even his best films are pretty patchy with some real pacing issues as opposed to Disney’s best, like Clements and Musker, who really know how to build a story and can really hit character bits just right.Honestly, his best stuff were his video games because they didn’t really build a story, it was just one almost unrelated sequence after another.
‘Don Bluth was supposed to be the guy who saved animation and, in the end, the Disney he left did a better job at that than he did.’
very true but i dont think they would have if he hadnt given them a run for their money with a land before time
omg no way, I love Anastasia, it’s magic and properly adventurous.
The strongest thing Anastasia has going for it is that the music is absolutely fantastic. “Journey to the Past,” “Once Upon a December,” and “Paris Holds the Key to Your Heart” are up there with the best of the Disney musicals of the 80s and 90s. Also doesn’t hurt that they had the monumental vocal talents of Liz Callaway and Bernadette Peters to sing them, though it’s a pity they didn’t give Angela Lansbury a number to do, too.
Yes, it was incredibly smart of Fox (I don’t think it was Bluth even though he does have lots of ties to live theatre) to hire Ahrens/Flaherty to do the songs—and good timing as I believe it was the same year they wrote their masterpiece score for the Broadway musical Ragtime. Definitely the smartest animated hire for a score since Disney hired Ashman/Menken (and really, among many weaknesses, one of the big weaknesses about all those other wannabe-Disney musicals from that era were simply not having great scores—sometimes even when hiring otherwise decent songwriters for whatever reason they never seemed concerned with doing their best work for “a cartoon”). Disney actually had approached Ahrens/Flaherty I believe around the time of their first major success, Once On This Island—which of course has ties to The Little Mermaid—but nothing came of it. And of course now Disney+ is doing a live action movie of Once on this Island. It just always seemed weird that the other attempts to do animated musicals (including Bluth’s with Barry Manilow) never thought to go look at up and coming musical *theatre* composers—which of course had been such a successful formula for Disney with Little Mermaid.
(I should add when Dreamworks were formed and they were making Prince of Egypt, which has a pretty great score too, they did go to musical theatre, hiring Stephen Schwartz to do music and lyrics. And of course Eisner felt that was a betrayal–he had been lyricist for Menken’s music to Pocahontas and Hunchback and had been given the role of music and lyrics for Mulan–and wrote a couple of good songs that have leaked–but then was quickly fired from it. And replaced by the composer of pop hit Break My Stride which always seemed beyond weird to me, even if his Mulan songs are decent enough)
I like Anatasia a lot but part of that is nostalgia—as a teen I tried to see all of the animated films, no matter how bad (Quest for Camelot UGH) and also had a lot of affection for Don Bluth despite what a mess most of his films are. And out of those non-Disney animated musicals, Anastasia was by far the best. But tonally it’s almost as off as Hunchback of Notre Dame (which is still probably a better film) and Rasputin and particularly Bartok are 100% typical Bluth creations. The stage version, while not perfect, was smart to just cut them completely and go for a more “realistic” (I use that lightly) villain and story (actually the same can be said for Hunchback’s stage version).
I will say (to earlier comments) I think Secret of NIMH is a masterpiece. And I saw it first as a kid after knowing the *wonderful* original book fairly well (I think my first experience with it was having it read to me). The changes didn’t bug me as a kid (they bug me a bit more now) but I think they work *for the film*. It also has one of Jerry Goldsmith’s best and most underrated scores (which often sounds like a Stravinsky ballet) and it’s the rare Bluth film where the slapstick “cartoony” elements actually (at least for me) work and don’t take me out of the film.
I could go on and on about his films but of course his biggest commercial hits were with Spielberg and it sounds like Spielberg often interfered with them. He had a weird attitude that he wanted to make films to rival classic Disney (and picking Bluth made sense—despite made largelhy in a garage, NIMH’s elaborate animation and art really does blow away Disney’s product from that time—which of course was one reason Bluth left them). And yet he also apparently had a rule that none of the films could scare his young son and was constantly worried about going too dark (did he not remember Pinocchio?) most famously chopping up Land Before Time heavily. I’m not saying it and American Tail would be better if Spielberg hadn’t interfered, but… (and I do like both films though they show a lot of the later Bluth issues coming to light). I did always feel bad for Bluth that he never had the film rights to those early films—and so we got the non Bluth sequels and spin offs to Tail, NIMH and the hilariously 25 or whatever video sequels to Land Before Time.
And then, post-Spielberg, we just get into the endless weird Bluth stuff, starting with All Dogs Go to Heaven. I think Dogs and even the much hated Thumbelina have enough good (and WEIRD) stuff to make me like them, but it’s much harder to excuse Rock-a-Doodle and Troll in Central Park and Pebble and the Penguin (which Bluth removed his name from) are just pretty terrible, and also give no indication of Bluth attempting to appeal to the mass audience of the classic pre-war Disney films, being barely tolerable even for many kids.
So yeah—as I ramble away—Anastasia was a breath of fresh air. And Fox gave him his own studio, a decent budget (which had always been an issue for him) etc. And then of course they put him on Titan AE (which started off without Bluth) and, while I do like the movie for the most part and think it suffered mostly from coming out at a time when no one wanted a teen-oriented sci fi animated film, the bubble just burst and Fox’s goodwill after the decent success of Anastasia went with it.
Bluth has always had a habit of wanting cartoony (in the old school funny animal way) characters who often seem out of touch with what people wanted in animation from the time. He had plans to do Beauty and the Beast and artwork and story ideas from it have been released (they dropped the project when it was announced Disney was doing an adaptation) and from what I recall they already seemed way too focused on all the cute animal sidekicks and their slapstick hijinks.
So while I have a ton of affection for Bluth, I am always amused by more recent nostalgia pieces where people claim their films from that era were better than Disney and also much much darker (again, I would defend NIMH as certainly better than Disney in the 70s and early 80s—funny it came out in 1982 when we got a number of my fave non-Disney, Western animated films including Last Unicorn—animated in Japan of course—and Plague Dogs).
I think it should also be pointed out that Bluth wasn’t working solo—his partners animator John Pomeroy and *especially* Gary Goldman (who I think is still planning to work on him if they ever do Dragon’s Lair) deserve a lot of credit/blame. Goldman actually became his co-director from All Dogs Go to Heaven on (including Anastasia). Pomeroy left at some point in the 90s and I think went freelance, mostly working with Disney, but his character animation is wonderful and also always easy to identify—for example he animated Justin in NIMH as well as John Smith in Pocahontas and man do they have a lot of the same mannerisms considering one is a rat.
the right-wing influencer sleuths are on the case
Learnt about backlight animation yesterday and every shot from any Don Bluth work seems to have it now. I cannot unsee it!
OMG, is that how they made Tron? I thought it was some kind of toxic chemical they used; like in most movies of the era. Goddamn, that’s a lot of work. I have new respect for the creators.
What I don’t understand is when the light seems to be coming from a cel, not the background. How can it be “backlit” when that’s impossible?
They thin the paint and or scrape the film so the light from the projector comes through. It truly is an art form getting the paint and film thin just so.
Anime has made an artform of this, a technique (partly to hide the low budget animation) that the great director Osamu Dezaki started with his TV anime in the 1970s–including light flares on the lens, etc
The Anna Karenina cancellation has absolutely nothing to do with Tolstoy. It was being filmed in Moscow and St. Petersburg and was being made by a Russian-based production company.
Anastasia is by no means the best animated movie I’ve ever seen but goddamn is it pretty.
It wasn’t popular because people can relate more to a pale woman talking to animals more than a loose take on actual history. LOL!
It’s a bit insane to laugh at what you said. 🙁
But it was pretty popular–the most successful non Disney animated film of that era.
I don’t think I’d release a film called “Turning Red” in Russia no matter what’s going on.
people want to parse what is or isn’t legitimately anti-russia, and they want to get into what hurts russia vs. the populace. Fuck em all. Saying “fuck em all” isn’t saying “nuke em all” it’s saying fuck em all. So they don’t get IKEA, they don’t deserve that clean of a break-up, fuck em.
I love this movie. It may have been the first move I ever saw, but I’m not certain; it’s definitely one of my most seen. If it’s not on Disney+, can we get it on HBO Max or Netflix or something? I just wanna watch it at my leisure.
As the article notes, it will be on Starz in a few days. You could also just buy it on Vudu if you don’t want to deal with service hopping.
The Land Before Time is still Bluth’s best film. I swear the movie could make me well up even if I watched it today.
despite Tolstoy dying before the Soviet Union even existedWait, did the Soviet Union reconstitute itself and that’s who’s currently invading Ukraine? I really need to keep up better with the news, because unless that’s what’s happening I’m not sure how it’s relevant.
The author thinks the Soviet Union is just a fancy name for Russia
So no, though part of the problem is that Putin is a Soviet KGB man through-and-through. He’s been very vocal about thinking the dissolution was a mistake, and conquering Ukraine plays right into that narrative.
The thought that Putin might love this movie amuses me greatly since he has a real tenuous grasp on history.