anastasia contains something that has been lacking from all of the recent disney releases . . . 
 ( especially hercules ) . . . 
emotion . 
all the wacky characters voiced by celebrities and fantastically animated adventure sequences aren't going to hold anyone's interest unless there is an emotional core to hold it all together . 
not since disney's beauty & the beast has there been such a compelling animated film with interesting characters and drama that works . 
the story of the romanov family , the rulers of russia , and their downfall begins the film . 
anastasia , one of the daughters , narrowly escapes the mad monk rasputin ( voiced by christopher lloyd ) with her grandmother ( voiced by angela landsbury ) . 
but anastasia gets lost , and grows up with no memory of her royal origins . 
the grandmother lives in paris , hoping to someday find her beloved anastasia , the only member of the family to survive the russian revolution . 
a young woman named anya ( voiced by meg ryan ) runs across dimitri ( john cusack ) and vlad ( kelsey grammar ) , who are trying to put together a scheme to create an anastasia to fool the grandmother and get the reward money . 
they pick anya to pose as their princes , and of course , it is soon revealed that anya is in fact the lost anastasia . 
dimitri realizes that he can never win her love as he is a commoner , and meanwhile , rasputin is not dead , and plots his revenge against the last romanov . 
the plot is actually quite well structured . 
there are a lot of complexities that may have to be explained to the kids later , but it moves along fast enough that they'll never have time to be bored . 
what this really means is that the adults won't be bored by it either . 
there is a great deal of banter between anya and dimitri that is very funny , and their relationship develops quite naturally as the film progresses . 
there is , of course , lots of comedy for the kids , including rasputin's pet bat , bartok ( hank azaria ) , who is easily the funniest thing in the film . 
however , the comical scenes never distract from the drama , but are worked into the plot almost seamlessly . 
the animation is gorgeous - the characters seem to come to life through the talented animators . 
not since beauty & the beast have animated characters had so much life to them . 
even without the voices , they act . 
the musical number in paris is a show-stopper , with some of the backgrounds rendered in an impressionist painting style . 
as with all recent animated features , there are songs , however , these songs do more than just provide fodder for top-40 singers to get on the radio ( although there are three of them during the end credits ) . 
the songs are all very catchy , and advance the plot , instead of just being showpieces ( except for the paris number , but that's so much fun , it's okay . . . ) . 
i can't reccomend anastasia highly enough . 
it's a wonderful film that ranks right up there with other animated classics . 
kids and adults alike will enjoy it , and it's also nice to have a quality animated feature film from another studio besides disney .