Anastasia (1997)

directed by Don Bluth & Gary Goldman

Nicole Efford

I don’t remember the first time I watched Anastasia, or the second or third for that matter, but from the start I knew she was my princess. Not only was she sassy and stubborn like me, but she was Russian, like my mother. Russians were usually villains in movies, not heroines. And definitely not princesses, so it goes without saying that immediately I thought she was rare and amazing and I wanted to be just like her. I saw her as the connection between my favorite thing (princesses) and my heritage. I wanted to have her red hair and to name my first dog Pooka. At eight, all I wanted was to get lost in the Russian winter and walk all the way to St. Petersburg, then travel to Paris with some friendly men, one of whom was young and handsome and irrevocably falling in love with me. We would waltz on a ship sailing from Germany and live happily ever after in France, just like Anastasia. Her story was so incredibly romantic.

One day in third grade I was walking through the library when I found a book on Anastasia, the lost princess. She looked just like Anya; I couldn’t believe it. I checked the book out immediately. My legs bounced during my classes and all the way home knowing she was in my backpack, waiting for me. At that point, all I knew was that the Romanov family in Anastasia was quaint and looked kind of like mine, with four daughters and a son (although my family has two sons). When I learned they were real, and not just like the Disney princesses based on lore, I felt a charge so deep in my chest that it felt like pure light. Like my brain was conducting an electrical current that connected with my heart and the depths of my stomach and made me vibrate as a little eight year old in an elementary school library that smelled of books and pencil shavings.

Finally I was home and read about the youngest Romanov daughter, lost to time in a mystery that, as of 2005, was still unsolved. Because it was an elementary school book, it didn’t go into any detail about what happened; it just left off with a ‘her family disappeared and to this day nobody knows what happened to her,’ which looking back is still pretty morbid to read in third grade. I’m pretty positive I cried. I asked my dad if he’d ever heard of Anastasia, and he told me about a war in Russia and that the royal family was overthrown. “What’s ‘overthrown’?” I asked. “It’s when a royal family can’t rule a country anymore because the country is unhappy with them,” he said. “Oh ok. So what happened to them?” I asked. He froze for just a second, but it was a second I held on to. Then he said, “They went away to another city.” And then he changed the topic and I felt the electrical charge in me ignite.

So I read and I read. I read books I had to look up words for. I read articles with pictures that an eight year old shouldn’t see. I discovered the horrors of the woods in Yekaterinburg and a young woman calling out in the dead of night, jewels strewn with bullets sewn into her bodice. And I was unfazed. I had to know what happened. Did she live? Was Anastasia a retelling of what really happened? Did she get to grow up? Did she ever get to find love and go to Paris?

There was nothing conclusive, only hope across the decades that she was pitied and let go. After a few months with nothing new about it, the charge in me dampened and cooled. Eventually it became only a very small light, fueled by curiosity and mystery.

The answer was revealed two years later: the princess really was lost back in 1917. My dad shared the Washington Post article with me over eggs and toast before I headed out to catch the bus. It was 7:30 in the morning and that small light went out.

But I still loved her. Somewhere in my bones was a love that had been solidifying my whole life. It was a love for the story and the hope that lasted for 90 years, that a 17-year-old girl escaped family tragedy and lived a full and happy life. The hope that led to millions of people believing Anna Anderson was Anastasia. The hope that kept people wondering about it for nearly a century. The hope that led to Anastasia and a small eight-year-old girl in northern Virginia feeling more connected to her heritage than ever before. Feeling like her country was romantic and warm and full of song.

Since the Cold War, Russians have been most often portrayed as villains, idiots, sneaky and slinking in the shadows—and no matter what, always untrustworthy, always cold. Like robots programmed for evil. But my mom was so kind and warm and snuggly, and I didn’t understand why the world didn’t want to see Russians as capable of love and laughter. My aunts and uncles back in Kazan bubbled over with jokes and smiles as they made dumplings in the kitchen. Why didn’t any movie show that? My cousin, who visited us when I was eleven, begged her mom for a dog after she met mine, just like all my friends did here in America. My other cousin was watching Pokemon on his Nintendo DS the whole trip. But in the movies, Russian children were only shown as training to be spies or assassins. They were never shown as kids; just training to be villians.

Anastasia was the first, and is still one of the only, American movies I’ve seen where the characters remind me of my family and the Russia I know. Vlad, vibrant and generous and charming, reminds me of my uncle Джихангир. Sophie has a little bit of each of my aunts, who have always been confidants to my mom, who cook the best soups so full of love and warmth, who always root for their family. I remember when I was visiting Russia as a teenager, my aunt who we were staying with, Наила, would go to each room every night and say goodnight personally with a hug and a kiss. She cracked jokes every second she could and I can’t remember a single moment where she wasn’t smiling. Somebody would bring the vodka out and my mom and her sisters would dance and sing old Russian songs and the sun shone outside at two in the morning and the happiness was so tangible it felt like magic.

But the way Anya chooses her path with determination because she knows, she just knows, what the right way forward is—that’s my mom. Anya and my mother don’t settle, they don’t shy away from confrontation; they are confident because they have had to hold themselves up their whole lives.

My mother grew up as the youngest of six in a small eastern Russian town during the Communist era. Her family, like so many Russian families at the time, had little money and little time to spare, with children and chores and cooking crowding their one bedroom. So my mom, determined as ever, rode into the city as a six-year-old to take sewing lessons so that she could make her own clothes and dolls. She grew up learning how to cut her own hair and take care of the house all while learning physics and algebra as a nine-year-old so she could do well in school later. She filled her days with art, teaching herself how to paint and draw. She learned piano so well that she was accepted into a musical conservatory in Moscow, only to turn around afterward and start her own business selling vacuums with a friend. “A very successful business—I was so good at it,” she reminds me all the time. My mom has this relentless go-getter spirit that Anya embodies in the movie, too.

But, most importantly, I see my mother in Anya’s unstoppable love for her family. My mom immigrated to the United States in 1996 to marry my dad, but also to give her two kids a new life in America, complete with three new siblings for them to grow up with. A year later she had me, and taught her children how to help care for me and love me like her older siblings love her. She is a rare kind of mother, one who can rearrange her life again and again for her children without batting an eye. One who drops everything for each one of her kids no matter how big or small the issue, even so small as when I got called ‘slow’ during a soccer game. And to this day she’s constantly walking through the house with her phone, giggling at videos her siblings send her or catching up with them over WhatsApp. She flies back as often as she can for big family reunions and small family reunions alike. If she could fly them all to her house, she would. She is a five-foot force of love.

Anastasia, to me, doesn’t remind me of a tragic family history; it reminds me that family is something to hold so close to, that, even from countries or even an ocean away, you still would do anything to talk to them, because family is the most important thing you can love and nurture. It reminds me that Russian girls can be the strongest princesses, that women like Anya and my mother can save themselves and their families, that if you want to do something right you can always do it yourself. I still proudly want to be like Anya, just as I proudly want to be like my mother. And the electric charge that went out in 2007 never really went out; it just deepened into a love for my heritage, my people, my mother, and my princess, Anya.

Nicole Efford is a dog-mom first and foremost, but also a book lover and soup enthusiast. She works in marketing for a media agency in DC, and lives in Charlotte, NC, where the city’s skyline inspires her to write more.