This lavish, massively hyped animated feature from 20th Century Fox has been criticized for aping the Disney formula while neglecting the charm. But latter-day Disney cartoons themselves are often short in the originality department, and Anastasia has that down to the coldest, most calculated particle. The misfit protagonist, a plucky orphaned Russian teen who is actually the long-lost daughter of the murdered czar, embarks on an arduous journey in which she is repeatedly plagued by the machinations of an evil sorcerer, only to triumph in the end with a true identity and a true love. Sound familiar? As with Pocahontas, Anastasia is based on some historical fact, but it plays so fast and loose with the details—there's talk of a revolution, but St. Petersburg is still St. Petersburg, and in a bizarre twist, the evil sorcerer is none other than Rasputin—and is so quick to cram them into the same old story template anyway that it only underscores the fettered conservatism of today's feature animation and its reluctance to experiment. You can set your watch to the musical cues, and the songs themselves are forgettable at best, insipid at worst. With the vivid exception of Rasputin, the character design is bland: The usual almond-eyed gamine look of the female lead is back with a vengeance. Anastasia does excel in its visual beauty; filled with sumptuous settings and meticulously rendered backgrounds, it outdoes Disney in skillfully incorporating computer animation with the traditional cels. But it's simply not enough to overcome Anastasia's disappointing predictability.