Disney's Anne Frank/Trivia


 * Banned in China: And just about everywhere else, for that matter.
 * Executive Meddling: This was originally going to be finished by 1986, and be a much darker PG-rated piece with no songs and Anne was actually going to die in the end. And it was written by Harlan Ellison. However, after The Black Cauldron flopped in 1985, Disney execs and Molly Ringwald's ego stepped in and retooled it completely again. Also a case of What Could Have Been.
 * Hey, It's That Voice!:
 * Miep is voiced by Jason Alexander, Horror as Ludvig, Samantha Baker as Anne, Maverick as Peter, Madonna as Sgt. Olga, Tim Curry as Churchill, Robin Williams as Franklin D. Roosevelt (uncredited, but unmistakable), Frank Oz as the ghost of Kaiser Bill, Carl Spackler as Bob the Zombie, and Prince as Kaiser Billy's singing dog.
 * This is also true for the foreign versions of the film: in the Italian dubbing, for example, Sgt. Olga is voiced by Amanda Lear. In the 2010 Japanese DVD/BD edition, Anne is voiced by Maaya Sakamoto, and Peter by none other than Takuya Kimura.
 * Keep Circulating the Tapes:
 * Almost all of the master tapes, cells, and original drawings were reportedly destroyed shortly after the film was released. You can find a full copy of it on pirated tapes of Bambi 2002.
 * The Latin American cut has only one known film reel to have survived, it resides in a museum in Santiago, in a room unavaiable to the public. It's screened only once a decade and you have to pay an exorbitant fee to see it.
 * The only DVD release thus far is a 20th anniversary edition for the Japanese dub in 2010 (which, ironically, also contains a new dub). It exists because the anime versions of The Diary of Anne Frank are very popular in Japan, which has very few Jews and hence very little cultural sensitivity to what happened during the Holocaust.
 * Old Shame: If you talk to any of the actors mentioned on this page, as well as anyone who worked at Disney in the late 1980's, they will totally act like this movie never actually existed and that they don't know what you're talking about. Go on, try it!
 * Throw It In: Madonna came up with Sgt. Olga's surname.
 * What Could Have Been: There were some reports of adding an attraction based on this movie to Disney World; namely the German Pavillion of EPCOT was to have added an Auschwitz-related attraction. The reports did not have any details on what exactly the attraction would consist of other than it would be "designed to be entertaining, but educational at the same time". However, before more details could be discerned, the severe backlash from the movie resulted in the project never being mentioned again.
 * Pete Townshend was considered for composing the film's score, but he backed out because he was too busy recording The Iron Man. It makes you wonder how it would've turned out.