Anyone who grew up in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, would tell you that by the winter of 1997 the glory days of the Cine Variedades were long gone. What had once been a palatial movie house with velvet curtains, a wide lobby and marimba concerts before each show was now a rundown establishment where rats were rumored to run between patrons’ legs, and college students sneaked in for loud make-out sessions followed by cigarettes, despite the bright neon “No Smoking” signs.

But anyone could’ve fooled me the weekend before Christmas that year, when I sat down to watch Fox Animation Studio’s “Anastasia.” Warm buttery popcorn and Coke in hand, I sat dazzled by the images conjured by the animators in Don Bluth and Gary Goldman’s film.

Given that I thought myself a very mature 11-year-old with a taste for classic Hollywood films and the finer things in life, I lost myself in the story about how the young orphan Anya seeks to reclaim her title as the Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna Romanova, youngest daughter of Czar Nicholas II, who was killed during the Russian Revolution.

I was particularly enthralled by sequences in which the young Anya dreams of finding her grandmother, the Dowager Empress, living in exile in Paris. Growing up as a gay boy in a conservative country that has become one of the most violent in the world, I knew even then that, like Anya, I’d have to find a home elsewhere.