POOR ANASTASIA: murdered by the Bolsheviks with the rest of the Romanov royal family in 1918; impersonated by a bevy of pretenders in the years to follow; exploited by Hollywood as a 1956 star vehicle for Ingrid Bergman, and later for Amy Irving, in a mini-series that seemed to drag on almost as long as the Communist regime.

And now, what many people will see as her final indignity: caricatured into a feisty animated orphan in a musical extravaganza, ''Anastasia,'' opening on Friday. It features Rasputin as a comically decomposing wizard; Bartok, a singing albino bat, and Pooka, a puppy (which must have been someone's little joke, because it sounds an awful lot like pook, a mild Russian vulgarity).

Not to get all politically huffy about a feature-length cartoon that is mainly meant to captivate children and give them a tantalizing sip of history.

Surely there was enough fuss over other attempts to animate history: Pocahontas's Barbie Doll build and kiss with Captain John Smith, the cuddly Quasimodo in ''The Hunchback of Notre Dame,'' the perceived negative stereotypes of Arabs in ''Aladdin'' and the Disney rewrite of myth to make Hercules kill Medusa and the Minotaur.