Hello everyone, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I feel privileged to begin a journey through Anne of Green Gables, one of the shimmering jewels of the World Masterpiece Theater program. The World Masterpiece Theater program ran for decades, typically selecting acclaimed works of global literature, and animating them with an eye for authenticity and general appeal. The program is frankly one of the greatest achievements of anime as an art form, and tragically has no successor in the modern era – these days, adapted animation of global literature tends to focus on characters like Batman or Darth Vader, rather than children’s literary classics.

Of course, rich and poignant source material still requires delicate execution; fortunately, in its peak years, the World Masterpiece Theater program was spearheaded by the future scions of Studio Ghibli. Anne of Green Gables was directed by Isao Takahata, who comfortably stands as my favorite Ghibli director, and also one of my favorite directors period. Through films like Only Yesterday, Grave of the Fireflies, and Pom Poko, Takahata captures both the quiet beauty of natural life, as well as the unmitigated harshness of life’s cruelty and disappointment.

I imagine his instincts will be a natural fit for a pastoral drama like Anne, and he’s accompanied by his closest and best collaborators. Hayao Miyazaki serves as Anne’s setting and layout manager, while Yoshifumi Kondo is serving as character designer and animation director. Miyazaki requires no introduction, while Kondo stands alongside Satoshi Kon as one of our most tragically short-lived masters – the director of Whisper of the Heart, he was intended to be Takahata and Miyazaki’s successor at Ghibli.

Anne’s staff ranks are undoubtedly suffused with more luminaries from across anime history, but I’m eager to get to the show. The Ghibli-led Masterpiece Theater era represents one of the clear high points in anime history, an intermingling of literary substance and animation talent that has rarely been matched since. I’ve been holding off on this anime treasure trove for too long, and am thrilled to have so much Takahata work before me. Let’s get to it!

Episode 1

Ooh, lovely opening cut as we enter, with Anne and her horse’s shadow transposed against the flowers rushing past. A shot promising both comfort and adventure

And then the cut pans up to the horse and the road, and follows Anne into a forest! A remarkable cut of animation moving into depth, which of course requires constant redraws of every single foreground and background object. A dramatic display by this OP’s animator, one that maintains the flow of energy and keeps tempo with the music as the OP continues

Anne’s journey through the woods ends in bright light, and then she’s flying through the sky. Takahata is a fan of this style of mild magical realism, where a character’s energy or emotions add a flush of magic to the world around them. Only Yesterday had a similar moment, with a character’s bubbling emotions actually carrying them into the sky, in an otherwise mundane narrative

Magical realism in general has been one of the tragic casualties of modern audiences’ preference for literalism and lore. Magical realism are flourishes of magic in the mundane, impossible things that instill our world with a sense of wonder and ineffability. They are incompatible with a desire to have everything explained

This gorgeous cut through a torrent of falling leaves! Such a beautiful opening

“Matthew Cuthbert is Surprised”

We open high above a boat in Canada, headed to Prince Edward Island. A great sense of space in these establishing shots; it feels almost unfair to be benefitting from the Ghibli maestros’ scene-setting talents in a TV production

I like these ornate frames they use for certain moments. Takahata is an artist who feels no loyalty towards cinematic naturalism, in spite of his love for nature itself

And god, these establishing shots of the bay! I’m going to be well fed by this show, huh

“An elderly pair of siblings decide to adopt a young boy, but receive a girl instead.” Try to imagine that premise in the parlance of modern-day anime adaptations. Yeah

They’re certainly not skimping on ambitious, energetic layouts. I like this shot from Matthew’s perspective as his horse approaches a hill

“Matthew is not used to coming into contact with strangers, especially strange beings like women and girls!” Delightful set of expression shifts for him here, as he ranges through a variety of discomforts with an economy of eye and chin movements

The sister’s name is Marilla

A neighbor named Rachel stops by to inquire about all the goings-on

So they’re expecting a teenage boy to help out around the house

Also feeling spoiled by all these lovingly drawn mechanical objects. I know CG makes it easier to include cars and whatnot, but I’d frankly rather abandon cars than make that compromise

Dear lord these backgrounds are beautiful. I want to live in this show

Rachel is full of helpful stories about well-poisoning orphans

“I’d never dream of taking a girl.”

Lovely yet emphatically lonely shots of Anne at the station, using variable elements to cast her as isolated within a larger space – first the floor of the station with this aerial shot, then the sky above with this low-angle one. Miyazaki’s layouts already demonstrate a fully-developed understanding of cinematographic form

It seems like this episode is mostly going to concern a girl being bored at an empty train station, and I am absolutely here for it. My last two years of film viewing having taught me that everything great about modern slice of life was already in appearance in the films of Takahata and Miyazaki, so we couldn’t be in better hands for a story about the simple beauty of a lazy afternoon

More beautiful shots of the town and countryside as Matthew makes his way to the station

Matthew notices Anne, but is looking for a boy, and so sits down to wait

More great layouts for this separation. There’s a subtle comedy in them stranded at opposite ends of this platform, while the layout emphasizes the extreme distance between them

Anne said she preferred to wait outside because “there was more scope for imagination.” She’s gonna be great, huh

“Maybe they were out of boys of the brand you wanted.” I’m still in recovery from how much watching every seasonal premiere blighted my perception of the medium, but this gentle, quietly funny, and beautiful show is certainly helping

“I’d made up my mind that if you didn’t come for me tonight, I’d go down to that big wild cherry tree and climb into it to stay all night.” Yep, Anne is great

Anne’s bright, optimistic attitude and imagination immediately disarm Matthew. Her charm is conveyed as a rush of flower petals, framing Matthew’s face as he accepts this turn in circumstance

Anne takes charge immediately, overwhelming Matthew with her scattered knowledge and opinions. Seems like she’ll be running this house in short order

“It’s terrible at the orphan asylum. There’s no room for imagination.” Anne is so thankful and so happy to be adopted that I can’t imagine Matthew will be able to backtrack now. Presumably he’ll be Anne’s defender when his sister complains

A charmingly lopsided dynamic between them. Matthew is entirely overwhelmed by Anne’s rambling, and meekly asks her permission to start the ride home

The initial riding sequence is quintessential Takahata, focusing on natural incidental details like the rhythm of the horse’s steps, and matching that to the music to create a kind of general melody of life in the countryside. Takahata and Miyazaki’s mutual adoration for the beauty of the countryside clearly elevates Anne’s idle moments, while Miyazaki’s particular fondness for traditional European architecture makes him an ideal choice for this show’s setting manager

Neat three-plane shot of the countryside as they pass through, with the uneven hillsides presenting three tiers of cascading landscape

“It wouldn’t be half so interesting if we knew all about everything…” Anne is a young girl with infinite curiosity and imagination, now in the home of two elderly people who’ve lived entirely quiet lives. I haven’t read the source material, but it seems safe to assume that she’ll help both of them find a more energetic and curious relationship with the world around them

Anne even has an extended speech about how she’s good at not talking, if she puts her mind to it

“People laugh at me because I use big words. But if you have big ideas, you need big words to express them, right?” Exactly right. Vocabulary enables not just greater nuance, but a greater ability to articulate and even initially think complex thoughts. Our conscious mind does not exist apart from our education and experience – the more you read and learn, the greater your ability to conceive of or reflect on new ideas

This truth is made awkwardly clear when you contrast this narrative with a lot of modern anime. Many light novel adaptations are written by people who only watch anime and read light novels, and thus their imaginations tend to be harshly limited by the conventions of those mediums. If you want to be a great thinker or writer, you necessarily have to first be a great reader, and read more broadly than your general comfort zone

I still vividly recall that moment in the first Jobless Reincarnation episode where the protagonist said “I have hundreds of books at home! All light novels, though,” and I pretty much instantly understood the worldview and creative limitations of the narrative ahead of me

Anne clearly sees herself in the bedraggled, lonely trees of the orphanage, and wishes that like them, she could be transported to a place with countless peers to interact with, and thus flourish

“I felt sorry to leave them behind this morning.” Presumably she also means her fellow orphans

“Just now I feel pretty nearly perfectly happy.” Yeah, you’re gonna have to convince your sister, Matthew. How could you possibly break this girl’s heart?

Anne is ashamed of her red hair, green eyes, and freckles. Interesting. The novel was originally written in 1908, and Montgomery apparently drew on her own childhood experiences – I doubt we’ll be getting into issues of immigration, but timing-wise, it wouldn’t be surprising if she were mocked specifically because of her Irish features

“It will be my lifelong sorrow.” I love how her language is so deeply informed by the books she’s read – she’ll jump from a melodramatic declaration like this back to her bright usual affectation, because it’s all inherited from literature

We pass through a beautiful flowering canopy, with plenty of multilayered shots creating a shroud of pink around our travelers

And once again, the beauty of the natural world unfolds into pure magical realism, as Anne imagines herself dancing through a flurry of fairies and blossoms. An astonishing animation highlight in an already-beautiful episode

There’s a charged moment of solemnity at the end of this sequence, as Anne looks back at the canopy with a wistful look in her eye. Moments of beauty this all-encompassing don’t happen too often in a lifetime

Both Takahata and Miyazaki’s works, for all their intense visual splendor, tend to also contain this hint of melancholy – an understanding of just how rare and precious the sights they are constructing truly are, reflective of their real-world antipathy towards man’s corruption of nature

The colors impossibly grow even more rich and appealing as we approach the evening

Anne says she feels an ache in her chest “whenever she sees something royally beautiful.” Matthew confesses he has never felt such a thing

“I’m always sad when pleasant things end. Something pleasanter might be coming after, but you can never be sure. And it’s so often the case that it isn’t pleasanter.” Yeah, I feel like this work must have spoken to the Ghibli pair pretty directly

Here, her words have a particularly ominous ring for Matthew, as he knows his sister awaits

And Done

How delightful that was! Anne of Green Gables was even more gorgeous than I’d hoped, and an exemplary demonstration of all the things I love about Takahata’s work. In spite of the far tighter constraints of TV production, this episode’s backgrounds offered an absurdly generous array of beautiful vistas, complemented by some ambitious flourishes of camera movement and effects animation. And the story so far is charming in its own right, with Anne rapidly establishing herself as a creative and strong-minded heroine, and the pacing allowing the simple beauty of something like waiting at a train station to shine. Plus that slight tinge of world-weary melancholy that I love so much! This was an extraordinarily good premiere, and I can’t wait to return to Green Gables.

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