Anne Shirley – Episode 1

Content Warning: allusions to child abuse

What’s it about? 11-year-old Anne Shirley has spent her life bouncing between caretakers and the orphan asylum, but her fortunes seem to have changed when she’s called to the beautiful Prince Edward Island to assist aging siblings Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert. Only when she gets there, she’s faced with the revelation that the Cuthberts had sent for a boy, and her new life might be over before it begins.

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I cannot overstate what a big deal Anne of Green Gables is in Japan. Its incredible prolific and respected translator, Muraoka Hanako, worked on the book over the course of World War II in secret when possessing it could have put her under suspicion of treason. In the post-war period it became a staple of school curriculums and beloved by middle-school girls, which was further cemented in 1979 with a TV anime written and directed by future Ghibli co-founder Takahata Isao (which, incidentally, has a halfway decent English dub made in South Africa of all places, and which the licensor put up for free on YouTube). Publishers organized annual tours to Prince Edward Island, and if you couldn’t take one of those you could always visit the replica theme park.

Beyond that, you can see traces of Anne in the evolution of shoujo and yuri. It’s not hard to see future shoujo heroines in Anne’s spirited approach to horrible circumstances (though the narrative of the plucky orphan was already plenty popular in Japan before her), and scholars have argued that her ambitions to attend college served as an inspiration to its readers. Anne’s friendship with her “bosom companion” Diana, meanwhile, fits right into the tradition of Class-S that had been paved some decades earlier by Yoshiya Nobuko.

I’m geeking out a little here, partly because my partner (who was my generous copilot during this premiere) has a deep affection for the book and its proposition that a weird little girl has thoughts worth listening to, and indeed makes the lives of those around her better. This remake also comes as we’ve been working our way through the ’79 series, which is charming if extremely unhurried (the first episode of Anne Shirley covers, no joke, the same amount of material as five episodes of the original). But despite all this preamble, I do want to assure you all at home that none of this background is a prerequisite to enjoying this beautiful, lovingly made premiere.

This first episode is dedicated to introducing us to our young protagonist. It’s easy to write Anne off as an overly chipper optimist who can always find the silver lining, but that does the character a disservice (but is also so baked into cultural memory that some people pitched an absolute fit over Anne with an E’s exploration of the book’s darker themes). Anne’s the same as any precocious kid who wishes her life were more like the stories she reads, inventing romantic titles for the local scenery or imagining herself a doomed heroine. But it’s also clearly a protective façade that helps her deal with her abusive upbringing, and that she’s used to market herself as a desirable prospect so that she won’t be abandoned yet again. This is conveyed deftly through a focus on character physicality and a playful camera that leans into embodying the emotion of a scene: when Matthew is overwhelmed on meeting Anne, she’s rendered with a goggly fish-eye lens; when Anne has a panic attack upon hearing that she’s unwanted, the cuts become frantic and claustrophobic.

It’s smart direction, particularly because of that faster pace. This isn’t a direct remake of Takahata’s series, but it’s inevitably indebted to it while only having a 26 episode runtime. That means a lot of moments that were more meditative have to clip along, and anything that can bring us inside Anne’s mind where her monologues get snipped is a plus. Series composer Takahashi Natsuko (My Love Story!!) is handling the task exceptionally well so far, including some sparing but delightful cutaway fantasy sequences. If anything arguably suffers from the shorter runtime it’s Marilla, who’s tasked with being the practical counterpart to her shy and anxious brother.

She’s a fascinating character that one needs time to sit with, as she’s clearly spent her life having to be the bad guy in order to keep the house together (meanwhile, Matthew comes off more immediately affable and less stiff than previously, which further tilts things). Even as I say that, though, the episode still ends on Marilla coming to Anne’s aid, once again relying on those nonverbal cues to sell the character’s change of heart. It’s efficient storytelling, and while it’s different (my partner did miss the looming dread of the original opening, which uses the fact that Anne is unwanted to create a steady mounting dread) it has its own thoughtful appeal.

The rustic pastoral look and older source material might mean people gravitate toward this series, but I really hope readers will give it a chance. It’s not just that it’s historically valuable—though it is that, and I recommend the older series as well. This new series feels fresh in its own right, a bonafide wonderful slice-of-life about a character finding joy in a society that’s been built to devalue and steal from young girls. I can’t wait to watch it again.