KONNICHIWA ANNE: BEFORE GREEN GABLES

DESCRIPTION

CAST

ANIME DramaAkage no Anne
MOVIE AdventureAkage no Anne: Green Gables e no Michi
ANIME DramaAnne Shirley

REVIEWS

• 

  Flueckli

  74/100
  The touching and often heart-breaking story of a brave young girl, who overcomes many difficulties in her life.

  

  Introduction/Story
  The story of Anne is the story of a brave and young red-haired girl. Due to the loss of her parents she is left as an orphan with the Thomas family. The Thomas family with their children Eliza, Horace, Edward, Harry and later on with Noah the youngest child. Their parents Bert and Joanna, or as Anne would call them uncle and aunt, try their best to do the best for their children and even for the little Anne, but as the situation is full of hardships it is very difficult for them while they’re trying to cope with their problems and stress in their own ways. With little to none income, they struggle with poverty caused by ongoing dismissals of Bert from working. To forget these struggles he falls back to quite an unsightly behaviour and alcoholism, which worsens their situation furthermore. Joanna trying to hold the household together, tries to cope with her frustration and discharges it not rarely onto Anne. Whose duty is to help in the house and support Joanna with the chores, but as the other children are often not behaving the way one would wish for and are so causing further disturbances to Anne and Joanna. Anne tries to cope with this situation in her young years in her unique way.

  _Imagination._

  Anne, everyone you met has a happy seed named Anne Shirley in their heart. That seed will
  grow to a flower, and that person will be happy. ~ Anne's poem

  She tries to think of more pleasant things, while she helps at the house, which ends not rarely in spacing off in her daydreams and needing more time than she’s supposed to have for doing it. When not having done the chores in time, it’s always the cause for her scolding by Aunt Joanna.

  The family has to overcome difficulties along the way and as sometimes everything seems to be hopeless, somehow a way is found to overcome these. At its roots lies often the impact made by little Anne and her unique and positive way of thinking. As time goes by, Anne meets new people and gets to them even if others were not able to. Her approach to others is unusual, which allows her to break through given social conventions, often lead by her telling them what her little mind imagined to be the reality or the cause for specific behaviour or happenings. More than once being offered to go to another family, to lead a happier life she’s either not allowed to go by her aunt, who is not able to let go of her, or even Anne refuses to leave the Thomas family as she knows how much of a help she is actually to them and that she is loved by them, although it isn’t shown too often to her.

  Julius Caesar once said: “Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once.”
  ~ Julius Caesar, Act II, by William Shakespeare.

  You might wish sometimes that she had chosen to go instead of staying, though.

  As she meets people along the way who knew her parents, the image is manifesting that Anne’s parents were two incredible people who left their impact on others, too.

  Anne’s later grown love for knowledge, rises further and she tries her best to learn new things, often being taught by others or books. Not rarely the written words, which are quoted during the series leave their impact on Anne itself. These make a nice addition to the series in a great manner.

  Even though life is painful and hard, if you follow her, you will make a beautiful path. ~ Howitt’s song

  Some later parts of the story have been left out in this review on purpose, as it might deteriorate the experience of watching the series as they would be major spoilers regarding the end of the series.

  Background/Relations:
  Konnichiwa Anne is the later published prequel of the series Akage no Anne, which is an adaption from the book Anne of Green Gables, published in 1908 by the Canadian author Lucy Maud Montgomery. Konnichiwa Anne tries to tell the story of Anne before she came to Green Gables based on the celebratory novel written by the Canadian author Budge Wilson published in 2008 in relation to the works of L. M. Montgomery.

  Lucy Maud Montgomery published also other works on Anne Shirleys’ later years as Anne of Avonlea (16-18) in 1909, Anne of the Island (18-22) in 1915, Anne of Windy Poplars/Willows (22-25) in 1936, Anne’s House of Dreams (25-27) in 1917 and Anne of Ingleside (34-40) in 1939. There have also been other works in which Anne is in her later years and plays a lesser part as they focus on Anne’s children or other family friends as Rainbow valley (1919), Rilla of Ingleside (1921) and The Blythes Are Quoted (2009). Source: Anne of Green Gables Wikipedia

  Anne of Green Gables (1979), the first release under the World Masterpiece Theater title.

  Akage no Anne was published in 1979, while Konnichiwa Anne has been published 30 years later in 2009 as part of the World Masterpiece Theatre as well.

  As I haven’t read the books written by Budge Wilson, nor Lucy Maud Montgomery, this review of the series has to be seen as a stand-alone and not as a description of how well it adopts the story from the original work to the anime. Although it might include slight biases as I’ve watched Akage no Anne, when I was a young child, which was one of the reasons, that brought me to watch this series in the first place. I got curious.

  Nonetheless, I refrain from making a decision on how well it fits to the prior work Akage no Anne or how smooth its’ transition is as it would need me to rewatch more than only a few episodes from Akage no Anne as it has been quite a long time since I watched the original series.

  Furthermore, I haven’t seen other related adaptions like the latest one from Netflix “Anne with an E”, or others like the many films, other literature, radio productions, stage productions, television movies and series and web productions, which means I cannot give a comparing opinion on these as well. What I can say for sure is, that the original book Anne of Green Gables made a huge, almost unbelievable, success in its’ time and later on and that I’m quite curious to read one or various works of Lucy Maud Montgomery now and that I plan for sure to do so.

  Animation
  Animation-wise it must be said that the two series production must have been very different as techniques in the time of 30 years might have changed a lot.

  I experienced the animation as soothing for the series underlining the important points of it. Nonetheless, don’t expect any flashy animations as one might know from some newer works, but it is still quite enjoyable.

  Anne Before Green Gables Opening Theme

  As 30 years went by, the staff changed a lot and other voice actors were chosen for the characters, too. Although, one would have liked a comeback of old voice actors, it is indeed quite understandable that this might not have been possible.
  The same goes for the animation staff, while the studio name stayed the same: Nippon Animation
  While looking into the staff, no flashy names popped-up, but some funny things popped up as other works the staff has been working on, i.e.:

  • Katsuyoshi Yatabe (Director): Boku no Pico (o.O),...
  • Michiru Shimada (Series Composition): One Piece, Shugo Chara, Little Men,...
  • Takayo Nishimura (Character design): 5 centimeters per second, Hoshi wo ou kodomo,...

  Wrap-Up:
  Konnichiwa Anne tells a touching and often heart-breaking story of Anne’s life, which is for sure not an easy one. Her positive attitude towards all the problems she has to face are able to brighten up one’s day. As the first part is mostly on how to be happy, even if bad/difficult things happen, the second part changes more towards unexpected things to happen. But as bad things happen, good are to come for sure as well. For some, it might even be possible to get a more positive attitude towards problems for themselves.

  Firstly, you will become humble. Then, you will put in more efforts to others from looking down at you. Therefore, one is not relied on how he/she looks like. No matter how one looks, the most important is his/her heart. ~ Hagedy

  Overall the series is not the best ever made, but Konnichiwa no Anne is for sure enjoyable, especially if one enjoys slice of life and drama stories. With the target audience directed towards kids, it is exactly that. For sure a series, which I would show my kids (if I had any already) as it tells a story with lots of value in it, from which they might be able to learn a thing or two for their life.

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• 

  Juliko25

  76/100
  Before Green Gables: a valiant attempt to relay Anne's early years, but held back by inconsistencies and cliches.

  For anyone who hasn't read my LiveJournal reviews of two of the Anne of Green Gables books—the original one by LM Montgomery and the prequel, Before Green Gables by Budge Wilson—my history of discovering the Anne series is kind of weird. I actually wound up discovering Anne through the 2009 anime adaptation of Before Green Gables, called Konnichiwa Anne: Before Green Gables. For the sake of brevity, I'm just gonna keep calling it Konnichiwa Anne. Discovering this anime led me to the Budge Wilson book and then Montgomery's book afterward, along with some of the latter's adaptations. I still maintain that the 1979 anime is the absolute best adaptation of Anne Shirley's saga. I watched Konnichiwa Anne when it first came out in 2009, but after a while, the fansubs for it stopped, and the only subbing group that completed it gave it really, really bad subtitles that were completely riddled with basic mistakes, even going so far as to give characters the wrong names at times! After that, the anime fell into obscurity...but then a YouTube channel called AnimeLog, which was sponsored by Nippon Animation and other anime companies, began streaming English subbed episodes of this on their channel, along with other shows back in 2021. As of this writing, Konnichiwa Anne is no longer on said channel, but luckily someone had the foresight to rip the episodes and post them on torrent sites, so I was still able to finish rewatching the series! That being said, before ARR's subs finished the series, a blogger I used to know watched and reviewed the series on a weekly basis. He had mixed feelings on the show as it went on, and was rather harsh on some episodes. After rewatching the series as an adult...there are some things about Konnichiwa Anne that I agree with him on, but I also feel that Konnichiwa Anne as a series deserves more love than it got.

  For the most part, the anime follows the same basic premise as a book, and much like the book, the series spends most of its time on Anne Shirley and her early life living with the Thomas family. Interestingly enough, the anime chooses not to adapt the chapters that focus on her parents, Walter and Bertha, along with Anne's early infancy, and instead starts from when she's 5-6 years old onward. Weird choice, but I can understand wanting to focus on the main character right away. Similarly, it shows Anne's life with the Thomases before being adopted by the Hammonds and then when she's at the orphanage, ending as she's on a boat headed for Prince Edward Island. Remember how in some of my reviews for WMT shows, several of them tried to be faithful to the novels while expanding on them and adding stuff for the sake of fleshing things out? Konnichiwa Anne diverges from the original book quite a bit, and admittedly, its attempts to expand on certain characters and stories wound up detrimenting the series.

  I don't want this to be a negative review, as I do genuinely enjoy Konnichiwa Anne and what it has to offer, flaws and all, so I'll focus on the positives first. While the animation isn't as good as Porphy no Nagai Tabi before it, it still manages to get the job done. The backgrounds are beautiful and detailed, fitting the feel of the series, and the character designs manage to strike a good balance between being cartoony and realistic. True to WMT, there's no exaggerated cartoony faces or characters going chibi. The soundtrack is also really nice as well, from the well-sung opening song by Azumi Inoue to the lovely woodwinds, harmonicas, and fiddles that really make you feel like you're out in the Canadian forests. It's atmospheric and knows when to fit the mood, be it sad and solemn or cheerful and peppy...though there can be some mood whiplash when the very peppy ending song plays right as an episode ends on either somber or dramatic notes.

  The characters are where things start to get murky. Since Budge Wilson's book creates whole new characters and personalities out of whole cloth, they don't have to worry about being faithful to LM Montgomery's legacy because a lot of them, namely the Thomases, were never shown in the original Anne books to begin with. This comes with its own pros and cons, both in how the anime not only adapts them to screen, but makes changes in said transition. Since the series has Anne spend most of her time with the Thomases, we get to see their family dynamic play out in detail. In some cases, the new additions to the characters and their personalities make them feel more nuanced and well-developed than how they were in the books. For example, Horace was just a bratty kid in the book, with his brothers being even more one-note, but not only do all the kids get more screen time in the anime, Horace as a character is actually shown to change and develop, especially later in the series. Ironically, the most interesting character in this entire anime is, of all characters, Bert, the guy who abuses his wife. The creators did an amazing job of making this hopeless drunk come alive and give him just the right amount of background and depth to really make him steal the show whenever he’s on. Hell, he’s even far more interesting than Anne herself, and...that should not be. Not every character gets this treatment though, and some of the subtle nuances they had in the book got cut out of the anime. For example, when Mrs. Thomas scolds Anne for using the vegetable brush to clean a rug, Anne works for the Egg Man to make money to buy a new one, and when Anne gives her a new brush, Mrs. Thomas is genuinely grateful and even apologizes for not being nicer. In the anime, she uses the brush, but not only does she not thank Anne for it, she even complains about it. Say what you will about how Mrs. Thomas is in the book, but I don't like that the anime got rid of some of the nuances to her character that humanized her because in doing so, the way they depict Mrs. Thomas as continuing to be mean to Anne even when Anne tries to rectify her mistakes makes it really hard to sympathize with her situation as a whole, even taking the time period and how orphans were generally treated at the time into account.

  Which makes for a good segue into how the side characters are treated in the anime. Anne's classmates in Marysville don't get a lot of focus in the book, which is justified because Anne has to work once she's done with school, so she doesn't have time to really make friends. The anime tries to remedy this by having Anne interact with her classmates more, which on its own would be fine, but a lot of the stories around them and the additions made to them are just cheesy rehashes of stories that were already done in other media before this, namely Emily of New Moon. Boy wants to be a farmer but his dad wants him to be a politician? Been there done that. Mean girl secretly wants friends but acts like a bully because her rich mom tells her not to talk to commoners? Where have I seen that before? The teacher helps her kids become what they want to be? Hey, let's make her into a totally obnoxious feminist who preaches about her morals in a way that'd make her fit better in the 1960s while we're at it! Plus, any interesting traits certain characters have later get retconned because the writers tack on needlessly cliche and cheesy backstories for them that ultimately don't wind up benefiting them as characters. If there's one consistent problem with Konnichiwa Anne, it's that the producers for the anime struggle to tell a story. The series thinks that having the characters spout cheesy, one-line backstories will make them interesting, and any development they end up getting comes off as shallow and one-sided. Which is strange because other WMT shows managed to develop their characters wonderfully throughout their run time, with good examples being Les Miserables, Perrine, Dog of Flanders, Porphy, Annette, and so on. Hell, the series was at its best when it focused on Anne's family dynamics with both the Thomas and the Hammonds, both of which forget the cheese and manage to garner truly genuine and heartwrenching drama. And don't even get me started on the whiny, out-of-place feminist that is Miss Henderson. In the book, she was just a nice teacher, but for some reason the producers made her into a stereotypical inspirational teacher who preaches feminism straight out of an after school special, and she winds up taking the focus away from other interesting characters.

  And that's not even getting into the pretty blatant continuity issues Konnichiwa Anne has as a series. To be fair, the original book had some continuity issues as well, but they were usually so negligible that you don't really notice them unless you're really looking for them. For one, the final episode tries to wrap things up by showing how the people Anne left behind are doing, but its attempts at doing so made Anne think back on her past with a happy mindset, but in the original Anne of Green Gables, Anne hated her past and never brought it up unless she really needed to. Anne in Konnichiwa Anne never even so much as touched any Shakespeare books, something even the Budge Wilson book got right! Honestly, my biggest pet peeve with the anime is that even though Anne grows up throughout the series, her hair remains the exact same length from beginning to end, even though in the 1979 anime, and the book, her braids are explicitly described as reaching down to her waist, but in the Konnichiwa Anne anime, they stay at her shoulders. Uh, hello?! Consistency should not be this hard, people! One more thing: I had no problem with her voice when I watched this as a kid, but watching this as an adult, I have to admit, Rina Hidaka's voice for Anne is a lot more shrill than I remember it being. I remember liking it a lot when I first watched it, but hearing it again years later, Hidaka-san, who was a relatively new seiyuu at the time of Konnichiwa Anne's airing, pushes her voice pretty high, and since Anne is well known for being a huge talker, I can imagine it not sitting well with people who don't like the more stereotypical moe girl voice. Granted, Hidaka-san doesn't use her Anne voice much anymore, as she's gone on to do other things, like Laura from Tropical Rouge Pretty Cure and Ririchiyo from Inu x Boku SS, both of which have her expand on her range and don't make her sound as shrill. Though to her credit, I'd still listen to her Anne voice over the auditory nightmare that is Misaki Kuno. Or whoever the hell plays Susanoo in the English dub of Little Prince and the Eight-Headed Dragon with his car alarm/screeching alpaca scream that is guaranteed to make you want to put forks in your ears.

  In conclusion, Konnichiwa Anne as an anime suffers from questionable adaptation choices and its producers being too immature and inexperienced to make this story work. That being said, I don't think Konnichiwa Anne is inherently a bad anime because of this. Could it have been done better? Yes. But it has just as many strengths as it does flaws, even if its flaws are too prominent to just sweep under the rug. I'd still gladly watch this over every bad ecchi or isekai anime any day, and I applaud that AnimeLog YouTube channel for trying to bring this series and others into the US, even if it didn't quite pan out for them in the end. Even if by itself it isn't quite the best attempt at a prequel to Anne Shirley's saga, and I do think the book is better in this case, Konnichiwa Anne does deserve more love than it gets.

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