Konnichiwa Anne – 22

And finally, two years pass and Anne has grown up to nine years old. While it’s good to see lots of development, this episode also confirmed what I’ve been suspecting for a long while now: Anne is not Anne Shirley of Green Gables. She really is just an incredibly bright girl who happens to look similar to Anne of Green Gables, she just happens to share the same name and same name of her parents with her. And hey, Canada’s a big country. It could have happened. Because in this episode, it becomes clear that Anne hasn’t been attending school for two years. Anne of Green Gables, however, was fully able to attend school; she just couldn’t attend it in the winter because it was too difficult to travel to her school, something which Randolf and Mildred don’t seem to have any problems with. This show simply shouldn’t have been advertised as “Before Green Gables”, because it simply isn’t. I remember how Budge Wilson commented that she wasn’t going to try and mimic Lucy Maud Montgomery’s style for the novel, and instead would keep to her own. That’s understandable and I fully agree with that. However, she should have kept the characters in canon with the Anne of the Green Gables novel. She seems to be a famous writer with lots of experience. She should have been able to predict how Anne would have looked like in her childhood, which is nothing like the Anne in Konnichiwa Anne. Nevertheless, this was a very nice episode if you ignore this. We get some background on Walter, the characters have all developed in an interesting way especially since this probably is one of the very first time in which we see a character as detailed as Anne, develop from seven years old to nine years old. Usually, when characters are shown below the age of ten, the creators usually just pick one age as a base, but this series instead shows Anne as a six, seven and nine-year-old. Anne really strikes me as a child who grew up too fast. Children her age should still be busy goofing around, and being children. Instead, because Johanna has been forced to get a job after Bert’s job backfired, she had to face her adult responsibilities way too early. Because of this, even though Mildred and Randolf are much older than she is, she acts as if she’s of the same grade they are. Rating: * (Good)]]>