This show is overplaying Anne’s thirst for learning. In a way, the creators made this show too “Japanese”. More on that later, first the summary:
The episode starts with Anne, reading a book at Eggman’s while Eggman is picking Tomatoes, and she’s getting impressed with it as always. We then cut to a scene in which Henderson talks with a couple of the children after class about books. One of them (Michael) wants to be a newspaper editor, and so Henderson gives him a book on the matter. He’s very happy with this, since they don’t have any books with them at home.
Henderson then passionately continues on how books are going to be very important for the class. Anne then thanks Henderson for lending her the book of King Arthur (it took me a while to figure out that “aasaa” stood for “Arthur”; damned Katakana), and asks whether she can loan it again. Her classmates then get angry because they too want to read the book, and rip it apart in the process.
The problem is that there are hardly any books around, so that’s why Henderson suggests to start a school library, and therefore she asks the children to bring some books from their homes. Unfortunately, nobody has any except for the book by Robert Browning from Anne. Mildred’s father has a ton of books, but her father doesn’t find it necessary for her to be reading books, since she’s going to get married to a rich guy anyway.
Since there are so few books, Anne suggests Henderson to pay a visit to Eggman, who she reckons is bound to have some idea. Eggman still acts rather grumpy against anyone who isn’t Anne. Eggman is disinclined at first, but in the end he becomes friendly with Henderson, and suggests that they should host a play in order to collect the funds needed to buy books.
Eggman writes the script, while Henderson is busy dividing the roles. Randolf wants to play Arthur, while Anne and Mildred both want to play the female heroine of Guineviere (however you spell that), so auditions on that are going to happen the next day. Eggman meanwhile managed to rewrite the script into some strange fantasy story, and for some reason Henderson loves it.
The class loves the script too, and so everyone spends the rest of the day rehearsing the script for the parts that they want to audition, while Henderson draws up a poster for the play, which gathers quite a bit of attention. The next day, Anne seems to have not just memorized her own lines, but also those of the entire script and so gets admired by the whole class.
During the auditions, everyone does well apart from Mildred, who gets a black-out because she loses her cheat sheet. So yeah, Anne gets to play the role of Guineviere, Randolf becomes Arthur, and Mildred becomes a little fairy. Obviously, the latter is angry and disappointed. She complains about it to her father and mother. Her mother then gets angry at the teacher for organizing a play while she should be teaching, and so the episode ends with the entire play getting blown off because her mother used her influence and refuses to listen.
I’d really wish that the Marysville arc is going to end soon so that we can get back to what’s really important: the Thomas family, but it’s certain that we’re still going to bet at least three episodes about them: one about Mildred, one about the play and one about Eggman’s dead daughter. It’s a bloody shame: the first arc of this series was a true emotional roller-coaster ride, but none of the newly introduced characters in Marysville are interesting, and most of them are just Kaze no Shoujo Emily rip-offs.
I’ve really been trying to not compare this series to the original Akage no Anne series, since that would just give me unreasonable expectations, and for the most part this worked. However, there is one thing that really bugs me: Anne’s thirst for knowledge. I have so many issues with that, I hardly know where to start.
The reason why I meant that this series is too “Japanese” at the beginning of this post is the following, and do correct me if I’m wrong about this, but the children here are way too obsessed with learning and books. Perhaps Japanese kids are like this: obsessed with learning. However, Anne is SEVEN. When I was that age, all I cared about was playing and having fun and school was boring. Only when I entered high school (or whatever the school is that you enter at the age of twelve) did I start getting interested in learning, and I was a real geek back then.
The thing is that at the moment, this series doesn’t feel in canon with the original Anne of Green Gables. What strikes me the most was how Anne at the beginning of the series indeed was a huge talker, but all she talked about was girly things, like puffed sleeves, rainbows and scenery. Not once did she mention her thirst for knowledge: that only became apparent gradually throughout the series, when she developed into the perfectionist we came to love. The Anne right here is completely obsessed with knowledge, so the second half of this series is going to have to include some really weird development in order to get that one right.
Als, probably the most annoying thing about this episode: ANNE IS NOT THE NEXT EINSTEIN. I mean, seriously: she’s six or seven years old; what the heck is she doing reading advanced books and stuff: she should be too busy catching up with everyone, doing her endless repetitions of basic summations and getting a good grasp of the written language. I know that she learned a bit from Elisa, but learning really doesn’t go that easily. She worked really hard in the Akage no Anne series. If she really were a naturally born genius, she would have blown away Gilbert Blythe’s efforts without any problems. The way she completely memorized the entire script in less than one week, while taking care of the housework at the same time is very hard to believe.
I praised this series for how it so naturally portrayed a bunch of little children. And really, Horace and Edward really feel like bunch of small brats. Anne also started out really well and down to earth, but I think that this series screws up at the character-development: the only well developed characters here are Bert and Johanna. The development of especially Mildred and Randolf feels superficial. And Anne… the creators seem to be forgetting that little kids don’t have the biggest attention span, which is something that the first bunch of episodes did really well, but completely disappeared once Anne became obsessed with learning and reading.
Rating: – (Disappointing)
