Konnichiwa Anne – 02

Short Synopsis: Anne wonders where her name came from.
Episode Rating: 7,5/10 (Good)
Boy, am I glad to see this one back! As for the summary: I’ll try to be accurate, but there is a lot of dialogue in this series, so there might be a few mistakes here and there.

The episode starts as Anne is hanging out the laundry to dry. Elisa returns from school early since she only had classes in the morning, and while she hoped that she’d be able to help Anne with the dishes, she arrived just too late for that. Anne believes that a kind grandmother called “wind” is going to take care of drying up the clothes (reminds me of “kaze no obaa-san” from Kaze no Shoujo emily ^^;).

Then they start talking about the cat, who Anne named “Brownie”, since it just refuses to listen to its name. While Anne wonders about giving it a better name, Eliza shows Anne a book, and she starts reading it in front of Anne (since Anne obviously loves stories like this). Anne then tries to give the cat the name of one of the characters in the story, but Elisa says that it might be better to name someone after someone in your family. Elisa’s name was given to her by her mother, and Horace and Edward got their names from their father, who apparently was so glad that boys were born into the family. This prompts Anne to wondering who it was that gave her name to her. Elisa doesn’t know, since she already was called “Ann” (apparently, it never was written down in front of her). Anne finds that name a bit too simple.

During their little talk, though, the two of them forgot time a bit, and have to rush in to get the laundry cleaned up. Inside though, the atmosphere is like that of a chicken farm: Horace and Edward are bickering as always and the little baby whose name I can’t seem to remember is crying. At that time, Elisa’s mother comes in and is angry at all of the ruckus that’s going on in front of her (not to mention all of the laundry that hasn’t been folded yet). Anne instead starts talking about how she changed the name of the cat to “Rockingba” (please don’t ask me how to spell that one…), but the mood completely crashes when the father comes in and he starts yelling at his wife because she doesn’t have dinner ready for him yet.

As it turns out, he has been drinking again, even though he’s out of a job and is relying on his wife to get money. When she stars yelling at him how there’s no money left, he smashes open a box of different ornaments and just tells her to sell those things if there isn’t any money anyway, and he walks off again. One of the other things in that box was a blanket that Anne was wrapped in when she arrived at the family. Elisa’s mother tells her how much Anne looked like her mother, and she also tells that she named Elise after her own mother for the same reason. Before Anne can ask where her own name came from, the baby starts crying again.

The next day, Anne of course fantasizes how it must have been for her mother to create said blanket, and she even gives it a name (“Mother’s Blanket”) before she’s called out to do the laundry again. Horace and Edward meanwhile are bored and decide to go out and play with the blanket. Anne catches them running off in the direction of a wild river and it starts raining. When Anne tries to stop them, they lose their balance and drop the blanket near the river-bank. When Anne tries to catch it, she slips and falls into the river. Horace tries to rescue her but he falls in too. Edward runs off to warn his parents.

When Anne and Horace finally are out of the river, they’re soaked and have no idea where they are, but thankfully they didn’t drift off for too long and are easily found. Horace starts crying and runs to his mother, while his mother got the wrong idea from Edward and thinks that it was Anne who pushed both of them into the river and so she gets really angry at Anne. When she finds out the truth later, she decides to tell Anne where her name came from: her father Walter gave it to her as well. I believe that it was named after a Queen of England that once lived, and that’s when she also learns that her name is spelled “Anne”, instead of “Ann”.

In any case, watching this series for me is going to be a matter of managing expectations, because this show has to fill some very large shoes. In the graphics department, it has to live up to the talents of Hayao Miyazaki who took care of the lay-out of the first episodes of Anne of Green Gables, and at the same time it also has the bad luck that it aired just after Porfy no Nagai Tabi, which had the most awesome background art. Konnichiwa Anne has none of them, and instead creates a style of graphics that’s much more simple, like the approach that was used in Les Miserables. In the music department, this series goes for a soundtrack that’s much more trying to blend in to the atmosphere, but it doesn’t make as much impact as the soundtrack of Porfy or Les Miserables did (although it is interesting to notice that the soundtrack is composed by those who did Jigoku Shoujo Mitsuganae, perhaps in the future it’ll get more interesting).

In terms of realism, there are other really big names that this show has to live up to: Isao Takahata and Tomomi Mochizuki: two of the best, if not the best directors when it comes to realism, and Lucy Maud Montgomery who wrote the original Anne of Green Gables novels (and also those of Kaze no Shoujo Emily). Konnichiwa Anne doesn’t have such a stellar director: Katsuyoshi Yatabe, whose work includes a hentai yaoi involving under-aged boys… yeah.

But on the other hand, looking at production staff in such a shallow way is such an inaccurate way in order to gauge the quality of a series. My favourite example is the director of The Third: the guy put down a really magnificent series… only to direct Penguin no Mondai afterwards. Or take Kaze no Shoujo Emily (another adaptation from Lucy Maud Montgomery): after doing this series of pure awesomeness, the director is now happily producing the crap that is Gokujou! Mecha Mote Iinchou, and I’m hoping for this to be the same with Konnichiwa Anne.

This episode really showed that this isn’t going to be among the best of the World Masterpiece Theatre: that fall into the river wasn’t needed. If you look at the other shows of the franchise like Porfy and Les Miserables at this stage, you can see that the drama was only caused by the characters clashing against each other, not these random disasters that happen a bit too conveniently, not to mention that there’s enough clash between the characters to keep this series going.

Having said that, though: I do love this series. There’s one thing that it stays absolutely true to, and that is Anne’s character. Even the lesser WMTs as Ie Naki Ko Remi had rock-solid characters, and there is no way that Konnichiwa Anne is going to be any different, and what this episode did such a wonderful job at is emphasizing how Anne’s name is so important to her, because it’s something that relates her to her parents. This show isn’t going to be the epitome of realism, but it’s still going to be an incredibly charming series. and with that, I guess that it’s also a bit more accessible than usual: if you can stomach the little kids, then there’s always something going on this time. Compare that to Porfy, which pretty much eliminated most of the viewer because hardly anything significantly dramatic happened in the first twelve episodes (which of course also had it’s charms, but it’s obviously not for everyone).