Konnichiwa Anne: Before Green Gables

It is a very emotional show. Its main focus is on how people process their emotions. It never loses its focus and there is always something to learn about life in every episode.

The animation is a little rough and few character arcs can be boring.

Dialogues and characters are the strength of this show. I love the chemistry between all of the characters. There are many characters and Anne influences everyone's life. She is a child and has an optimistic view on life. Most of the characters are adults and have a pessimistic view on life. This contrast in perspective makes Anne's dialogues with other characters ... interesting.

For anyone who hasn't read my 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 Thomas, 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, Porfy, 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.