Based on the 1880 book "Heidi," the story is "for children and those who love children." It focuses on a little girl named Heidi growing up with her Grossvater Ohi in the Alm Mountains for three years before her selfish Tante Dete takes her to live with a rich family in Frankfurt, Germany. The characters are fairly one-dimensional as well as the story itself, which is alright for what the anime is. Watching the first episode in Japanese with English subtitles, I felt I wasn't getting the essence of the show. From there I found a German dubbed version, and the show got so much better.
The art is your typical "Studio Ghibli" style, not coming to much surprise. Meanwhile, the Japanese music is great coming from Watanabe, but the German version took it out of the park. For a story taking place around 1880 with old German style folk music, perfect.
Heidi begins in the mountains at 5 as a free-spirit learning the mountain life, and then is forced to move to the big city at 8 into a "cage-like" environment to live/befriend the daughter (Klara) of a rich family learning "civil" life. As one could imagine, once getting used to a country lifestyle and then moving to the "civilized" life of the big city isn't for everyone. That is pretty much the story with some life lessons along the way.
At 52 episodes and what seems to have a lot of filler in between the show's main plot points, you could probably watch only about 12 episodes to fully understand the story while skipping the other content. I recommend to watch episodes 1-5, 16,18,20,26, and 52 in German preferably. This is a nice children's story and does a fine job being just that.
