The 52 episodes of the television animation series Anne of Green Gables (literally translated as “Red-Haired Anne” or “Anne with Red Hair”) were released by Nippon Animation in 1979 as part of the widely cross-themed animation project “The Theater of World-Masterpieces”. Shortly after its release, the television animation series Anne of Green Gables turned into an international success, both in the neighboring Asian countries and in Europe, most particularly in Italy, France and Germany. While in the rest of the world, throughout the decades since its first release, Anne of Green Gables has broadly been forgotten, it remains very popular in Japan until present-day, as a symbol of the optimism of late 1970s, which announced the 1980s – the climax of prosperity and abundance in Japan.

Background and Inception

Anne of Green Gables is based on the eponymous novel written by the Canadian writer Lucy Maude Montgomery (1874-1942) and published in 1908. The idea of such a plot-line came to Montgomery’s mind while reading a newspaper article about an elderly siblings’ pair who had mistakenly adopted a girl instead of a boy, as originally planned. Her own childhood memories and experiences in the rural environment of the island Prince Edward delivered further elements for the creative freedom necessary to write down a novel which, without aspiring to become a masterpiece of international prestige, did its best to describe as authentic as possible the imagination and yearnings as well as the atmosphere of pastoral Canada at the beginning of the 20th century. Anne Shirley, the main protagonist of the novel, emerged as an entity based on a real-life model, Evelyn Nesbit.

The plot of the television animation series Anne of Green Gables follows loosely the original children’s novel, but avoids specific chapters which might have seemed too complicated for the sanitized Japanese audiences: Anne Shirley is a skinny, red-haired girl with a face full of freckles, who grew up in an orphanage after her parents passed away very early and her foster family was unable to care for her after several misfortunes hit its members. Anne is always happy and cheerful, and enjoys life tremendously despite very bad experiences and despite a childhood which lacked any affection or love. She possesses an overwhelming imagination which has allowed her to escape from her hideous quotidian life through the immersion into wonderful fantasies. When she turns eleven, she is accidentally sent for adoption to the childless siblings pair Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert, both of whom are growing old and are looking for someone to help them out with household chores and with errands around their home. Matthew and Marilla live in the house named Green Gables, which is located in the fictional small town Avonlea (rather a bigger village than a small town) on the picturesque coast of the North Sea of the island Prince Edward in Canada at the dawn of the 20th century.

Matthew is immediately enchanted by Anne’s vivid personality and wants to adopt her, despite the initial plan to adopt a boy, but Marilla wants to send her back: she insists on the necessity to adopt a boy from the orphanage who would be able to help them, and particularly Matthew, on the farm, and in exchange, they would take care of him, of his education and of his future. Eventually, Marilla gives in and decides to give the arrangement with Anne a try, and the three of them start a new life together. Anne’s wild, uninterrupted chatter, even more intensive due to her open happiness to have been allowed to stay at Green Gables, her fiery temperament as well as her joyful cheerfulness bring her into various domestic adventures. In time – at the beginning of the series, Anne is 11 years old, at its end, she is 16 years old –, Anne develops under Marilla’s loving, but strict upbringing and under Matthew’s rather discreet care and encouragement, from an insecure, frightened girl into an intelligent young lady able to employ her imagination in a constructive manner. Accompanied by secondary characters such as her best friend Diana Barry or her rival at school, the boy Gilbert Blythe (a soft indication of a later romance), and the city’s gossip master Mrs Rachel Lynde, Anne discovers gradually her surroundings as well as her position within them: despite countless hardships, she slowly turns into a self-confident person who is able to make important, future-oriented decisions. At the end of the story, after Matthew’s sudden, premature death, Anne moves more closely to Marilla, who was getting increasingly old, with the same sincere love which she had learnt throughout the years from the two siblings, and prefers to remain in Avonlea with Marilla, Diana and Gilbert and build a life together with them, instead of pursuing a promising career in the neighboring city.

Soft Narratives of Growing-Up

Anne of Green Gables is, essentially, Anne’s coming-of-age life-story, an orphaned girl with red hair and a very vivid imagination, which she showcases in all conversations she carries with others and with herself. An impossible misunderstanding brings her into the lives of the elderly Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert, two siblings living in a pastoral small community at the turn of the 20th century in Canada. After Marilla’s initial rejection, who could not see any potential for household help in Anne’s shy, but highly eloquent demeanor, Anne is nevertheless accepted, particularly due to Matthew’s unexpected, open affection. Consequently, a new life begins for Anne, very different from the miserable past which she can definitely leave behind. The short, concise, realist story-line harbors optimist thoughts, shared both by Lucy Maud Montgomery at the dawn of 20th century in Canada and by Takahata Isao by late 1970s in Japan: it was the type of optimism delivered by the perspective of unlimited prosperity and abundance for all, a reality just around the corner: How would it be possible to keep alive the naive beauty as well as the reliable safety of the human togetherness in communitarian environments despite the progressive industrialization and urbanization? How could we give our co-citizens one more additional chance to move more closely to us, despite alienation tendencies and individualization coercion? To such questions, both Montgomery and Takahata answer from two historical and geographical areas with hopeful optimism – namely, the idea to present the human being, the world and the life as a game full of fantastic elements bred by the exalted emotions of an orphaned girl full of cheerful energy, who has been raised by an elderly childless siblings pair with loving strictness. Lastly, it is Anne’s imagination and her eternal joy which shapes, transforms, tightens her environment and her fellow-humans, by drawing them into her fantasy universe and then, again, by releasing them back into their mundane reality.

Anne’s various domestic adventures and experiences reveal a bright universe which seems continuously threatened by unexpected swirls of destiny. The Japanization of Western themes occurs in Anne of Green Gables as well, because such topics as poverty and social or family belonging are hardly ever tackled with in Japanese classical culture, as such. Generally speaking, the plot of this animation series could be described as the story of integration into and acceptance by the community, with a few, but essential allusions to the emerging society (e.g., the bankruptcy of the bank which had been holding Marilla and Matthew’s savings, which has as a consequence Matthew’s sudden, premature death). Anne yearns for a family and for authentic friends and is willing to put in the effort for a life in the midst of a responsive and loving community. As it was the case with Heidi, a Girl from the Alps or 3.000 Miles in Search for Mother, Anne of Green Gables is a tale of journeys of initiation, with family and friendship as necessary rites of passage. In addition to the joys of a carefree everyday life, pain and uncertainty are part of life and of the process of growing-up; the power of imagination and the lightheartedness of immersing into the fantasy worlds produced by one’s own imagination are among the tools employed to cope with the tension of growing-up, so that Anne’s environment develops into a manifold cosmos, in which real-life friends such as Diana and real-life rivals such as Gilbert Blythe co-exist, cooperate and compete with fabulous characters taken from

fairy-tales and legends.

Furthermore, Anne appears not only as a child with an unusually powerful, vivid imagination; at the same time, she is very ambitious and unable to come to terms with traditional models in her life. To the mediocrity of village atmosphere, she reacts with a challenging attitude, overcoming shyness, and in doing so, she discovers in every event occurring within the framework of the village community an opportunity to showcase various facets of her personality, regardless of event: the illness of Diana’s younger sister, a party outdoors, the injustice brought up by a teacher. Everyday life in the village is partly boring, partly exciting, but Anne lives life to its fullest: the frightened, insecure child from the beginning of the animation series, turns gradually into a happy school-girl enjoying new friendships and entertaining her classmates, and by the end of the series, she has already become a proud, self-confident young lady. Anne’s development is the typical development of a personality, which is in itself nothing special or above the average, but the loving severity and the disciplined affection of her adoptive parents lead to the unfolding of those very elements of the personality which make it special and above-average, namely the unique and irreplaceable characteristics of every single human being. Even if they have no experience in dealing with children, both Marilla and Matthew instinctively sense what makes Anne special: her quest for human togetherness, her fear of loneliness, her longing for love and safety, and the fact that she would pay any price, would not spare any effort to achieve and keep what she yearns for.

Trauma and Its Representation in Mass-Media

Anne’s fantasy worlds are not the products of boredom and idleness, but emerged as results of an oppressed existence, which has found its relief in the shape of infinite, inexhaustible imagination. During the first years of her life, Anne’s quest for love and togetherness with other humans could be satisfied solely in imagination – that was her survival strategy. While they perceive this hunger for emotional-mental connection in a similar manner, each of the two siblings reacts in a different way: Marilla takes care of Anne with deliberate strictness, Matthew stretches more than once the patience of his sister by overflooding Anne with gorgeous presents and openly showing her his limitless affection, with shy, somehow clumsy gestures. In a specific way, Anne’s character reminds of Hans Christian Andersen’s little girl with matches: Anne is her younger, luckier sister, who is rescued from her own wonderful, but lethal dreams by the generosity and unconditional love of an elderly siblings pair.

One could say that this is where the main difference between Anne’s story and other stories about orphaned children left to their own device resides: Anne’s life-story is told in tones of bright hope as well as optimist accents; there are some sorts of sun-beams even in the darkest moments; despair and sadness are presented as necessary counterparts to an overly cheerful existence; there are solutions to problems and to failures, instead of viewing them as crushing punishments of a wicked God or of an indifferent (social) environment.

Secondary Characters as Vibrant Personalities

Without being background characters, the secondary persons around Anne – Marilla, Matthew, Diana, Gilbert, even Rachel Lynde – are employed in order to showcase the main character and to turn it into the focal point of the story-line. This is a compositional strategy applied by Takahata Isao in previous animation works as well. Regardless whether family relationships or emotions and tensions associated with them are displayed, as in case of Marilla and Matthew, or, conversely, whether friendship and juvenile affection are depicted, as in Diana’s case, or more largely, conflictual situations and their resolution move to the center of visual representation, as in Gilbert’s or Rachel Lynde’s case – Anne’s character appears in various lights and colors, highlighted from a wide range of angles, which, again, confers her flexibility and complexity. Therefore, the viewer sees not only her development from a girlish existence towards the condition of a mature young lady, but gradually discovers her intrinsic qualities, both the positive and the negative ones, and witnesses the powerful process through which these are acknowledged and dealt with. Starting with the admission and acceptance within the household of Marilla and Matthew, Anne is integrated within a specific constellation of inter-human connections, which are all non-static and which dynamically contribute to the formation of those involved as reliable, trustworthy members of the community.

The representation of these interpersonal relationships takes place within the vigorous framework of a resonant, overwhelming, beautiful nature. Indeed, nature is an important element in Anne’s day-dreams as well as in fairy-tales and medieval (literary or not) literary works. Instinctively, Anne senses that humans must live in harmony with nature and therefore, she makes nature a vital part of her own being. One might regard this as Takahata’s contribution to a sort of eco-psychology which attempts at discovering nature from within, from the intricate structure of the humans, not from outside of the very actors who would supposedly better find ways to live with nature, rather than competing with it – as it is usually the case. The children of Avonlea grow up within nature, in a genuine togetherness with it; school is by no means a compulsory socializing obligation, as it is often prescribed in specialized literature, but an organic continuation of the previous childhood in the midst of nature. Developing oneself in the middle of nature, in cooperation with nature, in cheerful joy with nature, means that humans can deliberately, authentically learn from nature the continuity and eternity of life and, thus, gain confidence in their own selves. Anne of Green Gables talks of a world in which humans, even if they (try to) control nature in order to provide for their food and shelter, do not abuse or despise nature, but respect and protect it in the name of what might be labeled “shared cosmic condition”, connecting humans and non-humans indissolubly. It is a mild, gentle treatment of nature, which is reciprocated in nature’s tender and compassionate attitude towards humans. To live in such a world, implies, to regard humans as fellow-humans and to perceive deeply one’s own self as part of a greater togetherness of universal magnitude.

Correspondingly, Anne of Green Gables does not promote the ideology of a suffocating rural community, but outlines the village socioscape as a dynamic community which might appear at first sight as quite limited and relatively closed-off to outsiders, but in fact, provides various valves towards the outside, so that a refreshing exchange with the larger world is possible: e.g., the higher education opportunities in the bigger city or the manifold relationships with neighboring villages and urban areas. The city is, similarly to Heidi, the Girl from the Alps, a wide space largely open to innovation, a fabulous space full of gorgeous elements, and it stays as such in Anne’s memories, without, however, over-shadowing or diminishing the warmth and safety of Green Gables, which she adores immensely. Her decision, at the end of the animation series, to stay in Avonlea instead of pursuing a life of opportunities and self-development in the city, is Takahata’s educational contribution, which he would take over again in Memories like Raindrops: Pushing against the tendencies of one’s contemporary world, making decisions in accordance with one’s own ideals and emotions and, therefore, rejecting the blind submission to the more often than not opportunist requirements of current times, means to act and live as a self-confident, responsible citizen. Classifying such a person as conservative or retrograde, as it is often the case, solely puts the denigrator into a negative light, and not in the least the one choosing to pursue his/her own life trajectory. Similarly to the grown-up Taeko, Anne is fully aware of her position and function at the end of the animation series, and able to move on from the pains and losses of her past. Only through this awareness does she gain the courage, insight and inner harmony to leave childhood behind and enter the space of wholesome maturity.

Conclusion

In Anne of Green Gables, Takahata ceases to undertake social analysis, and instead focuses on warm, heartfelt description. After 3.000 Miles in Search of Mother, Takahata distances himself for a while from the standpoint of the social analyst and takes over the role of the contemplative observer, the one who internalizes phenomena and experiences them as such, without a critical approach. From this perspective, Anne of Green Gables is a much more positive work than 3.000 Miles in Search of Mother, but still more introspective than Heidi, the Girl from the Alps and less dramatic than The Prince of Sun: Horus’ Great Adventure. Anne of Green Gables surprises viewers, even decades after its release, with a warm representation style, the rounded-up, realist credibility of the characters as well as the compact story-line. Anne will stay in Takahata’s legacy as a figure of light, much more so than in Montgomery’s original novel, able to overcome her initial insecurity and fear and to evolve into a self-confident, responsible young lady who is by no means selfish or self-absorbed. On his quest for “l’invention du réel” in animation works, Takahata Isao builds up in Anne of Green Gables a dynamic universe full of most impressive colors, which gradually discloses realist characters who enjoy life and the manifold alternatives it offers in crescendo, on the directorial trajectory opened up by The Prince of Sun: Horus’ Great Adventure. The idealism from The Prince of Sun: Horus’ Great Adventure, the idyllic atmosphere from Heidi, the Girl from the Alps, the disenchantment from 3.000 Miles in Search of Mother metamorphose in Anne of Green Gables into an optimist meditation on the human being, on life and on the world.