For anyone who hasnt read my LiveJournal reviews of two of the Anne of Green Gables booksthe original one by LM Montgomery and the prequel Before Green Gables by Budge Wilsonmy 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 Im just gonna keep calling it Konnichiwa Anne. Discovering this anime led me to the Budge Wilson book and then Montgomerys book afterward along with some of the latters adaptations. I still maintain that the 1979 anime is the absolute best adaptation of Anne Shirleys 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 ARRs subs finished the series a blogger I used to know watched and reviewed the series on a weekly basishttps://starcrossedanime.com/category/finishedseriessliceoflifedrama/konnichiwaanne/. 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 Annes early infancy and instead starts from when shes 56 years old onward. Weird choice but I can understand wanting to focus on the main character right away. Similarly it shows Annes life with the Thomases before being adopted by the Hammonds and then when shes at the orphanage ending as shes 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 dont want this to be a negative review as I do genuinely enjoy Konnichiwa Anne and what it has to offer flaws and all so Ill focus on the positives first. While the animation isnt 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 theres no exaggerated cartoony faces or characters going chibi. The soundtrack is also really nice as well from the wellsung opening song by Azumi Inoue to the lovely woodwinds harmonicas and fiddles that really make you feel like youre out in the Canadian forests. Its 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 Wilsons book creates whole new characters and personalities out of whole cloth they dont have to worry about being faithful to LM Montgomerys legacy because a lot of them namely the Thomases 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 welldeveloped than how they were in the books. For example Horace was just a bratty kid in the book with his brothers being even more onenote 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 hes on. Hell hes 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 dont 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. Annes classmates in Marysville dont get a lot of focus in the book which is justified because Anne has to work once shes done with school so she doesnt 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 lets make her into a totally obnoxious feminist who preaches about her morals in a way thatd make her fit better in the 1960s while were 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 dont wind up benefiting them as characters. If theres one consistent problem with Konnichiwa Anne its that the producers for the anime struggle to tell a story. The series thinks that having the characters spout cheesy oneline backstories will make them interesting and any development they end up getting comes off as shallow and onesided. 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 Porphy Annette and so on. Hell the series was at its best when it focused on Annes 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 dont even get me started on the whiny outofplace 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 thats 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 dont really notice them unless youre 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 Hidakas 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 Hidakasan who was a relatively new seiyuu at the time of Konnichiwa Annes 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 dont like the more stereotypical moe girl voice. Granted Hidakasan doesnt use her Anne voice much anymore as shes 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 dont make her sound as shrill. Though to her credit Id 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 EightHeaded 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 dont 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. Id 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 didnt quite pan out for them in the end. Even if by itself it isnt quite the best attempt at a prequel to Anne Shirleys saga and I do think the book is better in this case Konnichiwa Anne does deserve more love than it gets.