Anne of Green Gables: Road to Green Gables

Matthew Cuthbert goes to the station to collect a boy and finds a red-haired girl who cannot stop talking. The mistake is large and has to be corrected. The film concerns that journey: Anne reaching Green Gables and the question of whether she gets to stay. The subject is not adventure but not being wanted. Anne talks incessantly because silence reminds her that nobody asked for her. Marilla changing her mind is not staged as an act of mercy but as a quiet acceptance. The form keeps television's slow rhythm: long landscape shots, seasonal changes, scenes that are not cut while people are still speaking. The drawing of Prince Edward Island has been the most praised aspect of the series from the start. This is not a separate production. Isao Takahata edited the first six episodes of the 1979 television series into a roughly hundred-minute cinema cut in 1989, but that cut went unshown for years. It only reached an audience in 2010, at the Ghibli Museum. On the original series, Hayao Miyazaki also worked on scene layout. The voice cast includes Eiko Yamada, Fumie Kitahara and Ryuji Saikachi. Who it is for: viewers who want classic Japanese television animation and Anne's story in one sitting. Who it is not for: anyone who has seen the original series; this edit compresses the episodes and loses part of the slowness that was its greatest strength.