Just for the information, for the upcoming winter-season I’m again planning to not look at any of the promo material of the upcoming series, so again I won’t be writing a preview for it. I’m going to make one exception for this, though: Konnichiwa Anne, the next instalment of the World Masterpiece Theatre. I figure with such a title, and the “kids”-label most people who might be potentially interested in the series will be turned off before the series even started.

For those of you who don’t know about the World Masterpiece Theatre, here’s a short description. They started back in 1975, and each year, a new series of usually around 52 episodes would be shown as an adaptation of a famous children’s novel. One of the big trademarks of the franchise was the huge focus on creating “real” characters: characters that felt like real people. The different series come in all sorts of different sizes: sometimes they get gut-wrenchingly sad, others are quite light-hearted, others are inspirational. They can be surprisingly mature for mere children’s’ series, and therefore are also an excellent watch for the older viewers.

This has both its good and bad points. The good side of the franchise is that because the characters are so well fleshed out, they become a delight to watch, and they’re very easy to identify with as a viewer. The bad side is that nearly every series of the franchise is very slow paced. There are a lot of slice of life moments that help to identify and define the characters in question, and if you can’t enjoy those, you probably won’t find much enjoyment, and the series will most likely bore you to death.

Anyway, about Konnichiwa Anne. It’s based on the novel “Before Green Gables”, which is the prequel of the famous children’s novel “Anne of Green Gables“, a novel by Lucy Maud Montgomery, and adapted in 1979 into an anime by Isao Takahata of Ghibli-fame. The original series was a slice of life series, which depicted five years out of Anne’s teenaged life.

Before Green Gables actually wasn’t written by Lucy Maud Montgomery herself, but instead by a completely different woman: Budge Wilson. She wrote it in 2008 as the 100th anniversary of the original novel, and it can be very well considered as professional fan fiction, telling about the first eleven years of Anne’s life, which only had been hinted at in the novels (or the anime, at least). What the tv-series told us about Anne’s past was that her parents died when she was only three months old. She then moved from family to family, living there as something as an unwanted child for those already overcrowded families, eventually ending up at an orphanage.

So my prediction is that this series is going to be completely different from the original Anne of Green Gables anime, and that instead it’s going to be a very dark but heart-warming slice-of-life series with quite a bit of drama every now and then.

The problem with this series is obviously going to be that there’s a very low chance of it actually getting subbed or licensed. I was hoping that the fanbase of Akage no Anne would at least give this series a small advantage over Les Miserables and Porfy no Nagai Tabi, but it’s nearly one month until broadcast and the information about the production staff hasn’t even been announced yet for goodness’ sake. All we know is that it’s going to be the next WMT and that it’ll be based on the book Before Green Gables.

However, if you’re a fan of sad slice of life series, then I do urge you to give this series a chance if it does get subbed somehow. In any case I’ll probably be providing a detailed summary for each of the episodes, for those who want to watch it raw but are still uncomfortable with Japanese. The World Masterpiece Theatre Series are actually relatively easy to understand.

Short Synopsis: The attack on the headquarters of the bad guys.
Highlights: Turtle dude rocks
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8,5/10 (Awesome)
You know, I really consider this episode to have the best action-scenes of the entire series so far. Okay, so they still weren’t as well animated as episode one, but they were one thing: incredibly fun to watch. Really, so much went on, and more especially, the major characters involved showed their best sides. It’s strange, the fights definitely weren’t the most well animated, or intense, or had the best fight coordination out there, but they kept my interest throughout the entire episode.

This episode felt so out of place in this series, but yet it worked. The car-chase-scene, the motorbike, it all fitted, and just about everything in this episode was really creative. The characters aren’t deep at all, but they’re fleshed out just enough to make us care about them. And I think that that was why I enjoyed this episode so much.

The problem is of course where this series is going to go after this point. The fact remains that the two characters who made this episode so much fun to watch are dead now, and we know hardly anything about the big bad guy. Seriously, WHO IS HE?! This guy seriously lacks fleshing out. I really wonder where the creators can be able to take him as such a stereotypical evil overlord. But then again, I do have high hopes for the reunion with Kuromitsu, and the deaths of the final two partners of Kuro (I mean, there’s no way that those two are going to make it to the end of the series with this pace ;P).

Short Synopsis: The killer’s identity is confirmed, Yoriko’s mother is in despair and a rather big spoiler happens that you don’t want to find out before you’ve seen episode eight.
Highlights: Talk about a change of pacing!
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8/10 (Excellent)
Oh, how I love this series. It’s not like other series, where the emotional power of the characters is huge (Casshern Sins for example). In contrast, this is a very quiet series, even during the fast-paced parts like for example this episode. But the writing is so incredibly solid that I’m regarding this series as one of the best series of the season. The creators don’t aim attempt awkward drama that feels forced, but instead have really succeeded in creating a very subtle atmosphere. I don’t know about others, but I personally love it when anime uses subtlety. The more the better.

The big event of this episode was of course Yoriko’s death, although we never actually get to see her die, it’s more that her presence lurks over the episode like a very gloomy ghost. As it turns out, the real killer is a friend of Sekiguchi: Kubo Shunko. It was pretty interesting how Eno simply walked up to Kubo, asking him about Kanako, about an hour before he went on to take Yoriko with him. We also saw Kubo from a very different angle in this episode, when Eno showed him a picture of Kanako, suggesting that there’s much more to this mystery than just Kubo being a serial killer.

What I also like in this episode was that they showed the exact same footage as in the end of the previous episode, but this time from the perspective of Eno and Sekiguchi, where it’s Yoriko who’s acting strange. It was also awesome to see that the two of them (especially Eno) went on to raid her house right after she left, finding her mother about to commit suicide. It seems that she’s much more than just the delusional mother we saw in episode two and three: she really feels guilty of calling her a Mouryou (apparently she did this by mistake, I believe that it can all be blamed on an eye-problem of hers(?)