Oh my god. Seriously, is this series ever going to stop being so awesome? I mean, seriously. I deliberately tried to keep my expectations for this series low because I was 100% sure that Konnichiwa Anne wasn’t going to live up to Porfy and Les Miserables because of its unimpressive staff and low production-values, but Christ, this series has got to have the best 10 opening episodes of any WMT I have seen yet. Good lord! This is something I’ve never seen coming!
This episode was a real Bert-episode. It starts as Anne is talking to Katie Morris when the Winter has just fallen. Anne is happy that with the money that Bert is getting from his job, she can finally eat things that she’s never eaten, and the family seems a lot better now. She then gets called by Johanna in order to deliver Bert’s lunch, which he himself forgot.
At Bert’s meanwhile, the lady we saw a few episodes ago who was a good friend of Bertha: Grace Shermon. She’s actually very worried about how Anne is doing, though Bert, exhausted from his job and boss just gives her the cold shoulder when she tries to talk to her, so her husband imagines how Anne must be living in a horrible place, and Grace wonders why at the time, she never offered to take care of Anne.
Anne arrives when Bert’s boss is yelling at him for slacking off, and she talks a bit to the boss and drops off his lunch. That afternoon, Bert is in trouble because one of the packages (he’s working at a train station) is missing, and the boss blames Bert because he’s known to be a good for nothing guy. However, it seems to be a simple case of a mix-up. Bert is especially angry when the boss (Franklin) doesn’t even apologize for his actions. One of Bert’s co-workers then offers a bit of alcohol to cool off, though Bert manages to resist the urges.
When Bert gets home, it’s a total chaos, and all of the boys are yelling, crying and fighting with each other. When Bert gets home, he can’t take the noise and starts screaming. He tells that it’s Johanna’s job to take care of the children and cooking, and how he himself is tired from his job.
The next day, a couple from Bert’s childhood happens to run into him. As it turns out, they believe that he’s holding some high position due to the way he used to be. He also used to be the star of dance parties, and looked up to by the women. The woman then wonders how his children have been doing with dancing, but Bert says that they’re still small. He then offers Bert to join a dance party that they’re holding that evening, though then Bert’s boss shows up, and shows them that Bert didn’t really turn out to be the guy they expected.
That same evening Bert again walks out of the dinner room in order to get some fresh air. Anne then walks out to do the same in order to give the youngest baby a bit of fresh air. Bert wonders how she’s able to take all the noise, but then Anne says that doesn’t really get on her nerves, since Bert used to be much scarier when he still drank. The two of them then talk for a bit longer. It makes Bert think back of the dreams he used to have, and none of them really came true. He tells her how he and Johanna used to love dancing, and Anne really gets excited when she hears it, and this prompts a quick flashback to when Bert proposed (and oh god, the two of them looked so different from the way they look now!).
Bert then grabs the courage to tell Johanna about the dance party, though Johanna very quickly says that it’s ridiculous for people to be still interested in parties with this weather, so Bert drops it. In the end though, he does grab his carriage and heads off to the dance party on his own. The carriage unfortunately gets stuck, and he ends up missing the party. He listens from a distance how his two former friends talk about him, and he hears them making fun of him, and laughing at the mess that he has turned into.
And this really breaks him, and he stops by some of his older friends who are drinking some alcohol, and starts drinking away his miseries. His former boss then happens to walk by (probably returning from the dance as well), makes a few snide remarks, and that was the final straw for Bert and he starts beating him up. The result is of course that he gets fired.
Later that night, he returns singing loudly, waking up Anne. He seems to have been drinking even more, and spends the rest of the episode breaking just about everything inside the house up in his drunken rage.
I must say, that this series so far couldn’t have been better at all. There are SO MANY great shows this season. I honestly consider this to be the best season we’ve had in years so far. There are many series with unique executions, and even the slice of life genre has already got a very strong show with the wit of Cross Game… and yet Konnichiwa Anne turned into one of my absolute favourites for this season. I did not expect that.
Oh, how Bert turned into such a wonderful character. I really feel sorry for the guy, even though he loses himself so much, and all of his misery can be simply attributed to his actions. He’s really stuck in a downward spiral of his own feelings that is SO hard to get out of, because of his own alcohol addiction, but also because the people around him have lost faith in him because of the things he did.
And the downwards spiral has the entire family in its grip. Johanna herself really is a terrible mother: she does nothing but yell at her children, she fails to keep order and never seems to provide parental support for Horace and Edward, but that’s because she too is away most of the time, in order to make some extra money to get by. I was especially struck by how she refused to go to the dance: she’s too much caught up in her own lifestyle that something tells me that she’s forgotten how to have fun and enjoy herself. It’s a rather uncomfortable truth of poverty that you really don’t see often in anime.
On a bit of a lighter note, this episode really showed why Elisa was so important to Anne for the first couple of episodes. Without her, Anne would simply have grown up to be a quiet girl who lives inside her own world, but because she had someone to talk to and share her thoughts with, she really learned to express her feelings through words. It’s pretty similar to Kaze no Shoujo Emily, in which Emily had her own father for the first eleven years of her life.
If this show is already this awesome with only eight episodes, I really wonder what the creators have in store for the rest of the 39 episodes. So far, this series has been really heart-warming yet very, very sad. That on one side is so typical of the WMT, and yet it also has its own feel.
Rating: *** (Awesome)
A Bert-episode, and what a sad one it was!
