I'd been wanting to watch this anime, which is based on my favorite L.M. Montgomery series, the Emily trilogy (Emily Of New Moon, Emily Climbs--the best of the three IMO--and Emily's Quest) and I finally found the entire series on YouTube. For the first episode, the title song was subbed in English so I thought the rest of the ep would be too. Nope--it was subbed in Arabic or something similar. I don't understand more than a handful of words in Japanese, and I definitely can't read Arabic. But, I figured since I've read the books many times and know what happens anyway, I'd watch it. From what I could gather from characters' actions and expressions, it was very faithful to the books with some minor changes (e.g. Emily's "second sight" is mostly swept under the rug, as it were), and at least they didn't completely ruin Ilse Burnley (my favorite literary character of all time) and kept her short hair and hair-trigger-temper (mostly, anyway) and funny, loyal, passionate personality like she's SUPPOSED to have. I'm talking to you, producers of the 1998 Canadian Emily series. >:/ Anywho. I'm not going to recap every episode individually though, since I've already watched all of them and that would probably require understanding more than about every 20th word or so. :p Yes, I watched all of the episodes, and even cried at a few. Like I said I've read the trilogy so I could get the gist of each episode from the actions of the characters. Hell, I even have a favorite episode, 21, which I can't remember the title of but which is based on the Emily Climbs chapter "At The Sign Of The Haystack" in which Emily and Ilse are canvassing for subscriptions to the Shrewsbury Times, get lost during sunset, and spend the night on top of a haystack. Then again there's a lot of Ilse in this episode and did I mention I love her?
There are a few nitpicks I have with the series, mostly that the first book, Emily of New Moon, gets 20 eps to itself, while the last two books of the trilogy are literally crammed into the last half-dozen episodes. I would have loved to see an adaptation of Emily being locked in the church at night, during a storm, with Mad Mr Morrison; or Aunt Ruth locking Emily out of the house and the latter, in a rage, walking seven miles to New Moon, venting to Cousin Jimmy while eating donuts, and then walking back to Shrewsbury; or Emily visiting a famous (in-universe) author she'd written to and each of them thinking that the mud-covered, misbehaving dog that follows Emily into the house is the other's. Or Dean Priest telling Emily he hates her book, and Emily burning the MS and then falling down the stairs and impaling her foot on Aunt Laura's sewing scissors. I could probably go on, but yeah, there was a LOT of stuff in the last two books they skipped completely.
Another nitpick is that Emily cries FAR too much. She didn't cry half as many times in the books, jeez. And when she did, she mostly cried alone.
All in all, though, it is a good series in and of itself, and for the most part, very faithful to the source material (esp. the first book). I think if they'd made another 10-15 eps they could have worked with more of the last two books.
Posted via m.livejournal.com.
vintage_pdx at Union Station, 1918
