Anne Anne with an E // VIDEO: | Official Trailer [HD] | Netflix

Anne with an E (initially titled Anne for its first season) is a Canadian episodic television series adapted from Lucy Maud Montgomery's 1908 classic work of children's literature, Anne of Green Gables. It was created by Moira Walley-Beckett for CBC and stars Amybeth McNulty as orphan Anne Shirley, Geraldine James as Marilla Cuthbert, R. H. Thomson as Matthew Cuthbert, Dalila Bela as Diana Barry and Lucas Jade Zumann as Gilbert Blythe.

The series premiered on March 19, 2017, on CBC and on May 12 internationally on Netflix. It was renewed for a second season on August 3, 2017 and for a third season in August 2018. Shortly after the third season was released in 2019, CBC and Netflix announced that the series was cancelled.

Anne with an E received positive reviews and won Canadian Screen Award for Best Dramatic Series in both 2017 and 2018. The series tackled a broad amount of issues such as orphaning, child abandonment, psychological trauma, social issues such as pressure for conformity, gender inequality, racism, religion and freedom of speech.

 

In 1896, elderly brother and sister Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert (who live together as they never married) decide to adopt an orphan boy to help out around their ancestral farm of Green Gables, on the outskirts of the Canadian town of Avonlea, Prince Edward Island. When Matthew goes to pick the child up at the railway station, he finds 13-year-old Anne Shirley, an imaginative, bright, high-spirited, and talkative girl, instead. Anne was an orphan when her parents died when she was a few months old, and lived as a servant in various households before being placed in an orphanage.

While Matthew decides he would like for her to stay, Marilla does not trust Anne, given her status as an unknown orphan and the perceived uselessness of a young girl. Her distrust appears confirmed when Marilla cannot locate a brooch, thus leading her to believe that Anne is a thief. The Cuthberts send her away, thus "returning" her to the orphanage. While she does arrive back at the orphanage, she is terrified to enter, haunted by bullying she had endured there and returns to the train station. Meanwhile, Marilla discovers that the brooch had been misplaced rather than stolen and that prejudice had led her to believe Anne was a thief. Matthew consequently finds Anne and convinces her to return to Green Gables, where she is officially made part of their family. However, Anne continues to face bullying from students in the Avonlea school and class based discrimination from Diana's parents and others in the community. Anne once again returns and attempts to gain acceptance by the rest of Avonlea, using her survival mechanisms of intelligence, problem-solving abilities and imagination.

 

Lush, sad and perfect: at last, TV gives us an Anne of Green Gables for our times

 

From her red pigtails to the cornflower seas, everything looks, feels and simply is right in Anne With An E, the exquisite new adaptation by Breaking Bad writer Moira Walley-Beckett

 

Chitra Ramaswamy

@Chitgrrl

Fri 12 May 2017 11.53 BST

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/may/12/anne-with-an-e-netflix-green-gables

 

Our first sight of Anne With An E, aka Anne of Green Gables, is on a steam train bound for Avonlea. Skinny as a piece of string, sharp as a tack, red pigtails, pale skin, pale eyes, freckle-spattered, with a moth-eaten straw hat and a tatty carpet bag that has to be carried just so … phew, she’s perfect. A baby cries, momentarily transporting the orphan traumatised by a lifetime of “never belonging to anybody” back to her last so-called home, where she was forced to care for Mrs Hammond’s ever-expanding brood and mercilessly beaten for being “nothing but a miserable piece of trash”. Meanwhile, the train chugs along the coast of Prince Edward Island, as much a character in Lucy Maud Montgomery’s beloved books as New York is in Sex and the City. Low, honeyed light on wildflower meadows, russet cliffs, cornflower seas and an almost obscene amount of blossom: it’s as lush and healing as a place can be. And this is a story in which everyone requires healing.

 

Everything looks, feels and simply is right about this exquisite Netflix adaptation by Moira Walley-Beckett, a veteran writer/producer on Breaking Bad and clearly an Anne superfan. It takes one to know one. I love Anne of Green Gables, specifically Kevin Sullivan’s unsurpassable 80s miniseries, like other people love their children. I spent many hours of my childhood learning Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s The Lady of Shalott off by heart, then attempting to steal boats on the Thames so I could recite it lying down and pretending to be dead, just like Anne. I follow Megan Follows (the definitive Anne in the 80s show) on social media and try really hard not to message her every day. I wanted to call my son Gilbert.

 

The feature-length opening episode, directed by Niki Caro (Whale Rider), is faithful to both book and miniseries without being straitjacketed by either. Anne arrives at what she believes to be her new home, Green Gables, after talking Matthew’s ear off on the long and wondrous ride from the station. Every detail is spot-on: Matthew’s fond silence, the avenue of wild cherry trees that Anne says will henceforth be known as The White Way of Delight, the pastoral peace and ruthlessly scrubbed wooden floors of Green Gables. Here, she is told by a particularly austere Marilla (the excellent British actress Geraldine James) that “she’s got to go back” because she isn’t the boy they were expecting. Cue a mini feminist tract, in which Anne insists that “girls can do anything a boy can do and more”. Nice touch.

 

Although Walley-Beckett brings some of Breaking Bad’s darkness and dry wit to Avonlea, it’s never at the expense of its essential tenderness. This, after all, is a story about an ageing brother and sister, so emotionally repressed they don’t even know it, whose hearts are slowly prised open by an orphan who never shuts up. Marilla begins by believing “only kin is kin”. Matthew quietly hopes to “be some good to her”. Yet it is the quintessential outsider who ends up saving them. Anne, superbly played by Amybeth McNulty, looks a little like a young Rebecca Hall and is one of those haunting child actors who can actually act. It’s not easy to pull off a classic line like “My life is a perfect graveyard of buried hopes” without being annoying. James’s Marilla is just the right combination of severity and long buried sentiment: her sad, kind eyes glossy with tears that never brim over.

 

The second episode, directed by Helen Shaver (who, fun fact, played Vivian Bell in iconic lesbian romance Desert Hearts) enters darker territory. Matthew goes in search of Anne, who has been sent back to the orphan asylum by Marilla after being wrongly accused of stealing her prized brooch. She fends off all sorts of jeopardy and is eventually coaxed back to Avonlea, but this 21st-century Anne – a bit Brontë-ish, a bit Jane Campion – is more damaged and untrusting than previous incarnations. She suffers debilitating flashbacks that can be triggered by the sight of a cup of tea, weeps heartily, and lives in fear that she will be sent away again. Her vivid imagination is less a lovable character quirk and more the only survival mechanism available to an abused child. “I like imagining better than remembering,” is how Anne cheerfully puts it.

 

Anne With An E ploughs its own furrow, which is just as well because any attempt to compete with the 80s series would be doomed to failure. Instead, what we have is a stylish, overtly feminist affair aimed more at adults than children. How the series will go on to depict such defining moments as the breaking of the slate over Gilbert’s head – as key to Anne fans as the shower scene in Psycho is to Hitchcock lovers – remains to be seen, but this, finally, is an Anne of Green Gables for our times: a darker, sadder, more realistic story about an outsider’s will to survive.

 

• Anne With An E is on Netflix now.