Television series

Anne of Green Gables

Name: Anne of Green Gables
Genre: Drama, Family
Released: 1985
Cast: Jonathan Crombie, Megan Follows, Patricia Hamilton, Schuyler Grant, Colleen Dewhurst

This is the gold standard adaptation: Megan Follows as the red-haired, silver-tongued orphan who talks her way into the hearts of two elderly siblings and then all of Prince Edward Island. Gorgeous, unhurried, emotionally exact — a coming-of-age story that trusts a child's imagination as much as her heartbreak. Family viewing at its most quietly devastating.

TVMaze rating

7.5

If you liked this

Road to Avonlea1990

The actual continuation of this world, widening out into the village and its later generations — if you want more time here with the same warmth and craft, this is it.

But Anne herself barely appears; it's more ensemble village drama, so if you came purely for her voice, you may miss it.

Little Women2019

Another fiercely imaginative heroine wrestling with poverty, ambition and sisterhood, told with the same conviction that a girl's inner life is worth the whole runtime.

But Greta Gerwig's fractured, time-hopping structure is a deliberate swerve from Anne's gentleness — it demands more attention than comfort viewing usually asks for.

Pride and Prejudice

The same unhurried, novel-faithful pacing, and the same pleasure in watching a sharp, funny woman spar her way toward the people who actually deserve her.

But It's adult romance rather than childhood wonder — the stakes are marriage and money, not orphanhood and belonging.

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Anne of Green Gables1985

It's the same book, filtered through two future Studio Ghibli founders who saw in Anne's imagination the very thing they'd later build entire films around — a rich inner life as its own kind of heroism. Watching it, you're watching Ghibli's DNA form, decades early, inside someone else's story.

Directed by a young Isao Takahata with Hayao Miyazaki on layouts, this fifty-episode anime adapts the same novel with startling patience — full of Prince Edward Island light, Anne's daydreams rendered as actual reverie, small gestures given room to breathe.

But Fifty episodes of slow, gentle animation is a big ask, and the visual style is unmistakably late-1970s TV anime, not glossy modern fare.