Jex
Member
I'd like to echo most of your thoughts about the series but in a manner that doesn't make me sound like a parrot, which may take some doing. Takahata is one of my all time favourite directors and the amount of work he has put into, and still puts into, the industry is remarkable. I'd say that he's survived so long as a director because of his 'sloth-like' approach to creating work but considering that Miyazaki is still around perhaps that's not the reason.
Regardless, with Anne of Green Gables I feel that we have a perfect meeting of Takahata's style of storytelling and a source material which revels in that which Takahata finds so important - the magic that can be found in the lives of everyday people. It also certainly helps that a number of talented people worked on the show and Miyazaki himself did the storyboards for the first 15 episodes (or so the Internet tells me).
It's pretty lucky that Takahata was working at a time when so many talented people were available to produce animation for TV because a lot of of what sells his works is people being animated in a natural and realistic, rather than an exaggerated and energetic manner. Really well animated natural facial expressions, for example, are certainly rarer than really well animated exaggerated facial expressions and Takahata is generally interested in grounding his works to reality.
One interesting thing that Anne of Green Gables highlighted to me was how well Takahata works as a long form storyteller and as a short form storyteller. While I enjoy both his movies and his TV shows I feel like the added length and depth that a TV series brings really gives him a great chance to build mood, place and tone. He's never in a rush to get you from place to place on some adventure like you might find in a Miyazaki work, instead he languishes around in small, personal locations.
I could go on, but this is already an unfocused ramble so curtailing it would be for the best.
