Guest Post: Does the 1985 "Anne of Green Gables" Refute the Idea That the Book Is Always Better?

A guest post by Amy Colleen from ‘Something Funny, Something True’

Amy from ‘Something Funny, Something True’ and Beccy from ‘Searching For Grace’ have swapped substack posts for the day to write about a topic near and dear to both their hearts: Anne of Green Gables. Make sure to check out both posts on both substacks!

The Kevin Sullivan film gently brings an ethereal novel to life in a way that remains faithful to the source material while enhancing the story.

Image via Sullivan Entertainment (Fair Use)

When my three sisters and I learned about the concept of staying up until midnight on December 31 to welcome in the New Year, nothing would dissuade us; we had to try it for ourselves. Our parents were reluctant. Early retirees themselves, they had no fondness for keeping late hours and even less fondness for the idea of their many rowdy children staying awake to chatter and shriek until midnight. We didn’t even have TV access to watch the ball drop! What was the POINT of it all?

Nevertheless, sometime around the year I was ten (and my sisters were eight, six, and four) the tradition began. Popcorn, lemonade, a VCR hooked up to the somewhat temperamental old box television, and a two-cassette videotape of Anne of Green Gables— and an unshakeable family practice was born.

Anne is the perfect NYE film. Clocking in at three hours and nineteen minutes, it can stretch from eight to midnight if you time the bathroom breaks and popcorn making correctly. It’s family-friendly: gentle, wholesome, funny, engaging for adults and not too complex for children. And if you watch it for enough years in a row, your family will be able to quote nearly every line from memory and will be able to chatter and shriek through the entire movie without missing a single plot point.

Okay, so some folks wouldn’t consider that last bit to be a positive aspect. Whatever.

I can’t remember exactly when I first saw Anne (see the word “sometime” used above). But as I’m approaching thirty now, I reckon it’s been a part of my life for roughly twenty years. That fact certainly plays a role in my love for the film, but I don’t think it completely accounts for the exception I make in its favor.

In general, I prefer books to movies. I’m a diehard nitpicker where literary adaptations are concerned; I wish it weren’t so, but actually I don’t. I like being a member of the imaginary The Book Is Always Better Club. Like Rachel Lynde, I pride myself on speaking my mind, and sometimes my mind wants to speak (in the middle of a poignant scene), “THAT’S NOT HOW IT WAS IN THE BOOK!”

One could well and truly say this about several elements of Anne of Green Gables (1985) and I shall elaborate upon them and defend my position. (Be forewarned, though: I speak today only of the FIRST movie, the one that focuses on the first book in the Anne series, and not the (also excellent but quite different) 1987 sequel or the horror-we-shall-not-speak-of that called itself a conclusion to the trilogy in 2000.)

I suppose I should also note that in order to follow the arguments I shall make in this piece, you ought to have watched Anne in its entirety and read the book— but if you haven’t done so yet, go ahead. I’ll wait.

Oh, you didn’t want to bother with all that just now? Fine. Go read the Wikipedia summaries. Book. Film. (Technically it’s a TV miniseries but it was shot on film and I prefer to say “film” as it makes me sound more pretentious and knowledgeable.)

1. While the book begins with Mrs. Rachel Lynde seeing Matthew Cuthbert driving to Bright River to fetch the “little orphan boy” from the asylum, the film opens with scenes that show Anne in her unwelcoming foster home and the orphanage before she comes to Green Gables. These scenes aren’t in the novel at all; we learn about Anne’s past from her lengthy soliloquy to Marilla regarding “what she knows about herself” (not, sadly, “what she imagines about herself,” which she avows would be much more interesting). It’s a gutsy move to start off an adaptation of a beloved book with 10-15 minutes of completely original material—I do wonder how many new viewers turned off their TVs in disgust in 1985, but I guess Kevin Sullivan is a gutsy guy. (Note: “gutsy” is a word that is neither dazzlingly clever, divinely beautiful, or angelically good, and I do not think I will continue to use it in this piece. Let us substitute a grammatically appropriate form of “gumption,” as a nod to Aunt Jamesina in Anne of the Island.)

2. Throughout the first half of the film, the storyline generally follows that of the novel, but several key scenes are moved into different places. Anne meets Gilbert Blythe at the Sunday School picnic rather than several weeks after she begins school; she dyes her hair green immediately after the slate-smashing incident (presumably in response to her shame over being called “carrots”), whereas in the book this does not happen until chapter twenty-seven, after the injured ankle and Aunt Josephine Barry and the puffed sleeve dress; the Haunted Wood and the walking on the ridgepole of the roof are combined into a single escapade rather than two totally different “goings-on;” and Matthew’s purchase of the puffed-sleeve dress for Anne is a successful endeavor rather than an exercise in futile embarrassment (in the book, he leaves the store unable to buy anything, and must ask Mrs. Lynde to obtain material and make up the dress on his behalf).

3. Anne and Gilbert’s relationship is not only more present in the film (Gilbert only appears a handful of times in the novel, more’s the pity) but more fraught; after Gilbert’s initial root vegetable insult, Gilbert attempts to apologize multiple times, is present at Anne’s fall from Moody Spurgeon’s roof, rescues Anne from the Lake of Shining Waters, drives Anne home from Lawson’s and is SEEN holding her HAND by MRS. RACHEL LYNDE (!) and even asks her to accompany him to the White Sands concert (which she accepts, then retracts). Marilla even has a little dialogue with Gilbert in which she clearly has clocked his interest in Anne and warns him against getting too serious with her at their age. In the novel, Marilla never says a word to Gilbert, and the majority of his and Anne’s interactions focus on academic rivalry, with romance only beginning to creep in at the bend in the road at the end when Gilbert gives up the Avonlea school for Anne. And perhaps most different of all: in the film, Diana is quietly carrying a torch for Gilbert all along, but never says a word about it, because she “thought her bosom friend was in love with him.”

All written out, these comprise a great many changes. Why, then, do I not find myself throwing popcorn at the TV and shrieking “THAT’S NOT HOW IT WAS IN THE BOOK?”

Because I think that the most important aspect of a book-to-screen adaptation is not actually the precision to which the script follows the novel, letter of the law and word for word— but the spirit in which it takes a story from page to living color. And Anne of Green Gables (1985) is a kindred spirit with the book. Above all, it respects its source material; it treats it gently and with love; it enhances the tale with warmth and beauty and a commitment to good storytelling, rather than chopping bits out in order to make a more lucrative and marketable movie.

The changes that were made are not all perfect, but by and large they tell a more cohesive story with a tighter plot and consistent characterization than what we see in the book. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not bashing one of the most beloved novels of my childhood! I think I’d lose my self-appointed status as a nerdy nostalgia blogger if I did. But I think many Anne fans will agree that the first book in the series is one of the weakest in terms of plot and structure; it is a lovely collection of pretty vignettes that work together to form what we might pretentiously call a bildungsroman and might more lucidly refer to as a coming-of-age story.

Let’s review:

1. When the movie opens with Anne herself, rather than showing us Mrs. Lynde (much as we love her) and the Cuthberts right off the bat, this immediately builds the viewer’s empathy for Anne as a friendless orphan who is carrying a weight of guilt for a death she didn’t cause. With this backstory explained right from the outset, Anne’s disassociation from reality with imagination and her penchant for over-explaining herself immediately make sense. We don’t see her as a quirky enigma but as a child who needs to be loved. This characterization develops further as the story progresses, of course, but it was a very smart move to open the film this way. Also, we get a fun foreshadowing of the Lily Maid adventure!

2. Condensing some of Anne’s “scrapes” into a more tightly plotted flow of narrative doesn’t lose any of the fun in the original escapades. In fact, I’d argue that placing such events as the hair dyeing near the beginning of the story makes more sense in the timeline of Anne’s maturing than it does in its later place in the book. This structuring of the storyline is so well-done, in fact, that the script is still used as a study text in film schools. (I learned this from the little promotional booklet that accompanied the DVD set in 2009, so it must be true.)
   
   I do lament the loss of a few moments from the book, however; I wish we had gotten to see Anne’s flower crown at Sunday School and her liniment cake and her tea party with Mrs. Allan. But one cannot have everything and I suppose we ought to be content with our lot and be grateful we have not been saddled with twenty pounds of brown sugar.

3. I am of two minds regarding the extra Gilbert material. On the one hand, developing Gilbert’s character further is an automatic yes, and getting to see more of Jonathan Crombie is not something anyone should ever complain about. On the other hand, I am not sure if I approve of Diana’s secret crush. I like the fact that Diana has a bit more to say and do in the film than her status as yes-woman sidekick (who is fat! We mustn’t ever forget she is fat! L.M. Montgomery makes sure to mention it once a chapter!) allows her in the book. But I wonder if Diana’s interest in Gilbert is meant to come across as a deciding factor in Anne realizing that she wants to be with Gilbert, and I do not think that is true to the sixteen-year-old Anne’s character. She is not ready for jealousy yet (that will come later, in Anne of the Island, when she hears that Ruby Gillis has been corresponding with Gilbert at Redmond). At any rate, nothing ever comes of it of course, and Diana ends up with the eminently respectable and crushingly boring Fred Wright. Bless.

Is the 1985 Anne better than the book? I think that’s a question every Anne fan must answer for herself. As a reader and rereader of the Anne novels (all eight in the series!) for nearly twenty years, I feel comfortable calling myself a true fan. And as I consider the impact the film has had on my life, intertwined with the legacy the books have left, I am happy to say I believe they support and enhance each other. The strength of the movie script comes from Kevin Sullivan’s superb writing, yes, but also from the fact that he knew when to edit and when to let L.M. Montgomery’s splendid dialogue speak for itself.

As for the characters themselves, Anne Shirley is made better and brighter by Megan Follows’ luminous portrayal; Marilla Cuthbert is deeper and more lovable in Colleen Dewhurst’s strong supporting role; Richard Farnsworth’s version of Matthew draws its gentle integrity from the good bones of the book character; Jonathan Crombie is the best Gilbert there could ever be, world without end, amen.

And of course, any mention of the film is not complete without noting the role which the gorgeous Canadian scenery plays. Beauty is one of the hallmarks of Anne’s imaginative worldview in the book, and though L.M. Montgomery’s purple prose plays a deft hand at describing the verdure of Prince Edward Island, actually seeing the coasts and woods and meadows on screen is a special kind of breathtaking. Anne’s world comes alive in the film and the viewer is given the privilege of stepping inside it.

In the end, I don’t suppose it matters. Is the film better, or the book? Or do they coexist in a lovely sort of symbiotic relationship, both kept alive and brought to life by the people who love Anne Shirley? A hundred and twenty years after the book, forty years after the film (I know, I know, you feel old now'; just take a deep breath and think of the Lake of Shining Waters), Anne’s legacy is still just as vivid and vibrant as the memories we formed around her and the bonds that bring her fans together. Kindred spirits, after all, aren’t so scarce as I used to think. It’s splendid to find out there are so many of them in the world.

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Amy Colleen is the author of the Substack “Something Funny, Something True,” and probably a couple of viral tweets that you’ve seen floating around meme pages on Facebook. She writes about life, literature, and the pursuit of hilarity at the aforementioned Substack, and sometimes in other locations. In what spare time she can scrape up, she likes to read great thick books and sew extremely old-fashioned clothes.