Japan’s NHK Educational Television has pulled back the curtain on Anne Shirley, a new coming-of-age anime series based on L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables.

Published in 1908, this classic Canadian novel is about an 11-year-old orphan girl whose unbridled imagination and zest for life wins over the hearts of two aging siblings trying to run a farm on Prince Edward Island. 

Tokyo’s The Answer Studio (Shimajirō no Wao!) is producing the new anime series, which is slated to premiere on NHK Educational Television in April 2025. Format details are still under wraps, but NHK has noted that the toon will explore the “three pillars” of the protagonist’s character arc—her newfound family, her friendship with “kindred spirit” Diana, and her budding romance with a boy named Gilbert.

This new project marks a return to the anime genre for Anne of Green Gables, which previously inspired a 1979 Nippon Animation series called Akage no An that aired locally on Fuji TV. The same studio also produced Kon’nichiwa Anne in 2009, based on Budge Wilson’s prequel novel Before Green Gables.

Anne of Green Gables has a particularly strong following in Japan, where a version of the novel translated by Hanako Muraoka became a bestseller in the early 1950s and made its way into the country’s school curriculum two decades later.

With more than 50 million copies sold to date, Anne of Green Gables has already been adapted for screens several times over the years—including a 1934 Hollywood film, a 2001 PBS KIDS animated series and a more recent CBC/Netflix live-actioner called Anne with an E that aired between 2017 and 2019.