Heidi - Kindheit in den Bergen

I will never forget watching this program as a child in Costa Rica in the late 70's. At the time we lived near the Pacific coast, in the jungle surrounding a banana plantation, and it was very difficult to get a TV signal. Only one channel came in, and only for a few hours a day. With my younger brother and sister, we would play the soundtrack LP of songs in Spanish over and over. For the last episode the signal that day was very poor, so my parents drove us to the beach, near Limon, and we watched on a tiny battery-powered black-and-white TV which at the time must have been the latest in technology, especially in such a place. Recently, after all these years I heard a clip of the opening music over the web and wept for hours... I will be the happiest guy the day I can get this show on DVD, especially the Spanish-dubbed version.

This is one of the first Japanese cartoon series that reached my country (Italy) in the late '70s and by far one of the best. It follows the original book quite faithfully and its graphics is of rather excellent level for just a TV series before the computer age. The characters are very well "builded", they are completely believable and lively: they became my friends and so was for all the children I knew. Indeed, this series was so well done that everyone, not just children, not just young girls, but just EVERYONE get crazy about it: boys and girls, teenagers, parents, grandparents... still I remember how much my grandpa liked it...

This TV series was one of the first anime hits in Argentina that crossed all barriers of age and gender. Extremely sweet and gentle, Heidi has a charm that both girls, parents and even boys love (but they'll never admit to it, of course). Heidi is such a pure girl that is impossible to ignore its charm. This TV series marks one of the earliest collaborations of Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata. By now, you can already see the genius of both. Looking back at these 52 episodes after their successful carreers, it is interesting to see many of their themes and leit motifs appearing in Heidi that would later also surface in later works (young heroines, love for country life, lazy and silent dogs, etc). Sadly, the TV series does not seem to have been published for later generations so the only way to watch it is likely thru some old fan subs. Technically, Heidi is also very impressive to see even today. The traditional use of shadowing in anime is instead replaced by a more flat look but a bigger emphasis put in animation. Looking at it today, animation buffs will be amazed at how good the animation of Heidi was for its time, the traditionally tight budgets of TV production and the length of the series.

This japan animated TV-series was an incredible social phenomenon in Spain.All the people in my country cried with the adventures of this charming girl in the 70's.It success was so strong that it caused that the television network that emitted it repeated a chapter by popular demand

It is really not possible to limit a work of such purity by a rating, but for all practical purposes "Heidi" deserves at least a 10 on IMDb's scale, in my opinion.

The animation is so realistically done that we not only feel for all the characters, human and otherwise, but also live, grow, smile and cry with them. And the storytelling is at once engaging, visceral, harrowing, redeeming and deeply poignant. Every frame has some subliminal emotional content that draws us deeper into the narrative.

On a personal note, "Heidi" was by a far margin the best show I enjoyed in my childhood, not just because of the fantasies it weaved but also how intensely they were interweaved with all the harshness of reality. While that may not be necessarily the ideal content for children, the feeling of emancipation at the end of it all still rings true with me.

Johanna Spyri probably could not have asked for a better visual translation of her story.