Heidi, A Menina dos Alpes

It's funny to see that Heidi, coming from the now very praised genius of Ghibli (Isao Takahata and, everyone guesses, some touches of Miyazaki) was so extremely successful in Europe and it is relatively unknown to American audiences, the ones most fascinated with Miyazaki. The story of an orphan girl who must live with her grandfather in the mountains, and how she is able to make a new life with a nearly unbeatable optimism, is told by Takahata in a style that could be Ozu on drawings. The same kind of character observation, the same kind of very long pauses between facts, and something that really surprises me, a very observatory storytelling, something that is very rare in animated series. It's extremely emotional too, but not being excessively emphatic on that. It's just an admirable animated series, very unique, and very classic, something that amazes me that had such success in Spain, Italy and Germany.

I loved this cartoon when I watched it as a child in Europe and now I felt very happy to find it on youtube and watch it all over again.

Heidi is a beautiful story about a little girl that lives with her grandfather in the Swiss Alps. We get to see her adventures in the mountains and outside of them.

Created by a Japanese anime director it is amazing how beautifully he portrayed the culture and the landscapes. I loved the drawings of the alps an the animals. He made an amazing job to show the atmosphere of the location that makes one just want to go there and one can feel the happiness and beauty of it.

The episodes in Frankfurt are the worst ones. They are sad and Heidi seems not as smart as she always does. But this sure has a reason as those episodes portray the sad time.

Lovely cartoon that all kids would love and their parents would enjoy with them

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.

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...

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.