Anne of Green Gables: The Continuing Story is a 2000 miniseries television film, and the third installment in a series of four films. The film was highly anticipated among fans of Anne of Green Gables, and was the most controversial and heavily criticized of the three film adaptations written and produced by Kevin Sullivan.
The Continuing Story was criticized principally because, unlike the 1985 film Anne of Green Gables and its 1987 sequel, the screenplay is not based on Lucy Maud Montgomery's works, but is instead a completely original World War I story written by Sullivan and Laurie Pearson. Montgomery had in fact written a novel focused on Anne's youngest daughter set in that same period, Rilla of Ingleside, in which Anne is a middle-aged married woman whose three sons are at war in Europe.
The chronology of Sullivan's Anne of Green Gables films is not synchronized with Montgomery's novels, largely because of the spin-off series Road to Avonlea. Over the course of developing original characters and stories for seven seasons of Road to Avonlea, the timeframe of Sullivan's fictional world evolved into a 20-year difference from the novels. As a result, Sullivan decided to make the third film an entirely new story that took Anne and Gilbert, instead of their children, to the battlefields of World War I.
The film was also criticized for introducing a continuity problem. Following Colleen Dewhurst's death in 1991, Marilla Cuthbert's passing was written into Road to Avonlea. At the funeral, Hetty King refers to Gilbert and Anne Blythe, stating they are married. Anne does not appear in the episode because she is sick with scarlet fever which, according to Gilbert, she contracted from one of their children. However, in The Continuing Story, set long after Marilla's death, the two are still engaged and do not have children. The film attempts to resolve the discontinuity by having Gilbert say that they have been engaged so long that people think they got married years ago, and by revealing that Anne had scarlet fever while teaching at an orphanage in Nova Scotia.
Megan Follows reprised the role of Anne Shirley, Jonathan Crombie returned as Gilbert Blythe and several other cast members from the first two films also appear.
Source: Wikipedia (CC BY-SA)
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