Backstage Stories About the Making of 1979 Classic Anne of Green Gables with Anne Herself, Eiko Yamada
by Richard Eisenbeis,
2025 is looking to be a big year for Eiko Yamada, who played Anne Shirley in the classic 1979 anime.
In the first part of this two-part interview, Yamada talks about the backstage aspects of her time working on Anne of Green Gables—how she got the role of Anne, her experience working with acclaimed Ghibli directors Hayao Miyazaki, and her most memorable moments.
*This interview contains major spoilers for Anne of Green Gables.
“It all started over a matter of 2,000 yen,” Yamada began. “Kōhei Miyauchi, who played the grandfather in Heidi of the Alps and was my senior in the theater company that I belonged to at the time said, 'Hey, Eiko, they're doing auditions for Anne of Green Gables. If you go, you'll get 2,000 yen for travel expenses, so go.'” Yamada laughed.
“At that time, I didn't have any feelings about the audition for Anne—about whether I wanted to play the role of Anne or even be a voice actor... I didn't know much about it at all yet. I had played leading roles in musicals for children in the theater company, but I hadn't been given a proper role with many lines in a normal production.” Yamada continued. “At the audition, I was given the book Anne of Green Gables and was told, 'Please read this part on this page.' I read a lot of lines which turned out to be really fun and exciting. After that, I was given 2,000 yen. […] On the way back home, my manager and I went to Takano at Shinjuku Station to eat a chocolate parfait. I ate the chocolate parfait with my 2,000 yen, and said to myself, 'Today was a fun day.'
“I'd had a blast so when I got the call for callbacks and found out that I was one of the last two people being considered for the role, I hurried to the bookstore, bought a copy of Anne of Green Gables, and practiced at home.” But what Yamada didn't know at the time was that this would prove to be her biggest mistake.
“I really wanted to get the role but I overdid it and things didn't go well. When I went to the callbacks, the sound director, Yasuo Urakami, only heard a few lines from me before he said, 'Are you the one who came the other day?' and 'Your performance is completely different, what's wrong? Try to act more normally, like the other day.'
“I couldn't do it. I practiced desperately at home and got so tense, caught within my own delusions, thinking, 'I want to the audition, I want to the audition,'” Yamada lamented. “So even as I was given notes [from the sound director], I couldn't perform with that same relaxed and joyful feeling at all like during the first round and I was sent home in about 10 minutes… I had done an hour the first time. All I could say was, 'I'm sorry. I couldn't be of any help.' Afterwards, I was crying in the entrance hall, thinking, 'There's no way I'll get the part. It's all over.'”
“But in the end, Isao Takahata, the director [of the anime], heard my first audition tape. Since we recorded for an hour the first time, there was a lot of audio so he said, 'This girl's voice is a little strange…'” Yamada told me while giving her best Takahata impression. “As the other finalist for the role had a beautiful voice Takahata said, 'Instead of a pretty voice, this interesting, strange voice is more like Anne, isn't it?' [...] Apparently, Hayao Miyazaki [who was doing scene setting and layout for the show in his pre-Ghibli days] apparently said, "No, the cute and beautiful one is better!" But in the end, it seems that I was chosen because Takahata recommended me.'”
Interestingly, there is a bit of an epilogue to that story. “10 years later Anne of Green Gables was made into a movie. I met Takahata for the first time in a long while and the first thing Takahata said to me, scratching his head as usual, was, 'Well, Yamada's voice for Anne wasn't as strange as I thought it would be.' That was the first thing he said to me after such a long time!” Yamada said in mock indignation. “Producer Junzō Nakajima, who was standing next to him, was the most embarrassed of us. 'No, Takahata! No, um, Eiko-chan, her voice isn't weird… Right? Right?,' He tried as hard as he could," she laughed. "But Takahata didn't seem to care at all and just said, "Hmm, well, that was for the best.”
That wasn't Yamada's only story about Takahata. While she didn't meet him often—as his notes were ed down through sound director Yasuo Urakami—there was one meeting that still sticks out in her mind today. “One day Urakami took me to the production site of the anime because he said, “we should ask Takahata to provide more drawings on the screen during recording—to have something being shown on the recording booth video screen, even if the images aren't colored. It really helps, you know?” Yamada told me.
“Takahata came out, his hair was all messy, and he was kind of, like, a total mess from pulling all nighters, scratching his head and saying, 'Oh, thanks for coming,'—at that time his hair was like a bird's nest,” she laughed. “When we tried to say something about the illustrations, he would start muttering to himself about the contents of Anne of Green Gables.” Yamada laughed again. “I had no idea what he was talking about, and I thought, 'Now I get it! Takahata is giving his all, completely immersed in the work!' In this situation, there's no way we could say, 'Please add more illustrations [to the recording booth monitor]' That's my most vivid memory of him.”
Over the course of recording for the 50-episode anime, Yamada made friendships with the other female voice actors. “Fumie Kitahara, the one who played Marilla, [left a strong impression on me]. She was always kind to me, and Urakami told me to deliver the script to Kitahara's house in Aoyama two or three days before recording every week. At that time, she would give me cake and tea, and in the midst of casual conversation, she would tell me things about how to act—not like, 'Do it this way, do it that way,' but in a nice, casual way. That was very helpful.”
Yamada had the opposite kind of friendship with her other veteran female costar. “Miyoko Asō, who played Mrs. Lynde, would often say things like, 'Eiko, your lines aren't very sexy, so you need to create more sexiness within yourself.'” Yamada explained. “Asō was kind enough to say all sorts of things to me directly. Kitahara always told me things in a rather gentle way.
But when it comes to her time in the recording booth for Anne of Green Gables, one scene stands out above all others: the death of Matthew. “That scene is painful,” Yamada reminisced 46 years after the fact. “I cried even during the actual recording session, so it took quite a while to record. At that time, I really felt like Ryūji Saikachi [Matthew's voice actor] was dying... And Saikachi said to me, 'Hey, you, stop it. It's not like I'm going to die.'”
“I was crying so hard I couldn't say my lines. But the more I tried, the more nasally my voice got. Recording just kept dragging on and on... so they decided to take a little break, calmed me down a bit, and asked the others to go home. It usually took us 15 minutes per scene? Maybe 10 minutes? 'To everyone waiting in the back, you can go home. For this scene we just need Eiko and the other two... Marilla and Matthew,'” Yamada said, imitating the sound director at that time. “The narrator had already gone home. We did it one more time after the break.”
“I had read it in the book, so I thought I could act it out, but to actually say it out loud—and to have Saikachi beside me having just said something like 'I'd rather have you than a dozen boys, Anne,' gave me great happiness but also great sadness—to have Matthew away was indescribably sad. And it was the scene where Anne truly, fully realized that 'There was someone who really loved me.' It'll make you cry. It'll make you cry…”
Stay tuned for part two of our interview with Eiko Yamada, where we dive into her relationship with Anne of Green Gables and the character that jump-started her voice acting career.
Additional interview assistance by Rebecca Silverman.
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