Anne of Green Gables: The Continuing Story

Anne of Green Gables: The Continuing Story was a 2000 television film, also broadcast as a mini-series, that was highly anticipated among fans of Anne of Green Gables. It borrowed characters from the Anne of Green Gables novels by Lucy Maud Montgomery but not actual plot lines. Instead it served as a sequel to two mini-series produced by CBC Television in the 1980s. It 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 Anne of Green Gables and its 1987 sequel Anne of Avonlea, the screenplay was not based upon Montgomery's works, but instead used Montgomery's much-loved characters in a largely original World War I story by Sullivan and Laurie Pearson. Montgomery had written an Anne novel set in that same period, Rilla of Ingleside, a story focusing on Anne's youngest daughter, and in which Anne was a mother whose three sons were fighting in Europe.

The chronology of Sullivan's Anne of Green Gables films is not in synch with the LM Montgomery 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 time frame of Sullivan's fictional world evolved into a 20 year difference from the Montgomery novels. As a result, Sullivan decided to make Anne of Green Gables: The Continuing Story a completely original work that took Anne and Gilbert to the battlefields of WWI instead of their children as in Montgomery's novels.

The film was also criticised for introducing a continuity problem. Following Colleen Dewhurst's death in 1991, Marilla Cuthbert's death was written into the series Road to Avonlea. At Marilla's funeral, Hetty King refers to Gilbert and Anne Blythe, stating they were married. Anne does not appear in the Avonlea episode because she is sick with scarlet fever. The Continuing Story, which takes place five years later, attempts to resolve the discontinuity by revealing that Anne had scarlet fever while she was teaching at an orphanage in Nova Scotia.

Megan Follows reprised the role of Anne Shirley.