Anne Shirley’s Waiting Scene, Captured in Sepia by Kaiyodo

Anne of Green Gables Sepia Figure by K&M and Kaiyodo

A Seated Anne, Rendered in Quiet Sepia

This fixed-pose figure captures Anne Shirley in a seated, thoughtful pose — left hand raised to her chin, as though absorbed in her own imagination. What sets the piece apart immediately is its finish: instead of the vivid colors typical of anime merchandise, the sculpt is toned throughout in warm, muted sepia. The effect is closer to an old photograph than a standard collectible, lending the figure a deliberately nostalgic character. A stepped pale-brown base anchors the scene, with a small dark brown bag resting alongside her. The “Waiting Scene” subtitle suggests a particular mood or moment from the 1979 anime, though its connection to a specific episode isn’t definitively documented. The figure belongs to the World Masterpiece Theater Sepia line, produced under the K&M brand — a collaboration between Kaiyodo and the anime merchandising firm Movic — and is most likely a trading figure or gashapon release, formats that were the dominant vehicle for this kind of collector-quality small figure in Japan during the early 2000s.

The Anime and the Story Behind Anne Shirley

World Masterpiece Theater was a long-running anthology broadcast on Fuji TV from 1975, produced by Nippon Animation. The format was consistent each year: one adaptation of a beloved Western novel, aimed at families, rendered as a weekly series. The lineup over the decades included Heidi, A Dog of Flanders, and Little Women, among others. The Anne of Green Gables installment aired in 1979 across 50 episodes. Its creative team gives it a particular place in animation history: the series was directed by Isao Takahata and featured character design by Yoshifumi Kondo, two figures who would go on to be central to Studio Ghibli. The source material is L.M. Montgomery’s 1908 Canadian novel, which follows Anne Shirley — a red-haired, freckled, fiercely imaginative orphan girl taken in by a pair of siblings on Prince Edward Island — through her childhood and adolescence. The novel has been translated into dozens of languages and has readers across Europe, Asia, and the Americas; the anime version was broadcast in Canada and several other countries beyond Japan, giving it genuine international reach.

Kaiyodo, K&M, and the Trading Figure Era

Kaiyodo, founded in 1964, is regarded among collectors worldwide as one of Japan’s most technically accomplished figure makers. Around 1999, the company moved into the food-toy and trading figure market — small collectibles sold with candy or dispensed through gashapon capsule machines — and the quality jump it brought to that category attracted attention both domestically and abroad. K&M paired Kaiyodo’s sculpting precision with Movic’s anime licensing infrastructure, directing that combined capability toward characters from established broadcast properties. The World Masterpiece Theater Sepia series applied a single cohesive visual concept — the restrained brownish palette — across figures from multiple series within the WMT catalog, treating the anthology as a unified aesthetic family. For collectors outside Japan, the Kaiyodo name carries weight as a marker of craftsmanship. The pre-Ghibli creative lineage of the 1979 Anne anime adds a separate thread of interest for fans who follow Takahata’s and Kondo’s careers. And for anyone assembling a broader Anne of Green Gables collection, the sepia finish distinguishes this figure clearly from standard full-color releases of the same character.