Last week the new footage and legacy-dissecting book, this week Anne Frank in anime. Is there a genre that can’t somehow accommodate her story? Directed by Eiji Okabe, Anne no Nikki combines the story of Frank’s confinement with “fantasy” adaptations of four of her short stories—Fear, The Wise Dwarf, Henrietta, and The Adventures of Bralee the Bear Cub—which saw later publication in Tales from the Secret Annex.
An English version of “Anne no Nikki” has never been released, but I find it comforting it’s out there in French, Italian and Arabic. Anne no Nikki?
Only 20 seconds long, but still tremendously moving.
The only existing film images of Anne Frank have been loaded on to YouTube by Amsterdam museum the Anne Frank House.
The footage, from 1941, is the only time Anne has been captured on film. The 20-second footage uploaded to the museum’s recently launched Anne Frank Channel shows Anne’s neighbour on her wedding day. A 13-year-old Anne is seen nine seconds into the video, leaning out of a second-floor window to get a better look at the bride and groom. At the time of the wedding the bride-to-be lived at No 37 Merwedeplein, next door to the Franks at No 39.
The scene was filmed on 22 July 1941, just under a year before the Frank family went into hiding above the family business. The family were discovered in August 1944 and Anne died in a Nazi concentration camp in March 1945.
In other Anne Frank news today, the NYT’s Janet Maslin praises Francine Prose’s Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife. In it, Prose tracks the diary’s various permutations—book, play, film—and shows how, when it comes to interpreting something as culturally charged as Frank’s diary, controversy is never far behind.
