The boy on the hill is the promise Candy Candy makes in its opening stretch and spends 115 episodes keeping. Toei Animation adapted Kyoko Mizuki’s manga into a single season that tv asahi aired from October 1, 1976, to February 2, 1979. That patience is the whole point of the show.
Candy Candy is a shōjo drama about an orphan who refuses to be pitied. It is also, at 115 episodes, a commitment. It rewards that commitment.
Pony’s Home and the Girl Who Won’t Break
Candice “Candy” White grows up at an orphanage called Pony’s Home. She is optimistic, warm-hearted, and not especially interested in being sad about her situation. Her friend there is Annie. Behind the orphanage is a hill, and on that hill she meets the boy who will shadow the rest of her life.
Then the Loka family adopts her. This is where Candy Candy gets its engine. The household comes with Leo and his sister Eliza, both bad-hearted, both committed to making Candy’s life difficult. The show does not pretend this is a misunderstanding that resolves in an episode. It is a sustained campaign, and Candy absorbs it.
What makes this stretch work is that Candy is not a martyr. She is cheerful in a way that reads as stubbornness rather than innocence. Mizuki built the character from a specific template — she has said she drew on Jean Webster’s Daddy Long Legs and Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, chasing the trope of the optimistic orphan who faces life head-on and moves forward.
That is the show’s thesis, and it holds for 115 episodes.
Anthony in the Rose Garden
In the rose garden, Candy meets a boy who looks exactly like the boy from the hill. His name is Anthony Brown, and he becomes her first love.
Mizuki has been explicit about what Anthony is for. In an interview published in the Keizensha Encyclopedia under the title “Candy’s Secret Revealed!,” she described three loves structured into the story. The first is Anthony: “a fleeting romance, a love composed solely of tenderness with a boy of a special, pure transparency.”
Fleeting is the operative word, and it is the show’s first real cruelty. Candy Candy does not treat first love as a rehearsal. It treats it as the thing itself, then takes it away. The second love, Terry, is described by Mizuki as “turbulent, youthful” — a love one must part from even while still in love.
Two loves, two losses, and the show keeps going. That is the structure, and it is more disciplined than it sounds.
A Nurse, Not a Rescue
After the losses, Candy trains to become a nurse. This is the decision that separates Candy Candy from the orphan-genre default Mizuki explicitly rejected. She said she wanted to write something that was not “merely a magical manga” and not “a conventional tale of an orphan girl searching for her mother,” but “the life of a girl who lives looking toward the future.”
So Candy does not wait to be found. She gets a profession. The back half of the show is about work, obstacles, and competence earned rather than granted — and the payoff is that the enigmatic Albert turns out to be both her protector and the childhood crush she was bound to by the red thread of fate.
The third love Mizuki described is “serene.” That word is doing a lot of work, and the finale earns it.
The Voices Behind Candy and Albert
Minori Matsushima voices Candice White Ardlay, and the performance is the reason the show survives its own length. Makio Inoue voices William Albert Ardlay. Kazuhiko Inoue voices Anthony Brown. Kei Tomiyama voices Terrence “Terry” Granchester, the second love.
The supporting cast is deep. Kaneta Kimotsuki voices Alistair “Stear” Cornwell and Yūji Mitsuya voices Archibald “Archie” Cornwell. Mami Koyama is Annie Brighton, Chiyoko Kawashima is Patricia “Patty” O’Brien, Yumi Nakatani is Eliza Leagan, and Kiyoshi Komiyama is Neil Leagan. Taeko Nakanishi handles Sister Pony, Grandaunt Elory and the narrator. Nana Yamaguchi voices Sister Lane, Mrs. Leagan and Sister Gray.
That is a lot of doubling, and it is a reminder of what 1970s television animation actually cost to make.
The Manga That Won Kodansha
Candy Candy started as a manga. It was published in April 1975, written by Mizuki and illustrated by Yumiko Igarashi, assembled by the magazine Nakayoshi. It ran for four years and won the first Kodansha Manga Award for shōjo in 1977.
The anime followed, along with three animated short films and a three-volume novel published between 1978 and 1979. A 1992 film recast several roles, with Ryo Horikawa as Anthony, Yumi Touma as Annie, Eiko Hisamura as Eliza, and Ryuusei Nakao as Neil.
The 1976 series remains the version that matters most.
The Three Loves, in Order
Mizuki’s structure is the clearest way to see what Candy Candy is doing. Ranked by how much weight the show gives them, and in the order the story delivers them:
- Anthony Brown — the first love, the fleeting one, composed solely of tenderness.
- Terrence “Terry” Granchester — the turbulent, youthful love, the one Candy must part from while still in love.
- William Albert Ardlay — the serene love, the protector, the boy bound to Candy by the red thread of fate.
The order is not a preference. It is the architecture. Each love teaches Candy something the next one requires.
Episode Order and Where the Story Turns
Candy Candy runs 115 episodes across a single season. The schedule below tracks the broadcast and the story’s major turns, not a per-episode ranking.
| Phase | Broadcast window | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| Pony’s Home | From Oct 1, 1976 | Candy at the orphanage; Annie; the boy on the hill |
| The Loka household | 1976–1977 | Adoption; Leo and Eliza; the rose garden; Anthony |
| Loss and Terry | 1977–1978 | Anthony gone; the turbulent second love |
| Nursing and Albert | Through Feb 2, 1979 | Candy trains as a nurse; Albert revealed |
What Actually Holds Up
The show’s weakness is its middle. At 115 episodes, Candy Candy has room to stall, and it uses some of it. The Terry arc is the most emotionally ambitious stretch and also the one most likely to test a modern viewer’s patience, because the show commits to a parting it refuses to soften.
The strength is that nothing here is decorative. Pony’s Home, the hill, the rose garden, the Loka house, the hospital — every location is a place where Candy is tested and where she chooses to keep moving forward. Mizuki’s three-love structure is not a gimmick. It is a machine for generating loss and then insisting the character survives it.
And Albert works. The reveal that the enigmatic protector is also the boy she was bound to by the red thread of fate should be too neat. It lands because the show spent 115 episodes making Candy someone who earned a serene ending rather than someone who was handed one.
The Score
Here is what matters most about Candy Candy: it is a 1970s shōjo anime that gave its heroine a job. Candy becomes a nurse. She does not become a prize, and she does not become a mystery for a man to solve. The romance is the plot, but the competence is the character.
The audience score for the series sits at 8.5/10 across 728 votes. That is a high mark for a 115-episode show from 1976 with visible production limits, and it reflects how completely Candy Candy commits to its own emotional logic.
The noise is the length. The signal is the structure — three loves, one profession, one reveal, and a girl who lives looking toward the future.
Score: 8.5 of 10.
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