Agatha Christie's Great Detectives Poirot and Marple

As part of my project of viewing all possible television and film adaptations of Christie's works, this series came as quite a pleasant surprise. The added character of Raymond West's daughter Maybelle was not at all intrusive, although her pet duck Oliver was almost just too-cute-to-handle. What made the animations so appealing was their willingness to stay quite close to Christie's original stories. Unlike many other film and even more so television adaptations, while watching these 39 episodes, I almost never found myself yelling at the screen: 'Not in the book!'

Sometimes adaptations in foreign languages are much superior to those in the story's original language: there are two different mini series in Russian of Sherlock Holmes' stories which are both quite solid, while the French series Le Petit Meurtres d'Agatha Christie is outstanding for its irreverent humour.

Don't dismiss this series since it's Japanese, or since it's animated, or since it's quite intentionally written for a younger generation. It works quite well not despite but because of all these features.