This is the World Masterpiece Theater trick at full strength: fifty episodes that make you care about building a roof, hauling water, and getting through one more season without anybody getting sick. Nippon Animation took Wyss's old castaway novel and handed it to Flone, a ten-year-old from Bern who climbs everything and refuses to be the daughter who waits on shore, and the whole show is better for it. The setup is unglamorous on purpose. A doctor gets a letter begging him to come to Australia because there aren't enough doctors, the family packs up a comfortable life in Switzerland, and the ocean does what the ocean does. What sticks isn't the shipwreck, it's the domestic arithmetic afterward, the salvaged supplies, the improvised shelter, a father still practicing medicine with nothing. You finish it strangely homesick for a place with no walls.

Ten-year-old Flone is an energetic, tomboyish girl living with her family in Bern. One day her father gets a letter from an English friend now settled in Australia, urging him to come because the country is badly short of doctors. The family decides to give up their old home in Bern and set out, and so their drifting voyage begins. Across 50 episodes, this adventure drama with slice-of-life touches follows Flone's remarkable experiences, stressing how much family matters and the pleasures of living close to the beauty of nature.