Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water

1990. TV series. (39 X 30 min.) Science fiction/fantasy. dir Hideaki Anno, Shinji Higuchi. mus Shiro Sagisu. des Yoshiyuki Sadamoto, Shinji Suzuki, Masanori Kikuchi, others. -jd

A circus acrobat named Nadia and a young inventor, Jean, travel the globe on the submarine Nautilus and discover the true secret of the lost continent of Atlantis in this first TV series by Studio Gainax, loosely based on Jules Verne’s classic story 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

At the 1889 Paris World’s Fair, teenage inventor Jean Raltique uses his fabulous homemade flying machine to rescue a beautiful dark-skinned circus acrobat named Nadia and her pet lion cub, King, from the Grandis Gang, a trio of notorious jewel thieves. The gang is after Nadia’s pendant, a faceted jewel called the Blue Water. An orphan, Nadia never knew her parents, and the Blue Water is the only clue she has to her origins. Unable to return to the circus with the Grandis Gang following her, Nadia accepts Jean’s reckless proposal to take her to Africa, which they assume is her homeland.

The pair sets out across the ocean in Jean’s experimental flying machine, only to soon crash en route. Through a series of accidents they end up finding refuge with the legendary Captain Nemo aboard his high-tech submarine Nautilus. Nemo is waging a secret war against the sinister Gargoyle and his Neo-Atlantean organization, which possesses its own mysterious submarine fleet. Soon, even the pursuing Grandis Gang and a young orphan girl named Marie have joined forces with the Nautilus crew to thwart the world-conquering schemes of Gargoyle and his minions.

As the story continues, it becomes apparent that Nadia’s Blue Water is a relic of the lost continent of Atlantis, and her possession of the gem makes her a special target for Gargoyle’s Neo-Atlantean forces. Meanwhile, Captain Nemo proves to have his own connection to the lost civilization, whose ancient super-technology was used to construct the Nautilus. Ultimately the Nautilus is destroyed in battle against the Neo-Atlantean fleet, and Nadia and Jean find themselves stranded on a desert island along with King, Marie, and the Grandis Gang. Seemingly abandoned, they struggle to survive on their own until a new Nautilus appears to carry our heroes into the final battle against Gargoyle.

Produced for Japan’s NHK TV network (the equivalent of U.S. public television), Nadia has the look of a classic, family-friendly adventure, with characters that are well drawn, but easily identifiable caricatures. More than is usual for anime, Nadia boasts a wide variety of skin tones and ethnicities in its large cast of characters. Jean resembles an eager newsboy, with oversized eyeglasses, baggy knee-pants, and a bow tie. The dark-skinned Nadia has a Cleopatra haircut, and is dressed in a skimpy red midriff-baring outfit. Grandis Grava, leader of the Grandis Gang, is a busty redhead who wears a maroon uniform when she is hard at work trying to steal something, and elaborate frilly dresses or skimpy bathing suits when she is trying to draw the eye of the handsome Captain Nemo. Her henchmen, Hanson and Sanson, operate as a sort of comedy duo, with matching white suits and hats. Gargoyle, head of the Neo-Atlanteans, wears a red suit and a pointed black hood with a built-in mask. The locations are similarly exotic and distinctive, as the story globetrots from 19th-century Paris to the heart of Africa to beneath the polar ice caps, and even into outer space.

Nadia of the Mysterious Seas (1990, movie)

Nadia began as a plot outline for a TV series by Hayao Miyazaki (Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Castle of Cagliostro, Castle in the Sky, etc.) based on the classic Jules Verne story 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. The project was shelved by the network, and Miyazaki later went on to reuse many of the concepts from his proposal in the theatrical feature Castle in the Sky. NHK eventually revived the project and entrusted it to Gainax, then an up-and-coming new anime studio that had created a buzz with the OAV series Gunbuster and the feature film The Wings of Honneamise. The resulting TV series naturally had many plot points in common with Castle in the Sky from Miyazaki’s original outline, including a girl with a magic blue gem, a gang of jewel thieves, and a megalomaniac who seeks the jewel in order to harness the lost technology of an ancient civilization, but the final form of Nadia had a uniquely Gainax spin. While still a globe-trotting adventure with all the exciting elements of the Jules Verne story that inspired it—super submarines, sea monsters, and wondrous flying machines—Nadia is also a thoughtful character study of its unique heroine.

Other than her appearance, Nadia at first doesn’t seem very different from a host of other anime females. She’s exotic and beautiful, has a special connection to nature and animals, and is firmly opposed to violence and wanton destruction. But Gainax’s Nadia followed all these traits through to their logical conclusions. Because of her affinity for animals, Nadia is a strict vegetarian, not only refusing to eat meat, but never missing an opportunity to lecture her companions about their own carnivorous habits, which she finds horrific. Her love of nature makes her reflexively suspicious of science and technology, and as an avowed pacifist, she becomes increasingly distressed by the constant bloodshed she witnesses. A flawed heroine, Nadia is almost a direct rebuttal to saintly characters such as Miyazaki’s own Nausicaä, and her moodiness, misdirected anger, and ill-tempered scolding give her a psychological complexity uncommon in anime.

As with other Gainax productions, Nadia weaves a host of homages and anime in-jokes into the fabric of the story, from the Neo Nautilus that appears near the end of the series and is suspiciously reminiscent of the spaceships of Space Battleship Yamato, and Captain Nemo’s strong resemblance to Macross’s Captain Global, to the comedic antics of the Grandis trio and their all-purpose Gratan tank, which hearken back to the classic Tatsunoko anime series, Time Bokan. The series also looks forward to the themes and animation techniques explored in later Gainax works: the much-maligned “island” episodes, often dismissed as time-wasting filler by fans, made up almost a third of the series and produced some of the most interesting storytelling experiments. Not only do the island episodes feature plenty of light comedy and some experimental animation that looks forward to the wackiness of later productions such as FLCL, but Gainax takes full advantage of the confined environment to plumb the characters’ psyches in even greater depth. In “Lincoln Island,” Nadia undergoes what amounts to a complete mental breakdown when confronted with the practical realities of life in the wild, while in “First Kiss,” Jean runs afoul of hallucinogenic mushrooms and in his fevered state is unable to register Nadia’s softening feelings toward him. A run of episodes centered around Nadia’s pet, King, changes the lion cub from a realistic animal to a Snoopy-like anthropomorphic sidekick, including one episode where King runs away from home because he is jealous of Nadia’s feelings toward Jean!

In the end, however, Nadia returns to more traditional anime storytelling to wrap up its plotlines. The mysteries of Atlantis are explained, the secret history of life on Earth is revealed, and the story builds to a seriously dramatic finale in which Captain Nemo returns to lead our heroes into a final confrontation with Gargoyle. The struggle for control over the super-scientific legacy of ancient Atlantis serves as a parable of the positive and negative uses of technology, and the childlike fascination with which the young inventor Jean regards these marvels provides a counterpoint to Nadia’s reflexive distrust. When the final battle is over, a final montage shows us what’s become of all the characters and their awkward, touching relationships.

“King vs. King,” one of the notorious “island” episodes, features a competition between Jean and the Grandis Gang’s own scientific genius, Hanson, in which they pit robotic replicas of King against each other in a footrace around the island. Unfortunately, they forget to give their robot replicas the ability to turn corners, and the two Kings immediately charge forward in a straight line toward a sheer cliff.

In “Lincoln Island,” irritated by the behavior of her fellow castaways Jean and Marie, Nadia throws a furious snit and stomps off to live alone “with nature.” The experiment ends in disaster, with Nadia sneaking into her former camp to steal canned food from Jean and Marie (cans that she is reduced to bashing with rocks in a fruitless attempt to get them open) and nearly drowning herself by trying to break into their abandoned Nautilus escape capsule for supplies. “Why aren’t the fish helping me?” she wails as she sinks into the ocean, only to be rescued by Jean. An awesome split-second reaction shot shows the fish not helping.

“My Darling Nadia” is a clip episode staged as a musical, where the characters sing their feelings. The highlight is Jean’s original love ballad to Nadia, backed by his own invention, a strumming mechanical banjo.

Codirector Shinji Higuchi worked in various capacities on The Wings of Honneamise, Gunbuster, Otaku no Video, Macross Plus Movie Edition, Neon Genesis Evangelion, and End of Evangelion, but has concentrated on live-action films in recent years, including special effects direction on all three Gamera remakes. He became a live-action director with the 2005 World War II movie, Lorelei: The Witch of the Pacific Ocean, and the 2006 disaster movie, Nihon Chinbotsu (Japan Sinks).

The movie sequel, Nadia of the Mysterious Seas, was produced without involvement of the original directors Anno or Higuchi.

Nadia had a very checkered licensing history in the United States. The original licensor, Streamline Pictures, released only the first eight episodes, dubbed into English, on VHS tapes in 1996. Hopeful plans for a television broadcast of the series did not pan out, and no more English-language episodes were produced. After languishing in licensing limbo for several years, Nadia changed hands to ADV Films, which has since released the full series on bilingual DVD.

Nadia was the first character to overtake Nausicaä as the Number One favorite female anime character, in a poll of readers of the Japanese magazine Animage.

The mecha design for the Nautilus submarine is modeled on the submarine Alpha from the 1969 Toho movie Ido Zero Dai-Sakusen (aka Latitude Zero or Atragon II). The Neo Nautilus combines elements of the space battleship Andromeda from Space Battleship Yamato and the Moonlight SY-3 from Destroy All Monsters (which was itself based on Thunderbird 1 from the Gerry Anderson series Thunderbirds), reportedly one of Hideaki Anno’s favorite ships.

In “The New Nautilus,” the Nautilus submarine is reborn as a spaceship, breaking free from a rusted covering and a dry lake bed, in an homage to Space Battleship Yamato (aka Star Blazers). Nemo’s second-in-command Electra also appears dressed in a tight white flight suit reminiscent of the costumes worn by female characters in Yamato.

A shout-out to Gainax’s previous production, the OAV series Gunbuster: the Neo Nautilus is eventually revealed to be “the fourth-generation space battleship Exelion.” There just so happens to be a fourth-generation space battleship named Exelion in Gunbuster, although it doesn’t actually look anything like the Neo Nautilus.

The scenes of an Atlantean city with frozen specimens of prehistoric life, including a giant-sized Adam, foreshadow similar sequences in Evangelion.

violence Bloody violence, especially in the last few episodes. Shootings, as well as some extremely emotional offscreen death scenes that are perhaps more disturbing for not being shown. nudity Nadia is occasionally shown nude, and there is a glimpse or two of Grandis’s breasts as well.