Rating: 
Summary: The Secret of Blue Water
Review: The Series: "Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water" is a lot of fun, but not without its flaws. The animation is very well executed, but also obviously done on a tight budget, with a lot of scans and loops. The characters are lovable, but tend to bicker amongst themselves too much. The story is interesting, but the writing occasionally goes south, especially in the dismal Lincoln Island episodes. All and all, though, it's a wonderful, innocent adventure, and it makes me very happy. While, at 36 episodes on ten discs, it's a serious investment in time and money, it will richly reward those who stick with it. The ending is one of the best I've seen in an Anime series, and there are a lot of wonderful moments along the way. It will also interest fans of "Neon Genesis Evangelion" and "His and Her Circumstances", since this is the first series Hideaki Anno directed, and it's interesting to see the themes that will show up in his later work evolving here.This Disc: The series gets off to a good start. Jean, a young French inventor, meets Nadia, a beautiful but temperamental circus acrobat with a pet lion cub and a necklace with a blue jewel (the titular Blue Water) that glows when she's in danger. Jean rescues Nadia from a gang of jewel thieves who want Blue Water with the help of a series of fantastic, if slightyl anachronistic, vehicles. These episodes aren't the best in the series, and the scale is a lot smaller and the stakes a lot lower than they will be later on, but they introduce most of the 'good guy' characters, have a lot of great moments, and give a pretty good feel for what the rest of the rest of the series will be like.
Rating:
Summary: The Secret of Blue Water
Review: The Series: "Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water" is a lot of fun, but not without its flaws. The animation is very well executed, but also obviously done on a tight budget, with a lot of scans and loops. The characters are lovable, but tend to bicker amongst themselves too much. The story is interesting, but the writing occasionally goes south, especially in the dismal Lincoln Island episodes. All and all, though, it's a wonderful, innocent adventure, and it makes me very happy. While, at 36 episodes on ten discs, it's a serious investment in time and money, it will richly reward those who stick with it. The ending is one of the best I've seen in an Anime series, and there are a lot of wonderful moments along the way. It will also interest fans of "Neon Genesis Evangelion" and "His and Her Circumstances", since this is the first series Hideaki Anno directed, and it's interesting to see the themes that will show up in his later work evolving here. This Disc: The series gets off to a good start. Jean, a young French inventor, meets Nadia, a beautiful but temperamental circus acrobat with a pet lion cub and a necklace with a blue jewel (the titular Blue Water) that glows when she's in danger. Jean rescues Nadia from a gang of jewel thieves who want Blue Water with the help of a series of fantastic, if slightyl anachronistic, vehicles. These episodes aren't the best in the series, and the scale is a lot smaller and the stakes a lot lower than they will be later on, but they introduce most of the 'good guy' characters, have a lot of great moments, and give a pretty good feel for what the rest of the rest of the series will be like.
Rating:
Summary: Neglected Nadia--and a Harbinger of Things to Come
Review: This neglected series, which I saw in its entirety on fansubs, might very well be the best TV series adventure drama for younger audiences produced in anime--but I'm not so familiar with anime aimed at younger audiences, so that's not something I say with total confidence. There are still numerous flaws in the storytelling, especially in the middle episodes that were made after Director Hideaki Anno handed over production to his assitant Shinji Higuchi and the animation was farmed out to cheaper, overseas animation studios. (I guess he came back for the final episodes, which are pure Anno indeed.) On the whole, "Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water" is an age-appropriate series that doesn't fail to include compelling characters, a twisting, consistently interesting plot, and a grand finale that's logical and actually worthy of everything that came before it. Anno didn't even manage to pull something like that in "Evangelion," no matter what the greater strengths of that later show were. What's actually rather amazing in seeing this series is how many parallels the storyline and even the characters of Nadia, Captain Nemo, Electra, and the Neo-Atlantean organization were carried over into "Evangelion." Suffice to say that in the second tape, the middle episodes before the infamous "Island" sequence, and in the final five episodes--the echoes are undeniable. (Biblical references abound, for example.) Situations, lines, and themes turn out to be similar, and occasionally they even rival the brutality that "Evangelion" portrayed so vividly--though of course, this show was made for children and thus Anno had to pull his punches. Reportedly, he was unhappy about this fact; I suppose "Evangelion" made up for that! Even the infamous close-up montages of still objects that would be a hallmark of Anno's later work shows up from time to time in this show. The colors are bright and sharp, if a bit 80s-ish and slightly dated by today's anime standards. The character design is also much more "round" and "cartoonish," with the eerie exception of Nadia herself--a dead ringer for Shinji, if I ever saw one. (Of course both "Eva" and "Nadia" shared the same character designer, so it's no surprise.) Special note must be made about the delightfully Jules Vernes-ish mechanical devices--the Gratan, for example, or the intricately designed Nautilus, which has throwbacks to the spaceships in Anno's debut OAV, "Gunbuster." As a previous reviewer has noted, the influence of Miyazaki, especially "Laputa: Castle in the Sky," is significant, though they're not specifically the flying machines that Miyazaki has a special affection for. The alternate late 19th Century portrayed in this series is quite charming and intricate, in a Jules Verne-ish way again. What I liked about this show is that while the above-mentioned brutality and plot twists are definitely present, the strong sense of faith and vitality is never lost in the characters--especially in Jean, who never loses hope, even when the moody, introspective Nadia does. Jean's optimism is believable, not contrived, and it is his devotion and energy that drives this show, even as many of the characters around him start to fall apart in remarkably similar ways that the "Eva" characters did. I think this ultimately was the secret of this anime's true success in Japan and in the early US anime fan community, besides the humor and impressively detailed mechanical devices and plot twists. I look forward to completing this series on DVD, hopefully with the valuable, revealing, and necessary omake/extra bits released as well.
Rating:
Summary: Neglected Nadia--and a Harbinger of Things to Come
Review: This series, which I saw in its entirety on fansubs, might very well be the best TV series adventure drama for younger audiences produced in anime--but I'm not so familiar with anime aimed at younger audiences, so that's not something I say with total confidence. There are still numerous flaws in the storytelling, especially in the middle episodes that were made after Director Anno Hideaki handed over production to his assitant, but on the whole, "Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water" is an age-appropriate series that doesn't fail to include compelling characters, a twisting, consistently interesting plot, and a grand finale that's logical and actually worthy of everything that came before it. Anno didn't even manage to pull something like that in "Evangelion," no matter what the greater strengths of that later show were. What's actually rather amazing in seeing this series is how many parallels the storyline and even the characters of Nadia, Captain Nemo, Electra, and the Neo-Atlantean organization were carried over into "Evangelion." Suffice to say that in the second tape, the middle episodes before the infamous "Island" sequence, and in the final five episodes--the echoes are undeniable. (Biblical references abound, for example.) Situations, lines, and themes turn out to be similar, and occasionally they even rival the brutality that "Evangelion" portrayed so vividly--though of course, this show was made for children and thus Anno had to pull his punches. Reportedly, he was unhappy about this fact; I suppose "Evangelion" made up for that! The colors are bright and sharp, if a bit 80s-ish and slightly dated by today's anime standards. The character design is also much more "round" and "cartoonish," with the eerie exception of Nadia herself--a dead ringer for Shinji, if I ever saw one. (Of course both "Eva" and "Nadia" shared the same character designer, so it's no surprise.) What I liked about this show is that while the above-mentioned brutality and plot twists are definitely present, the strong sense of faith and vitality is never lost in the characters--especially in Jean, who never loses hope, even when the moody, introspective Nadia does. Jean's optimism is believable, not contrived, and it is his devotion and energy that drives this show, even as many of the characters around him start to fall apart in remarkably similar ways that the "Eva" characters did. I think this ultimately was the secret of this anime's true success in Japan and in the early US anime fan community, besides the humor and impressively detailed mechanical devices and plot twists. I look forward to completing this series on DVD, hopefully with the valuable, revealing, and necessary omake/extra bits released as well.
Rating: 
Summary: Muddle
Review: This video is the first installment of the NADIA series,
an anime take on Jules Verne, and it gets off to a fair
start. Young Jean, an adolescent inventor, goes to Paris
with his inventor uncle to demonstrate their flying
machine. While in Paris, Jean runs into a circus gymnast
named Nadia, a pretty dark-skinned girl who by the looks
of her is from India or thereabouts, and her pet baby
lion. Nadia wears a mysterious jewel, called the "Blue Water",
and a sinister redheaded woman and her two gangster
flunkies are after her for it. Jean helps Nadia escape,
and this launches them on a series of adventures that
take them ultimately to the amazing submarine, the
Nautilus, and its mysterious Captain Nemo. Now this sounds like a reasonable premise for an anime
series, and it doesn't start out badly at all in the
first few installments, promising a world of marvelous
inventions and globe-spanning adventures, something
like Hayao Miyazaki (KIKI'S DELIVERY SERVICE) might do. Of course, at the outset it's obvious the production
quality is much more to the norm for anime than Miyazaki's
work, but it would be a bit much to expect otherwise
given the fact that Miyazaki's work is top-of-the-line. However, that turns out only to be the first thing that
the viewer has to swallow. After a few episodes, the
plot slowly descends into what amounts to predictable
anime hokum -- to be sure, I can't say I actually *mind*
that the storyline takes a jog to get an attractive
femme character into a skimpy swimsuit, but this does
suggest that the scriptwriters were not exactly putting in
mental overtime, either. After a time the whole thing loses the viewer's "willing
suspension of disbelief" and becomes basically silly. Even
*that* wouldn't be such a bad thing if it were *admittedly*
silly, but it seems to lurch back and forth between being
silly and trying, absurdly, to be serious. Worst of all,
NADIA occasionally drops to a level of violence that, while
maybe tame for any typical work of action-adventure fiction,
is simply unworkable in what would sensibly be a work of
light entertainment. I think I got to about episode eight before I bogged down and
gave up. The last straw was the fact that Nadia not only
spends much of her time in a snit, but she's also a militant
vegetarian. "Not only am I being treated to gratuitous
violence, I have to listen to someone gratuitously posturing
about it." NADIA was something of a good opportunity wasted. I
would have had great fun watching Jean and Nadia travel the
world and have fantastic adventures in marvelous machines,
but the scriptwriters simply weren't up to the challenge. * As a footnote to this review, in the spring of 2003 Hayao
Miyazaki's CASTLE IN THE SKY was released in the US on DVD
and I picked it up. Watching through it, I realized that
CASTLE IN THE SKY *is* a really fun story about fantastic
adventures in marvelous machines and it's a good bet that
NADIA takes its cue from it. So I would recommend ignoring
NADIA, the low-budget imitation, and picking up CASTLE IN
THE SKY, the real thing.
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