Contrary to decades of memes portraying Anno as a machine made of meat that produces only disappointing artworks, Anno doesn’t get enough credit for being a very funny guy. And no work exemplifies this as perfectly as his seminal Gainax TV series, Nadia: mystery of blue water.
Nadia: mystery of blue waterbased on jules verne Twenty thousand leagues under the sea, It follows the globetrotting adventures of two stormtroopers: Jean, a young inventor, and Nadia, a young circus performer. While their whirlwind relationship begins by chance, it turns into a cataclysmic whirlwind adventure thanks to a mysterious diamond in Nadia’s necklace, whose power the world is obsessed with. They include a group of Team Rocket-like thieves, a Captain Harlock-type submarine captain, and an army of what I can only describe as Neo Atlantean Klansmen. Translation: This show has a lot going on in 39 episodes.
when i first started nadiaI had some clear expectations. For starters, I expected this show to be like a progenitor of the adventures that made me fall in love with Disney Atlantis: The Lost Empire. And sure enough, I got it. But what impressed me most about the show was how zealously it ignored the main quest to embellish “canon filler”, a term that would make modern anime fans lose their minds in frustration for one episode, let alone the entire damn show.
Canon filler is the connective tissue between the filler episodes of the anime and the show, which adapts the resulting stories. Sometimes it’s a strict adherence to the source material, but more often it’s things that are consequential to the plot. Things of consequence are happening in this story. Sometimes it’s really weird on the show NarutoAnd other times it’s hard to differentiate shows like a piece. As an original anime series, nadiaLike cowboy bebop, I enjoy making my canon fillers the best part of the show.
Nadia: mystery of blue water Driven by a kind of pure Saturday-morning cartoon cynicism that deliberately pushes its cataclysmic stakes into the background, adopting the same filler-as-text rhythm that defined its contemporaries cowboy bebop. Logically, this appears in the show’s 10th, 20th, and 30th episodes as moments when the show acknowledges the narrator’s growing desperation as to whether his character will uncover the show’s MacGuffin in its initial recap. You know, what the show is named after.
When this happens, the series unleashes some of the most emotionally devastating scenes that can happen in a light-hearted cartoon. I’m talking Tower of Babel-meets-Atlantis mythmaking that lands so honestly EvangelionIts pseudo-religious imagery feels like empty-calorie visual decoration by comparison. I was oohing and ahhing over the build-up to and aftermath of these episodes. but the vast majority nadia Aren’t these mysterious incidents Anno’s specialty; This is enjoyable, character-driven downtime.
Whenever the gang isn’t fighting the Atlantic Klansmen or insisting on a mutually assured sea battle, they’re bunkering down in their claustrophobic submarine, playing survivor Through an archipelago of uninhabited islands, or falling in full Looney Tunes Mayhem-dust-cloud brawls, non-serious train-track chases, freeze-frame pratfalls, and everything in between. Hey, there’s even a clip show of episode two, the final part sung by the cast, slapped on in the English dub and sub. And this is where the show really shines.
The clearest sign of a great series is whether it can trap its cast in an empty room and rely on their chemistry to move the story forward. nadia Excellence in this and then some. Much of this is due to its quirky troupe of pre-teens and 30-somethings who reach through time and space as the embodiment of the best of age-gap “coworkers.” if anything, nadia It’s a harbinger of Anno’s fascination with the dirty, tender push-and-pull that happens between adults and children, who are going through it.
Unlike the broken adults of Evangelion, nadiaThe ensemble slowly tries (and often fails) to raise Jean, Nadia, and my favorite girl with a tragic story, Marie. This mobility usually involves the crew aboard the ship nautilus The subterfuge of projection and overreach in their over-the-top advice, is met only with children who call out their own issues in the brutally honest manner in which children are accustomed to doing so. The ebb and flow of those relationships — their warmth, their frustration, their mindless downtime — is what makes the final plotline all the more tenuous, grounding the show’s grand themes about the stupidity of war, loving a person to the point of invention, and nurturing some deeply moving nature of overcoming.
An “idiot adult”. nadia One might casually drop a truth bomb, such as, “It’s good to protect other people, but you have to protect yourself, too. You have to survive,” while a petulant child might stumble over something like, “Science can’t explain the heart, just as the heart can’t explain science.” Granted, the wisdom of adults comes from brutal trial and error – they’ve been through enough hardships to helicopter-parent these kids around every corner. Whether it’s issues of the heart, confusing dynamics between the genders, or something as elusive as being empathetic.
Throughout the show, they keep trying to make the world their own, either out of guilt over the wreckage they’re leaving behind or out of a misconception that unsolicited advice is the solution they didn’t need. But in doing so, they accidentally create criss-crossed sidewalks for children to walk on, depriving them of the wonder and necessity of walking their own path toward understanding the world and themselves. By the time the show moved toward its finale, even the narrator stopped worrying about the main quest and began to wonder about the mystery of its cast’s hearts as real. a piece-Like the treasure at the end of your fairytale rainbow.
And that’s all thanks nadia Don’t rush forward on your grand adventure and let the journey drag on for a long time without any results. Thirty-six years later, nadia Standing the test of time, proving that, like Anno, its heart is not buried beneath nihilism; It’s there in the filler, when the story slows down so much that its characters start living easy, silly lives, that it rings loudest.
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