released 09 nov 02 / last mod 01 jun 07 / greg goebel / public domain
* The NADIA series, an anime take on Jules Verne, 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 goes well in the first few installments, promising a world of marvelous inventions and globe-spanning adventures. Of course, at the outset it's obvious the production quality is fairly average, but that would be tolerable. Unfortunately, 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."
I think 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, some time later I picked up Hayao Miyazaki's CASTLE IN THE SKY, and found it to be a vastly entertaining film featuring fantastic adventures in marvelous machines. It seems obvious that NADIA picks up its cue from CASTLE IN THE SKY, and I would recommend that you pick the real thing instead of the cheap imitation.
