'Nadia of the Mysterious Seas') is a Japanese anime television series created by NHK, Toho, and Korad, from a concept of Hayao Miyazaki, and directed by Hideaki Anno of Gainax.
[2] Set in an alternate universe 1889, the series centers on Nadia, a 14-year-old girl of unknown origins, and Jean, a young, warm-hearted French inventor.
It was never produced, but Toho retained the rights for the story outline, while Miyazaki reused elements from his original concept in later projects like Future Boy Conan and Castle in the Sky.
Inoue, who was producer on Gunbuster, provided a pitch, bypassing Okada, using material created in secret by Yoshiyuki Sadamoto and Mahiro Maeda.
After the conclusion of the pitch NHK chose to proceed with Inoue's Nadia presentation, though the estimated cost of producing the show would cause Gainax to lose money.
[5][6] The series contains references and in-jokes to other anime works including Space Battleship Yamato, Macross and Time Bokan.
[9] Evangelion itself was originally planned as a further sequel to Nadia, regarding the 16 "Adams" who escaped from the destruction of the Red Noah and caused a cataclysmic event known as The Dead Sea Evaporation Incident (死海蒸発事件, Shikai Jōhatsu Jiken), but the scripts for all 26 planned episodes had to be completely rewritten when Gainax could not secure the rights to Nadia from NHK.
[12] Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water – Nautilus Story, a compilation director's cut by Hideaki Anno,[13] was released in Japan on VHS and Laserdisc on June 21, 1991.
[14][15][16] Streamline Pictures licensed the series for North America and produced an English dub of the first eight episodes, which were released on individual tapes as Nadia between March 1992 and August 1993.
[17] Streamline co-founder Carl Macek pitched the episodes for a television broadcast, intending to use the network money to dub the rest of the series, but was unsuccessful.
[37] In The Anime Encyclopedia, Jonathan Clements and Helen McCarthy noted the series made an obvious attempt to reach the mass audience adding that "Very rarely has this approach produced a show of such enduring charm and emotional validity".
They recognise that the audience is aware of a "dark and terrible fate" hiding behind the otherwise positive nature of the show's visuals and music.
[38] When Disney's Atlantis: The Lost Empire was released in 2001, some viewers noticed that it bore a number of similarities to Nadia, particularly in its character design, setting, and story.
[39] The similarities, as noted by viewers in both Japan and America, were strong enough for its production company Gainax to be called to sue for plagiarism.
He claimed both Atlantis and Nadia were inspired, in part, by the 1870 Jules Verne novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas.
[41] However, speaking about the clarification, Lee Zion from Anime News Network wrote, "There are too many similarities not connected with 20,000 Leagues for the whole thing to be coincidence.
[43][44][45] In 2018, Reuben Baron from Comic Book Resources added to Zion's comment stating, "Verne didn't specifically imagine magic crystal-based technology, something featured in both the Disney movie and the two similar anime.