Fushigi no Umi no Nadia

What a wonderful show full of adventure, discovery, and relationships. This story follows the titular Nadia and a young inventor, Jean, as they get caught up in a spanning adventure that takes them across the ocean, under the waves, and through the skies in search of Nadia's past all the while discovering more about each other and, more importantly, themselves.

The character relationships of the cast are dynamic and really change over time. The animation is beautiful to behold; there are great elements of mecha and magic present in the show... I hesitate to say much more as don't want to spoil the experience of the ... story. It really is a treat to experience for the first time. Overall a beautiful mix of light and dark elements.

The narrative is all tied up in a bombastic and exciting conclusion that, while feeling a little rushed, seriously delivers on viewer satisfaction all the way to the end. There are also a lot of visual/audio queues and tropes that are both referenced and originated in this anime that later became ingrained in not just Hideaki Anno's other works, but the anime medium in the decades following.

On to the music - simply put, it is excellent. Able to jump between playful, intense, tragic, and alien nature of different elements of the story, it was one of my favourite elements of the whole show. Well worth tracking down the OST. As for general audio, I stuck with the Japanese track which is what I would recommend. The actors all give extremely memorable performances, are well cast, and are what kept the show afloat for me even in it's downtimes.

Some things to note for this show/release... There is an often mentioned caveat with this series known as "the island filler" or the Island/Africa arc which I suppose bears addressing in a review of the series. I won't get into the production reasons, but for a chunk of episodes in the middle, the episodes were outsourced to a different animation studio and the animation quality took a big hit. Not just the animation quality, but for a few episodes, our main cast were quite off-model. Putting this aside, however, I found these episodes nonetheless endearing and possessing many key character moments for our main characters. Of the whole of this subsection of episodes, there was perhaps only 1 episode I though was objectively bad and irredeemable, and one plot element in another that really didn't work. Getting to my point, I would say, just know there is a section with lesser animation quality, but just stick with it and you can still find some treasure buried here.

Putting aside the drop in animation quality for a few episodes, there were strange drops in resolution in some scenes throughout the rest of the anime, often in the same scene (I watched through the Gkids blu ray which totes a 4k remastered scan). It would switch from a sharp HD, to what looked like an old VHS or DVD transfer. I am not sure if this issue is present in other releases as I do not have the Sentai or Japanese releases to compare. Whether it could be that maybe these elements were lost and so could not be adequately touched up or if this was a result of the "4K" treatment this release totes, I'm not sure. Occasionally there appeared to be some DNR aftereffects that overly smoothed some details, but I didn't notice this too much.

Overall, I highly recommend this anime. The positives far outweigh the negative. Don't let this gem pass you by.

Fushigi no Umi no Nadia is a series marred by an abrupt mid-season change in direction that disrupts the established quality and tone. This deviation spans roughly 10 episodes, constituting approximately a quarter of the entire anime, which somewhat detracts from the overall experience. Setting that aside, the narrative is reasonably well-crafted, albeit with a few plot holes and an increasing reliance on exposition in the later episodes. The characters, while relatively straightforward, are overshadowed by the anime's heavy thematic emphasis. The initial episodes exude a strong sense of adventure, harmonizing effectively with the more dramatic and action-driven scenes in the conclusion. Overall, Fushigi no ... Umi no Nadia is a predominantly good anime, yet the jarring shift in direction ultimately leaves the conclusion somewhat unsatisfying.

Recommendation: A decent series marred by almost 1/3 of the episodes being an irrelevant and terrible filler arc added as a cash grab without the involvement of the original creator. It's a respectable adventure series, but you have to skip episodes 23-34 or it will completely ruin your viewing experience.

Nadia is, of course, most well-known as Hideaki Anno's prior series before Neon Genesis Evangelion. And the parts of this series that he directed bear some resemblance to themes and ideas that would later be explored more deeply in NGE, especially with regards to religious symbolism. For most of Anno's run on the series, ... it's a fun, well-paced steampunk adventure series, following Nadia and Jean's travels on the submarine Nautilus, and their fight against an advanced alien race called the Atlanteans (or Neo Atlantis). Some of the world-building is very confused, for example, it seems that the destruction of Atlantis happened just 14 years prior to the start of the series, which takes place in "real-world" 19th century France. However, no one seems to have even noticed that it happened, even though they had supposedly controlled the entire world less than 2 decades ago. There is simply no explanation for how no one remembers Atlantis' worldwide dominance within living memory of most of the population of Earth.

That is a minor nitpick compared to the cardinal sin of this series, which was Gainax deciding that since the show was doing so well on TV, they would just throw almost an entire season's worth of filler episodes straight into the middle of it, bringing the plot to a screeching halt. Anno, realizing how idiotic this was and how badly it would throw off the rest of the series, refused to take part, so it was handed off to a new director that was clearly unfamiliar with the series and its characters, with the animation outsourced to Korea. The result is a nearly-unwatchable stretch of episodes 23-34, nicknamed the "island episodes", where Jean and Nadia are stranded on a deserted island and nothing happens whatsoever. It's boring, but even worse than that, Nadia acts horrendously out of character and becomes intensely unlikable and even brazenly tries to cheat on Jean as a way of generating some cheap drama. If you were to tell me that the new director had some sort of grudge against Nadia and planned the entire arc to thoroughly and gleefully assassinate her character, I would probably believe it. That's how bad it is. And just for good measure, the animation is atrocious for this entire stretch as well.

That ends immediately with episode 35, where Anno is back at the helm, and finally gets the story back on track. You can legitimately skip straight from 22 to 35 without missing a beat, though there is a little bit of context in 31 that may be helpful for the ending. Anno in fact seems to have designed 35 almost as a repudiation of the island episodes just by making the transition from the pre to post filler arc so seamless that they may as well not have even happened. The ending to the story is solid, though some parts were rushed and I would have preferred that (SPOILER ALERT) the reveal that the Atlantean-supremacist Gargoyle was actually human would have happened earlier in the story, with his self-loathing serving as context for his behavior, rather than it being thrown in off-hand, almost as one final insult while he's already dying.

In the end, the story it tells is pretty decent if you skip the filler episodes, but this is the series that will always have the legacy of making Hideaki Anno so depressed and disenchanted with the industry that it heavily influenced the dark tone of NGE, which was originally planned as a sequel to Nadia before having to be rewritten due to Gainax's loss of the Nadia IP, several years later. Nadia probably deserves a higher rating on the merits, but you can't simply ignore the island episodes when fairly appraising the series as a whole (though I highly encourage you to ignore them as a viewer).