The power of the magic stone

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The power of the magic stone
Original title ふ し ぎ の 海 の ナ デ ィ ア
transcription Fushigi no Umi no Nadia
genre Adventure , science fiction , comedy
Anime television series
Country of production JapanJapan Japan
original language Japanese
Year (s) 1990-1991
Studio Gainax , Group TAC
length 25 minutes
Episodes 40 in 2 seasons
Director Hideaki Anno , Shinji Higuchi
music Shirō Sagisu
First broadcast April 13, 1990 - April 12, 1991 on NHK
German-language
first broadcast		 February 23, 1996 - April 1996 on RTL II
synchronization
Movie
► Nadia - The Secret of Blue Water - The Movie (1991)

The Secret of Blue Water ( Jap. ふしぎの海のナディア, Fushigi no Umi no Nadia , dt as "Nadia from the sea of miracles.") Is a 39-part Japanese anime - TV series of the studio Gainax . The series was followed in 1991 by the movie Nadia - The Secret of Blue Water - The Movie , which takes place after the plot of the series.

The anime can be classified into the genres of adventure , science fiction and comedy .

action

The 13-year-old inventor Jean came to the World Exhibition in Paris with his uncle in 1889 to take part in a competition with his self-made airplane . In Paris he meets Nadia, a young circus acrobat who is always accompanied by the little lion King. He falls in love with her and saves her from Grandis Granva and her two helpers Hanson and Sanson, who is after Nadia's blue stone Blue Water . The stone has the property of indicating Nadia if she is in danger. Grandis and her helpers hunt the versatile Grakam robot and vehicle, which was built by Hanson.

They flee Paris from the three thieves and soon land with their plane in the Atlantic, where they rescues a ship belonging to the American Navy. There they meet the Englishman Ayerton and learn that the ship is on the hunt for a sea monster that has sunk many ships around the world. Grandis and her helpers follow them up to here, too, but they are caught by the navy. When the battle against the sea monster comes, Nadia, Jean and the three crooks disembark. You will be caught by the sea monster that turns out to be a huge submarine called the Nautilus . But they soon leave the Nautilus again and land on an island where Grandis is after Nadia's stone again.

The island is controlled by a mysterious organization that forces the inhabitants to work or kills them and that has amazing technology. Nadia and Jean help the girl Marie, who has lost her parents, and take her in. Soon Nadia is captured by the organization called New Atlantis . Her leader Gargoyle wants Nadia's blue stone, but Jean now has it. He tries to flatter her and blackmail Jean. But when he tries to use the Tower of Babel , a building in the center of the complex on the island, as a weapon, Jean, Grandis and their helpers, who have allied themselves, bring the tower down and Gargoyle and his organization flee in an airship .

The six encounter the Nautilus again, whose crew is also after Gargoyle to thwart his plans. So they stay and become part of the team. The captain of the ship, Captain Nemo , who also has a blue stone, has a hard time with the children. The first officer Electra takes care of the children, but becomes jealous of Grandis, who has fallen in love with Nemo and now works in the kitchen. The engineer Hanson and the former chauffeur Sanson work as part of the team, while Jean is mainly occupied with inventing and exploring the Nautilus. There are also conflicts with Nadia, who now also works in the kitchen, because as a vegetarian she doesn't want to eat most of the meals and Jean hardly has any time for her. Marie befriends King and sees Jean and Nadia more and more as their parents. On the journey with the Nautilus they arrive at the sunken Atlantis, where the victims of the fight against Gargoyle are buried. The city was once destroyed by the first Tower of Babel. After a battle with Gargoyle they get to the South Pole, where the base of the Nautilus is to do repairs. Nemo lets Jean and Nadia in on various secrets of nature. They also learn that Gargoyle had usurped power in the African kingdom of Tartessos and Nemo fought against him. So Tartessos was destroyed and with the survivors the fight between the two began.

Soon there is another battle against Gargoyle, in which he uses an airship. The Nautilus is sunk, but shortly after Grandis, Hanson and Sanson, Nadia, Jean, Marie and King also escape. Shortly before they escape, Nemo tells them that he is Nadia's father and that 13 years earlier he had destroyed Gargoyle's super weapon Nemos and Nadia's homeland.

Soon afterwards they land on a lonely island on which they now have to survive alone. This leads to various conflicts that arise from Nadia's closeness to nature or Jean's trust in technology. One day another island drifts by where they find Grandis, Sanson, Hanson and Ayerton. They move to the floating island and now seven of them have to get along there.

However, Jean soon discovers that the island is a machine. When he leads Nadia inside, she is swallowed up by the machine and the island begins to dive. But Jean is able to save them and they flee with Gratan to Africa, near which they are. Nadia now also finds her home there, the destroyed Tartessos . But there they are soon spotted by Gargoyle, but they also find Nemo and his team, who have survived against all expectations. It is now revealed that the Atlanteans came from the Nebula Galaxy and stranded on Earth millions of years ago. Here they founded a new civilization and created humans as slaves for themselves. Now Gargoyle wants to make people slaves again and the fight against him comes again, which Nemo now fights with the new Nautilus, a spaceship of the Atlanteans that was 12,000 years under Tartessus. But Gargoyle can kidnap Nadia and get both blue stones in his possession, whereby he can control the technology of the Atlanteans. His emperor Neo of Atlantis turns out to be the brother of Nadia, Nemo was the king of Tartessus. But Neo is almost nothing more than a robot controlled by Gargoyle. Now they all meet in the Atlantic spaceship Red Noah controlled by Gargoyle. Gargoyle has the upper hand, but he is betrayed by Neo, who wants to protect Nadia. This consumes both blue stones to revive Jean, who was killed by Gargoyle. Finally it becomes clear that Gargoyle was human too and Nemo and Nadia were the last Atlanteans. Nemo dies when Red Noah is destroyed, the others escape.

Origin and production

The power of the magic stone is based on Jules Verne's novel 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea . The main features of the plot were first developed by Hayao Miyazaki in the 1970s for Tōhō and NHK , but not made into a film. Hayao Miyazaki later developed The Castle in Heaven and used ideas for Mirai Shōnen Conan .

In August 1989, Hiroaki Inoue took up the concept at Studio Gainax , for which NHK also still had the rights. Yoshiyuki Sadamoto and Mahiro Maeda first work out the plot and the design. NHK hired the studio to produce the series, but the foreseeable costs posed problems for Gainax. Due to a conflict within the studio, Inoue was withdrawn from the project, whereupon he left Gainax. Yoshiyuki Sadamoto and Hideaki Anno added their own ideas to Miyazaki's concept, many of which were borrowed from older series, including many allusions. Grandis Granva, Hanson and Sanson come from the opponents from the Time Bokan series from 1975. Captain Nemo is also very similar to Captain Glovel from Macross . Sadamoto was originally supposed to be in charge of production, but after two episodes this job was turned over to Hideaki Anno. Shinji Higuchi directed the last few episodes . The character design comes from Shunji Suzuki and Yoshiyuki Sadamoto and the artistic directors were Hiromasa Ogura, Hiroshi Sasaki and Masanori Kikuchi.

The animation was carried out as a limited animation , so movement was often generated by camera work and moving the image planes instead of changing images. Use is made of this, for example, in part 13 in particular, in which Marie’s walk on train tracks is only created by moving the plane of the image of the sky and the grass. Images are also reused.

The figure Nadia was initially designed with recognizable African origins, dark skin and black frizzy hair. In the series, however, her hair is straight and the skin is not quite as dark. Hideaki Anno justifies the change in hair with the fact that frizzy hair is more difficult to animate and many animators have problems with it.

After the series was produced, Studio Gainax owed 80 million yen and had assigned all rights to the series to Toho and NHK. The only exception are the rights to the video game for the series.

publication

The anime aired from April 13, 1990 to March 29, 1991 by the Japanese television network NHK every Tuesday at prime time at 7:30 p.m. The broadcast of the series in Japan was suspended from August 1990 to October 1990 due to coverage of the Second Gulf War.

The anime was aired in English by The Anime Network , in French by La 5 and in Spanish by Telecinco . There were also translations into Italian, Arabic, Chinese and Tagalog.

The German first broadcast ran from February 1996 to April 1996 on RTL II . A repetition took place in 2001. The German TV version was cut because of the depiction of violence in episodes 1, 8 and 38. In 2004 and 2005 the series was released by OVA Films , partly uncut, on DVD .

Voice actor

The German dubbing was done by the FFA Group in Munich.

role Japanese speaker ( seiyū ) German speaker
Nadia Yoshino Takamori Beate Pfeiffer
Jean Noriko Hidaka Hubertus von Lerchenfeld
Captain Nemo Akio Ōtsuka Reinhard Brock
Electra Kikuko Inoue Alexandra Ludwig
Gargoyle Motomu Kiyokawa Bernd Stephan
Peter Musäus
Grandis Kumiko Takizawa Martina Duncker
Sanson Ken'yu Horiuchi Oliver Mink
Hanson Toshiharu Sakurai Jan Koester

music

The music in the series was composed by Shirō Sagisu . The opening credits Blue Water and the credits song Yes! I want ... come from Miho Morikawa.

Video game

The video game Nadia - The Secret of Blue Water , which was also produced by Gainax, was released for the Famicom console in 1991 . In the role-playing game, the player leads a series of characters through several tasks.

Music videos

Twelve music videos were put together from scenes and music from the series, which thematize a character or an aspect of the series for a song.

reception

In Japan, the Gainax studio became known to a wider audience through Nadia . The series became a huge hit and topped the popularity polls among anime fans until the mid-1990s. In an interview with Animage in 1990, Hideaki Anno countered the criticism of having taken too much from older anime series that years were spent on other series to create something new but boring. He'd rather do an interesting anime. The series won the Animage Anime Grand Prix in 1990.

According to Thomas Lamarre, through frequent use of limited animation, the series also shows its qualities, as the application by Hideaki Anno, who exhausts the technology to the extreme, creates a different sense of movement, but which adapts to the action sequences. Appropriate image repetitions would produce rhythms that are equivalent to full animation. In contrast to the later work Neon Genesis Evangelion , the Animerica promises a satisfactory end to the relatively long series. The show has great characters, especially Jean and Nadia. The development of the relationship between the two makes up a lot of the fun of the series. In The Complete Anime Guide the series as is "brilliant, funny [and] full of action" described. Fred Patten counts the series among the 13 notable anime television series from 1985 to 1999.

The German magazine Funime praises the constantly evolving storyline, in which the feeling of an endless series never arises and which does not fall into a scheme. The characters are multi-layered and Gargoyle is credible as a villain . However, we regret the dubbing and recut of the opening credits in the German version. The synchronization will get better in the course of the series. The Animania counts The Secret of Blue Water to the Anime milestones. The viewer is surprised several times, the plot is full of twists and turns, and despite the drama, a sympathetic and humorous undertone is retained. The series is sometimes very serious and has "a very deep story, lots of action and drama" . The animation was, for this time, of above-average quality. The German synchronization, however, does not always do justice to the series, the German opening credits were not successful.

After the 2001 Disney film Atlantis: Secret of the Lost City was released, anime fans, especially in the United States, saw many similarities to The Power of the Magic Stone and the series' influences on the film. Fred Patten compares the debate to that of the similarities between Kimba, the White Lion and The Lion King , which, however, received more media attention. Director Kirk Weise and others involved in Atlantis denied that the series had any influence on the film and that they knew Nadia at all. Patten, on the other hand, cites many similarities between the two works and considers it unbelievable that a series that was so successful in Japan should not have been known to Disney studios, although cartoon productions are observed there worldwide and Hayao Miyazaki is one of the well-known producers.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Patrick Drazen: Anime Explosion - The What? Why? and wow! of Japanese Animation . Stone Bridge Press, 2003
  2. ↑ Ralf Vollbrecht: Anime - A phenomenon from Japan in Ga-netchū - The Manga Anime Syndrome. Henschel Verlag, 2008, p. 26.
  3. ↑ a b c Yasuhiro Takeda, 2005, pp. 130-132.
  4. ↑ a b Animerica Vol. 8/4, p. 24 f.
  5. ↑ a b Thomas Lamarre: Full Limited Animation in Ga-netchū - The Manga Anime Syndrome. Henschel Verlag, 2008, p. 114ff.
  6. ↑ a b c Patten, 2004, pp. 185-189.
  7. ↑ a b AnimaniA No. 02/2004, p. 10 ff.
  8. ↑ a b Animerica Vol. 8/4, p. 41 f.
  9. ↑ Trish Ledoux, Doug Ranney: The Complete Anime Guide. Tiger Mountain Press, Issaquah (Washington) 1995, p. 71.
  10. ↑ Patten, 2004, p. 126.
  11. ↑ Michael Borgwardt: Nadia - The Secret of Blue Water. Review. In: Funime . No. 0 from 1997, p. 13.
  12. ↑ Funime No. 40, p. 36.
  13. ↑ Patten, 2004, p. 149.

literature

  • Yasuhiro Takeda: The Notenki Memoirs - Studio Gainax and the Man who created Evangelion . ADV Manga, 2005. (English)
  • Fred Patten: Watching Anime, Reading Manga - 25 Years of Essays and Reviews . Stone Bridge Press, 2004, ISBN 1-880656-92-2 .
  • Animerica Vol. 8/4, pp. 24 f., 41. f.
  • AnimaniA No. 02/2004, p. 10 ff.

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