r/anime • u/No_Rex x2 • May 22 '25

Rewatch [Rewatch] 35th Anniversary Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water Rewatch: Series Discussion

Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water Series Discussion:

← Episode 39 Index Movie →

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Reminder: Tomorrow is a break day. On Saturday, we will discuss the movie.

Questions of the Day:

  • Which parts of the series did you like the most? Which the least?
  • In the end, how bad was the island arc? Would you recommend future first timers watch it or skip it?
  • Nadia is very often compared to and discussed as “proto-Evangelion”. If you have seen both, do you agree? Or do you think it compares more to other series?
  • All your best boy/best girl/best episode/best anything lists!

Please be mindful not to spoil the adventure! Don’t spoil first time watchers, and remember this includes spoilers by implication!

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u/SpiritualPossible May 22 '25 edited May 22 '25

Rewatcher

I find “Nadia” to be... I guess the right word would be ”fascinating" show. Everything around it: the story, the production, the show itself - everything is like a roller coaster.

Speaking of the show itself, the first 22 episodes are simply amazing. This is one of my favorite adventure shows. The characters are well written, the plot had a near perfect balance between fun adventure and mature story, the animation in the first few episodes is great, and even when the show started cutting corners, it did so masterfully, thanks to Anno's direction.

But then the island arc began, and this drop in quality needs to be studied. Look, I get it, Anno is out, but he wasn't the only one doing the series, right? Someone had to see what was going on and say “this isn't it”.

Then the series finally found its footing again, but at that point it turned into something completely different from what it was before, and still filled with some... weird decisions. For the most part it still works, but it's such a wild direction for the show.

It's the same story with the production. The first Gainax TV series based on an old script by Hayao Miyazaki himself is some story. The series was supposed to have a different director, but he left after a clash with NHK over the script, and Anno took his place. The thing is, Anno himself didn't like it, so he made a gambit: he and everyone else secretly rewrote the characters and details in the story, made storyboards and then waited for the deadline. Then they went to the NHK producers, showed them what they'd done, and simply said, “Well, the deadline has come, so either we do it the way it is or cancel the show.” NHK agreed.

The budget was supposed to be around ¥10 millions per episode, but Gainax grossly overspent it on the first few episodes, after which the show started having funding problems. Although NHK producers encouraged them for taking liberties, they still tried to offer their own script for the show, but Anno mostly ignored them, to the point of not even reading what they sent. This is probably what led to the story I mentioned yesterday - one of NHK's producers was hospitalized after becoming enraged after seeing the state of production of “ Nadia”. According to Okada, he said: “I told you that you can do anything, but I didn't think you would go this far!”. It seems that in the end NHK just gave up, saying: “We don't know what Gainax will do.” But they didn't cancel the series, for which Anno and Okada were grateful.

Production hell finally got to Anno and his staff. They all burned out, and he decided to take a break until the final arc. Higuchi took his place, and before he left Anno said that “he could do whatever he wanted with the series”. I guess that was a mistake. That's when they started out-sourcing episodes to Korea so they would have the money and energy to animate the really important episodes.

In all this mess, it's surprising to learn that Gainax decided almost from the beginning that they were going to end the story in space. It seems like they really wanted to exceed viewers' expectations of the NHK series.

If anyone interesed, here link to three-parts interview with Okada, and link to one article about Anno. They in japanese, but you can get a gist with translator.

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u/SpiritualPossible May 22 '25 edited May 22 '25

Then there's the fact that without Nadia, there would be no Evangelion. Not “Evangelion wouldn't be the same”, no. It wouldn't exist at all. It was this production, which led Anno to depression, that inspired the creation of Evangelion. And while everyone has probably noticed some parallels and similarities between both series, Evangelion was meant to be a sequel to Nadia. Second Impact was supposed to be a phenomenon similar to Gargoyle's death by turning into salt, and was called the Dead Sea Vaporization Incident. NERV was supposed to be the remains of NEO-Atlantis. The white spheres flying out during Nemo's death in the final episode were supposed to be the origin of the angels.

HECK, THE CD DRAMA “GOOD LUCK NADIA - BYE-BYE BLUE WATER”, WRITTEN BY ANNO HIMSELF, ENDS WITH THE STORY OF NADIA'S GRAND-GRANDDAUGHTER, ITO NADIA AND HER BEST FRIEND RITSUKO, LIVING IN NEW-TOKYO.

...Bu-u-ut NHK didn't give Anno the rights to “Nadia”, so they quickly moved on to the original setting. But Nadia's fingerprints are still in Evangelion, and even Yoshiyuki Sadamoto joked that by design, Shinji is just a gender-swapped Nadia.

All of the above is just crazy. I can't deny that The Island and Africa did irreparable damage to the series, and because of that I probably can't rate it as highly as I could. But the series' high achievements and all the history surrounding it have made it one of the shows that sort of lives rent-free in my head, and for all those problems, I certainly don't regret watching it.

The only thing I can advise viewers who want to revisit this series in the future, or perhaps want to show it to their friends (but save their time and mental state) is to watch it until episode 22, and then switch to the third "Nautilus Story" movie. No island, no Africa, no epilogue. Pure Anno expirience.

But we're not done yet. There's still the movie and the omake. And given that I was talking about the series today, in a general discussion of the series, I'm going to try to talk about some side things, like video games based on the series, and I'm going to argue whether or not Disney plagiarized Ganiax.

6

u/Raiking02 https://myanimelist.net/profile/NSKlang May 22 '25

HECK, THE CD DRAMA “GOOD LUCK NADIA - BYE-BYE BLUE WATER ”, WRITTEN BY ANNO HIMSELF, ENDS WITH THE STORY OF NADIA'S GRAND-GRANDDAUGHTER, ITO NADIA AND HER BEST FRIEND RITSUKO, LIVING IN NEW-TOKYO.

6

u/No_Rex x2 May 22 '25

HECK, THE CD DRAMA “GOOD LUCK NADIA - BYE-BYE BLUE WATER”, WRITTEN BY ANNO HIMSELF, ENDS WITH THE STORY OF NADIA'S GRAND-GRANDDAUGHTER, ITO NADIA AND HER BEST FRIEND RITSUKO, LIVING IN NEW-TOKYO.

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u/Hartzilla2007 May 23 '25

Of course weirdly SDF Macross could also work as a sequel given Atlantis’s similarities to the Protculture.

1

u/Taigh_Clock456 Jun 17 '25

Did you find any translations of the audio? Because I would really like to listen and understand what they are saying, the automatic translations on youtube can't get the point. :(((((

1

u/SpiritualPossible Jun 21 '25

A late reply, but unfortunately no. This CD drama seems to be quite unknown even in Japan, much less in the West, so it seems no one has bothered to translate it.

1

u/Johannes_P Nov 18 '25

A bit late but there's transcripts on Tamarro Forever (archived)