Fushigi no Umi no Nadia

It blows me away that this anime doesn't have more fans or receives more critical praise. I'll start with what's good about the anime since there's a lot great about it. Nadia: Secret of the blue water is very fast paced and exciting. The roller coaster of emotion this anime takes you on is amazing, one episode your having a blast and laughing it up with the hilarious and dynamic cast, the next you feel like bawling your eyes out. The action in this anime is also top tier, it's not listed in the genres in MAL but I would honestly call this a mecha, ... with it's intense submarine battles.

The art in this anime is fantastic (especially in non filler episodes, but we'll get to that later). The landscapes are beautiful, and the character design is top notch. I especially like Jean and Captain Nemo's design. The music is another high point in the series with great tracks, some somber and slow, and others bombastic and really add to the grandiose battles.

The plot and characters is where this anime shines the most, the plot instantly grasps you with the mystery of the blue water and takes hold of you for the entire series, constantly hanging it over your head. But the plot really kicks into gear when the main characters are picked up by captain Nemo in the Nautilus. The characters are one of my favorite parts of the show, as to be expected from Anno they are complex and very well written characters. The dynamic between characters is a very strong point as well, Nadia and Nemo's relationship is interesting and fun to watch develop. The Grandis gang is so fun to watch too, but they fumbled the ending with the last minute of the show with Sanson, it's not enough to really ruin the character but it is quite disappointing.

The elephant in the room here when it comes to the negatives of the show is it's filler, which I skipped and will always skip filler no matter the show. However skipping the filler also doesn't feel like a great option because you're left a little confused on how they got to where they are. But I just pressed on and it was fine, but it definitely takes away from the show a little, and is the main contributor to my rating being 9/10 instead of a 10. One more thing I slightly disliked about the anime is I think the ending just moves a tad bit too fast. It's still a really great ending but I wish some things were drawn out a little more. But that being said my complaints are minute, especially compared to the positives of the show which greatly outshine the negatives.

I cannot recommend this anime enough. Especially if you like evangelion, since eva was planned to be a sequel to this show but couldn't attain the rights so they had to reskin it. It's also composed by Shiro SAGISU so you know the soundtrack is great if you've seen eva. I recommend skipping the filler as well, and continue watching until the end because it is well worth the small stumble for that amazing ending.

Do you want to see Evangelion before Evangelion took a definite form? look no further than this series, which is simply a preamble to what Hideaki Anno made with that one, and I mean that it's a preamble in the true sense of the word not only in terms of visuals and scenes copied and pasted but also because it de facto encapsulates every virtue and sin (oh no the christian symbology from Ultraman and Ultraseven has taken hold of me too! help me! No, wait, I'm an Ultraman fan too, everything's OK) of that series, in turn the virtues and sins of the creator, ... who can write enticing and reflexive stuff when he refuses to give go to any pretention of fake intellectualism (hello the Gainax Bounce on Grandis' tits and the nude butt of Nadia/Vegetarian Asuka in the bathtub! Hello final reference to Otaku No Video!) and when he tries to convince you that he's the intellectual that he isn't due to his geek obsession of psychology by inserting a cameo of Goya's Saturn eating his son that has no meaning whatoever or with some kind of word salad/overcomplication that true intellectuals don't use (these ones make complicate concepts digestable for people who are not in their same league, not the contrary) the writing takes a nosedive for the worst, in particular with the all the stuff concerning the Electra complex of Electra towards Nadia's father (Misato Katsuragi and Ritsuko Akagi Anyone?) which literally has no point whatsoever and it is not particularly well written or explained. Oh yes, you can also clearly see that Hideaki was using this series as a way to externalize hard his depression like he did with Evangelion, and again the writing suffered for it, even if it didn't suffer the way sucky and unwatchable End of Evangelion did. So, this being the preamble of Evangelion, the only logical consequence is to give it the same rating I give to Evangelion, a 7. TBH, I still put Gunbuster and in particular the first five episodes over the Eva stuff (of which I'm a fan of certain things only, meaning all the Otaku stuff - I.E. the ladies, the mechas, the audio department and the people behind it - and not the word salad or the uberdepression) which have NO OVERDEPRESSIVE TONE and they're just him and the Gainax guys doing great Otaku stuff for other Otakus like them, but there are far worst Hideaki Anno products out there (totally unwatchable/boring End of Evangelion and trio of Love&Pop/Shiki-Jitsu/Shin Japan Heroes "movies" I'm looking at you). Oh and BTW as suggested by the majority of this anime's fandom I didn't care to watch the filler arc except episode 31, where the penultimate Ultraman fan fanboys like only he could do with no particular pretention, and I'm perfectly OK with that. Thanks for reading! Next in the watchlist for the Hideaki Anno world tour: his preferred thing ever The Return of Ultraman!
P.S. absolutely excellent voice acting and in particular by Akio Ootsuka and Kikuko Inoue in here, if you're a fan of those Seiyuus you'll love them. Kikuko is FAR BETTER employed and with a stronger range of emotions at display than she was in the Ah My Goddess series (my first introduction to her voice), IMHO.

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).