Akadot - Review: Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water, Vol. 4 "Battleground" page 1


Akadot Retail - Pop Japan Mercantile

by Luis Reyes

Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water Volume 3 box

Episode 13: Run Marie Run!

Marie wanders off from the beach camp, playing with King while the adults of the Nautilus tend to gathering supplies and relaxing after such a long stay at sea. However, she gets lost and runs into Neo Atlanteans, also anchored on the island. Her escape is facilitated by Sanson, who eventually develops an emotionally affinity to the young orphan. As the two of them come storming into camp, the mechanical beast following them smashes into the ground, and its pilot emerges with a loaded weapon.

Episode 14: The Valley of Dinicthys

Back on the Nautilus after breaking camp, Nadia and Marie contract a potentially fatal figure that can only be treated with a rare plant that grows near the bottom of the ocean. Captain Nemo along with Hanson, Sanson and Jean journey to find the healing herb but find the sea floor as treacherous as the surface.

Episode 15: The Nautilus Faces its Biggest Crisis

Ambushed again by the Garfish, the Nautilus sustains heavy damage. But when they surface for repairs, Nemo finds an entire American fleet ready to fire on his ship. Pelted with cannon fire, the Nautilus once again submerges only to find that saving the ship means sacrificing some of the crew, a circumstance that horrifies the blindly idealistic Jean and Nadia.

Episode 16: The Mystery of the Lost Continent

Having to bury fallen comrades, the Nautilus journeys to the once thriving Atlantis, where Jean and Nadia get their first taste of this strange but spectacular culture, long destroyed at the hands of its own technology. Jean also, surprisingly, discovers some of his own history there as well.

Nadia's strength is its capacity to maintain playfulness while depicting the most harrowing of human experiences. Volume four pushes this theory to the edge. Grave scenes of consequence and death, the stark antithesis of a scurrilous modern society in the strained nobility of the Nautilus crew (and the horrifying reflection of modern society in Gargoyle's palatable evil), and the portentous echo of a decimated Atlantean culture sounding an admonishing chord for a humanity that is stampeding toward acquiring the technology to facilitate its own annihilation. Here, as in Wings of Honnemise, Gainax demonstrates its uncanny awareness of the world - made even more poignant by setting Nadia over a hundred years ago, at the beginning of a new age, when mankind was in danger of making the same mistake it may make at the beginning of this age. Nadia is more than a fantastic tale of adventure, but a kind of animated essay on how the instinct of self-interest and the ideal of global harmony are constantly at odds - an especially weighty debate considering our current predicament.

In volume four the Nautilus crew, physically and ideologically, lays victim to a modern age that doesn't understand it. An American naval fleet opens fire on the already damaged submarine out of sheer revenge, blaming the sub-aquatic boat for the damage wracked by Gargoyle's Garfish. This American military indiscriminately eradicates anything in the ocean, as our own planes level an already injured, mountainous people.

It works the other way as well. Gainax doesn't preach a strict regime of peace. Nadia the uber-pacifist doesn't make a distinction between death for survival and death as a result of malice, and therefore irrationally rejects the heroes of the story, namely Jean and, more importantly, Captain Nemo.

So the protagonists are jaded, flawed figures; the antagonist is more a phantom idea than a physical force (though Gargoyle dominated the action of the second disc, he has remained an enigma through until now). The protagonists are chipped from the mettle of goodness and aim to save the world from a powerful technology; the antagonist is spawned from hell but is definitely a creature of the earth and wants to use this powerful technology to bring the world to its knees. But Nadia is less about their polarized conflict and more about the world that lies in the balance, about the decisions that world has to make, and about how history must teach us something of ourselves. And that is what makes Nadia extraordinary.

Love it? Hate it? Buy it.