There’s always this… something about plays that are performed in anime. I’m not sure what it is, but they always tend to bring out something fresh out of the characters. Aoi Hana as usual does this very subtly and full of emotions. In this episode, we see the play Wuthering Heights being performed by Yasuko and the others. I really have been watching too many cheesy soap operas lately, because this episode really surprised me at how well everything went, and yet there were so many emotions at the end.

Basically, nearly everything in the play goes smoothly, aside from a few pieces of clothing and books that aren’t at the place they should be, and when everything is over the teacher that Yasuko had her crush on congratulates her, which makes show a rather embarrassing side of her, which is something that Fumi happens to oversee. In your average anime, you’d usually expect Fumi to run away and refuse to talk to anyone, but interestingly enough the two of them were able to talk just fine after that: Fumi is clearly hurt when she found out that Yasuko still has feelings on her past crush, but both of them understand that it’s just something from the past.

There’s also this scene in which Yasuko claims that she dislikes the character of Catherine in Wuthering Heights. Well, I don’t know the full details of the Wuthering Heights novel, but Catherine seemed to be a passionate, wild and mischievous girl, who lead both her and Heathcliff to their doom. It’s interesting how in the same way, Kyouko actually looks up to her due to her strong will. They both have totally different ways in which they relate to her character, and it also signified the distance between the two of them, since Kyouko doesn’t know what happened in Yasuko’s past with her teacher.

And on a side-note, this series has something with hair. In every episode, you can see someone playing around with someone else’s hair. I like this though: it shows that hair is more than just brightly coloured stuff on top of people’s heads that waves elegantly in the wind to give off the air of good animation. I especially liked the animation of Catherine as she played the part. It’s much better to have a bit of a messy animation and movement, rather than clean art and a bunch of still frames.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

Watching a series like Nadia is interesting, if only because of the place it takes up in the history of the adventure genre. It’s based on the novel 20000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne, who was one of the pioneers of the science fiction genre and wrote about aeroplanes and submarines before they were even invented. The visuals are clearly inspired by Laputa Castle in the Sky, one of Ghibli’s earliest classics, and you can also see traces of the awesome Mysterious Cities of Gold. In its turn, you can see its influence amongst great future adventure series as Bonen no Xamdou, Blue Submarine No06 and of course Ashita no Nadja. Amongst these excellent works, Nadia obviously doesn’t stand out as the greatest adventure ever, but nevertheless it’s an excellent series and a proof of Gainax’ ambition.

Nadia starts out as an historical series in the year 1889 and shows the two lead characters (two kids named Jean and Nadia) as they are chased by what at first sight seems to be the prototype for Team Rocket. Gradually though, this series gains more and more depth, and the setting develops into something truly epic, and a great look at how science fiction would have been more than a century ago. We gradually get to see more and more of the back-story of the world that this series plays in, which really becomes increasingly more interesting as the series goes on.

Throughout the series, we get to see a wide variety of situations, as we see Jean and Nadja travel on aeroplanes, hot air balloons, robots, the Nautilus Submarine of which the novel 20000 Leagues Under the Sea has become famous for, and much more. There’s also an entire arc that takes a step back from being epic, and instead has the lead characters stranded on a desert island for about eight episodes, with the focus being much more on “slice of life” and trying to survive on that desert island. While it will probably be boring for those who are watching this series for its action, but these episode did a great job of fleshing out and developing the characters.

But what great action this series has! Consider that this series aired in 1990, it looks like no other TV-series that aired before. Hideki Anno did a great job in creating a TV-version of the Ghibli-esque graphics, in the days that Hayao Miyazaki was really at his most prolific. The series has a excellent selection of rich and colourful character-designs and other graphics, and while you can see that the drawings in this series were still done by hand, the animation is surprisingly smooth and detailed.

There unfortunately are a bunch of flaws that hold this series back from calling itself among the greatest adventure series out there. Especially the villains of this series just are hardly fleshed out. The major villain is your typical evil mastermind who wants to take over the world, and every single one of his subordinates has the personality of a paper bag. It’s very hard to take these guys seriously and consider them a serious threat, even though they’re usually competent at their jobs. I think that it’s also because of this that the ending contains a bunch of weird Deus ex Machina that just seemed to have been inserted to wrap up the story. Also, Nadia may have been a bit too often a damsel in distress, especially in the first half of the series.

At times the show is a bit hard to watch, because the barrier between men and women forms a major theme for especially the lead couple, but most of the important characters end up nicely developed by the end. Nothing memorable, but this development does makes sure for a bunch of really charming scenes in which this development comes together. And a honorable mention has to go to King, the animal side-kick who proved that subtlety and GAR do go together.

Well, talk about a different atmosphere in this episode. For once, nobody died and instead we’ve now come to fleshing out the characters, with Shannon, Jessica and Kanon being the first. What the hell is going on is still pretty much a mystery, but we did get quite a few new answers to what went on. Not the most spectacular episode, but I liked it a lot.

So right now we’ve either moved to the past, or a third universe. We either have ourselves a non-linear storyline like Baccano or Touka Gettan, or this series really is like Higurashi which resets itself every time Beatrice kills everyone (or lets everyone kill everyone), just in the way that Higurashi went. My suspicion is the latter, though. Beatrice is known as the “eternal witch” who likes to put people through eternal suffering. But then again that does raise the question of why she’s resetting in the first place when her goal simply seems to be regaining her powers and ruling over the island.

In this episode, it’s also revealed that Kanon and Shannon are siblings, or at least, Kanon referred to Shannon as his older sister. I could be mistaken in this because kids have a tendency to refer to anyone as older sisters or aunts. We also learn that they are the only two who can see Beatrice, which seems to suggest that either in the past or in this universe Beatrice has yet to say hello to Maria.

This episode was mostly about explaining Kanon’s deep-seated grudge at his position as a servant. He and Shannon both started out as furniture who fell in love with a member of the Ushinomiya family (for Kanon, this was Jessica). Shannon accepted Beatrice’s help and therefore got to date George without any problems. Kanon however, was different and refused Beatrice because she he believed that she kept toying around with the lives of others. So saying that people can’t date furniture in the first few episodes turned out to have been a bit of a rejection to Beatrice.

Jessica in the meantime very much reminds me of Mion: she’s supposed to be the heir of an important family, and yet when she is with her friends she puts up a completely different character. Perhaps she also has a twin in the same fashion.

This is also something seemingly unimportant that caught my eye, but with this series in which everything seems to be relevant, perhaps it’ll turn into an important clue later on: why do all of the direct heirs of the Ushinomiya family have just one child? Is this also something that was dictated by grandfather? And why is Maria the only one who doesn’t match the ages of the others? Did something happen with her parents in the past that caused them to go against Kinzou?
Rating: * (Good)