“Atlantis - The Lost Empire” is very close to
“Nadia - The secret of Blue Water.”
Hero: reddish-hair, big round glasses, and a red bow tie.
Scientific-type with lots of charts.
Heroine: Pretty blonde princes of Atlantis, with dark skin,
hoop ear rings, bikini-top, sarong skirt, and
golden armband with blue jewel necklace.
On board a high-tech submarine with an international crew, they find an undersea area with carvings (Nadia)/drawings(Atlantis), which leads them to Atlantis where there is a crystal structure in the center that is linked to the blue jewel of the princess. But she doesn’t know that because her relatives are dead.
This is why the bad guys on the sub want to capture the power. But she merges with the power, saves the day etc.
WAIT! Before you reply, I have already read the Kimba/Simba
“Lion King”/“Simba the White Lion” stuff on the net and
in the Streight Dope. This should be a differnet topic.
I believe that both movies are spin-offs of “20,000 Leagaues
Beneith the Sea.” (The book, where they briefly visit Atlantis.)
is Atlantis a re-do of Jules Vern’s novel or Japanamation?
The crystal as a powersource for Atlantis is a theory older than Japanamation, if I remember correctly. I did a paper on the legend of Atlantis way back in highschool and the sources I used were older than that. In fact, many elements in the movie about the legends of Atlantis and then Atlantis itself seem to be based on many of the standard myths of Atlantis.
SPOILER…
In Atlantis, which I saw Friday, the crystals that all the Atlanteans wear are what keeps them alive for so long and gives them their healing powers in addition to powering their cool stuff and are all connected to the central power. The reason that they don’t know that or all of their history is because they’ve forgotten how to read their own language over time. Not all that unbelievable since it seems most of their surviving writings are not in the city but deep underwater. Only the Princess’s mother had joined with the powersource. Her father was still ruler.
As for the Princess’s appearance, of course she’s pretty. She’s the Heroine in a Disney movie. Our hero was your stereotypical studious nerd type with an obsession. Neither would have to be ripped off from Nadia.
Personally, I liked Helga better. She was a bad, bad girl and Claudia Christian did the vocalizations for her. My main reason for going to see the movie was to hear her talk.
There are elements of Verne in the movie, but seeing as they had to use an advanced sub to get where they were going (how else would you get to an underwater city?) I don’t see how that could have been avoided. At least there were no giant squids.
Both movies are ripping off 100 years worth of pulp cliches. Certainly “nerdy but adventurous boy goes to exotic place and meets exotic princess” hardly qualifies as a new concept. (Tom Swift, anyone?) And the whole Atlantis-was-powered-by-a-giant-crystal thing goes back to Edgar Cayce: http://skepdic.com/cayce.html
The fact is that some “anime” fans can’t accept the fact that Disney does good animation. Their worldview is so narrow that they think everyone has seen the same films they have. And the idea that Disney could do a top-notch animated film goes against their prejudices.
The list I’ve seen, BTW, uses the old Spy Magazine trick of taking two unrelated items and making them seem the same by adding the same adjectives to describe them.
But oy vey do 2 and 4 (especially 4) get trotted out a lot.
And claims that Nadia is ‘VERY popular’ and almost sure to have been seen by the animators… Well, it’s quite popular among anime fans, but pretty much unknown to English speaking audiences aside from that.
For example, a number of these “comparison sites” (I’m way too tired to link them) claim that the “crystal as power source” is a ripoff. Which it isn’t; they both took it from the same source.
Or that the submarines are both “high tech”. Well, they’re both based on Jules Verne, and the Nadia one is future anyway, while the Atlantis one is very steampunk.
Also, they claim that the blonde chick is a ripoff of Nadia. Of course it is, but not of Nadia; they used the old cliche off the attractive and mysterious blonde. If you’re going for the feel they were aiming at–especially for her first appearance–you have to have an attractive and mysterious blonde.
Just a few examples among many of 3.
As for number 1:
One page identifies a character as “helmsman/gunnery seargent”–to look like the “helmsman/gunnery seargent” from Nadia, when in fact he is the demolitions man.
Or they claim that the princess “merges with and controls the power source”, when in fact she is controlled by the power source.
Or that she “doesn’t know how to use her crystal because her mother dies”. In fact, she doesn’t know how to use it because she’s illiterate, and her father deliberately hid the truth from her.
Ok, here’s one of the links (Mountain Dew revives me!)
I’d consider both of these examples of #4, not #3. (The other is granted) - They’re not drawing from a particular source for either of these, just cliches and standard visual shorthand.
As to the #1s…I really should have clarified that I haven’t seen Atlantis, so I wouldn’t know any but the most blatant falsehoods about it (thus the ‘that I know of’). I’ve not seen those claims, actually, but I’ll take for granted that I just haven’t seen them, and that they’re false.
I think that most animators out there have a better knowledge of obscure and international animation than most folks. Sure, Nadia is pretty much unknown to English speaking audiences… but so are most of the animators on this page. Many people have never heard of Ub Iwerks. There’s a lot of obscure animation out there, some of it very influential, which people who aren’t animation enthusiasts have never heard of.
That being said, I don’t really think it’s fair to call Nadia obscure. If I remember correctly, Japan and the United States are the two biggest producers of animation in the world today. Though they lack marketing power in North America, internationally Japanese studios like Ghilbi and Gainax are in direct competition with Disney. Nadia was a huge success when it was first released in 1990, and continues to enjoy great popularity to this day. The success of the TV series has led to success in the character goods market.
I stand corrected on which number to assign the blonde thing. My muddled mind at work again.
The crystal, though, was from a specific source (a reference to it already linked earlier in this thread, I believe). It may not have been the origin of the idea, but I believe it was the source material for the works in question.
And as far as I’m aware, it is only the hardcore anime fans who know Nadia. I often go to the weekly anime showing around here, and am friends with both people who have run it, and have not once heard the series even mentioned until now.
I have a quandry here. On the one hand, Nadia is an extremely popular series in Japan and in many other countries. It was the first television series produced by Gainax, which gives it a certain historical significance.
On the other hand, a quick look through the net has confirmed that the promotion of Nadia in North America was handled very poorly. English rights were first obtained by Streamline Pictures sometime in the 90s, but they dropped the project after releasing only the first eight episodes. Just recently (in May 2000), AD Vision began releasing the series in subtitled format. Subtitled anime generally only appeals to hard-core fans; casual fans are more likely to be attracted to dubbed films. So, I can see why many North American animation fans would never have heard of this series.
Compare Nadia in North America to Star Wars in Korea. The first three films in the series were never released here, but even so I don’t think it would be correct to describe them as obscure. They were a huge commercial success, they revolutionized special effects technology, and they have a large and dedicated following in many parts of the world. Although most Koreans wouldn’t know a wookee if it bit them on the bum, I would expect that most of the people working in the FX industry here have some idea what Star Wars is, even if they’ve never actually seen the movies.
Getting back to the OP, any serious anime fans out there will probably already be familiar with another argument concerning Nadia and stolen ideas… that the plot for Nadia was itself lifted from Studio Ghilbi’s 1986 film Laputa: Castle in the Sky.
You beat me to it. I was about to say the same thing. I kept thinking [padzu voice] “Sheeeetaaa!!” [/padzu voice] while watching Atlantis. Similarities I can come up with off the top of my head:
The lost city (Duh)
The crystal on Kida’s neck
The gruff mercenaries who become allies
Military/paramilitary forces resorting to violence
The grandfather who was a laughingstock for believing in the lost city
The big protective robots
I definitely thing Atlantis was influenced by Laputa, but it’s clearly not the same story. And there’s no shame in being influenced by someone as awesome as Miyazaki.
The silly thing here is that I’ve heard of Laputa and Nadia, and I’m hardly a serious anime fan. I watch perhaps an hour or two a year.
Interestingly, I ran into this link today at http://www.memepool.com and as background, they provided a link to Cecil’s column on the Lion King version of this controversy. Woo-hoo!
Actually, when my friends and I saw it, we’d just finished Escaflowne instead, and we were howling with laughter because of the (yes, superficial) similarities there. The mole man seemed a little odd - I mean, the rest all comes from the same pulp sources, right? But the mole man? Our appreciation or lack thereof of the movie didn’t have much to do with our almost being thrown out of the theater with the Mysterious Blue Light and Pendant appeared, however.
Our hero was your stereotypical studious nerd type with an obsession. Neither would have to be ripped off from Nadia.