Why it matters
It is one of the major anime routes into steampunk, combining Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, nineteenth-century adventure, the Nautilus and high-energy speculative machinery.
Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water begins with Jules Verne in the bloodstream and then adds Gainax energy, submarine grandeur and enough mystery to keep the ocean looking suspicious.
Created at Gainax and directed by Hideaki Anno, the series follows Nadia and Jean as they are drawn into a globe-spanning adventure involving the submarine Nautilus, Captain Nemo, lost civilisation secrets and dangerous technology. The Verne connection is explicit enough to bring its own diving helmet.
This is one of the stronger anime entries for the steampunk shelf. It has scientific romance ancestry, period adventure, retrofuturist machinery, submarine spectacle and the idea that technology can be both liberation and menace. The machinery is not ornamental. It drives the story's awe, danger and mystery.
The Jules Verne inheritance matters because steampunk has always been in conversation with scientific romance. Nadia does not simply adapt Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas straight. It uses Vernean elements as a launch platform for anime melodrama, comedy, action and mythic science fiction. That mixture is exactly why it remains so useful. It shows how nineteenth-century adventure material can be rebuilt by a different national animation tradition.
Jean is a particularly steampunk-friendly figure: an eager young inventor whose fascination with machines is both charming and risky. Nadia's scepticism and independence keep the series from becoming a hymn to clever boys and their hardware. Together, they give the story a human argument about technology rather than a simple parade of gadgets.
The Nautilus supplies the grand machine at the centre. Submarines are among the great steampunk-adjacent objects because they turn engineering into environment. A ship, a weapon, a refuge and a secret all at once, the Nautilus lets the series move between wonder and threat without changing vehicles.
The series also connects to Castle in the Sky through lost civilisations, ancient power and the danger of recovered technology. Both works understand that ruins are not just scenery. They are warnings with architecture. Nadia adds a more serialised, sometimes uneven but often thrilling television rhythm, where comedy, adventure and darker revelations jostle for deck space.
Its unevenness does not hide its importance. Television anime often has to manage budget, pacing and tonal shifts while keeping the adventure afloat. Nadia has those bumps, but the central imaginative package remains powerful: children drawn into adult secrets, machines larger than nations, and a world where the romance of invention keeps colliding with domination.
That makes it an excellent bridge between Verne and later anime spectacle. It is recognisably descended from nineteenth-century scientific romance, yet it feels emotionally and visually at home in Japanese animation. Few entries show the international portability of steampunk ingredients quite so clearly.
It also gives the field one of its best submarine routes into anime. Airships get plenty of attention, but the Nautilus proves the depths can be just as theatrical, and usually with better lighting discipline.
Is it really steampunk?
Yes. Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water is core anime steampunk, or at least very close to the boiler room. Its Vernean premise, nineteenth-century adventure mode, submarines, inventions, lost civilisation and retro-scientific imagination make it essential international context.
Readers looking beyond British and American steampunk should not skip it. The show proves that the Nautilus can surface in anime waters and still look entirely at home, even when everyone on board has brought complicated feelings.
Find it
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