utd500.utdallas.edu/~hairston/atlantis.html
So that just leaves the two main characters of each: Jean and Nadia vs. Photo of Alantis sketch courtesy of Cabel Sasser Let's take them separately. Jean is a French boy of 14 who is an inventive genius and wears thick glasses. Milo Thatch is the American 20-something main character in Atlantis who wears thick glasses. Since the film isn't out yet, we're limited in what we know about the characters in Atlantis, but it's obvious that Milo is the hero and that he's smart. One of the oldest cliches in films, tv, and stories: he's wearing glasses. Both Gainax and Disney put glasses on Jean and Milo as visual shorthand to make sure you knew from the start that this is a "smart" character. Here's a short list of other "smart" characters with glasses in animation: Mr. So both Jean and Milo are the same character type, but that is hardly proof that Disney borrowed the idea from Nadia. They could just as easily have borrowed the idea from Mr. Both of them are lost princesses of Atlantis, both have dark skin, both have a magic gem pendant that shoots beams of light and levitates objects, and both wear sexy outfits with bare midriffs. At first this looks like the "smoking gun", but let's look at these similarities more closely. Both are lost princesses of Atlantis, but the lost princess (or prince for that matter) from a long forgotten realm is another stock character from fantasy and other imaginative tales. Specifially "lost princesses from Atlantis" have shown up in other stories long before either Nadia or Atlantis. I've checked the original story in Plato's 10 Critias and there is no mention of that, however that may have been something that appears in later versions of the legend. For that matter, Princess Kida is voiced by 11 Cree Summer, a Native American voice actress (and singer) so I'd be willing to bet that the Disney story links the ancient Atlantean race with Native Americans (just as Nadia linked the ancient Atlanteans to the ancient Egyptians and other African natives). Again, it's the case that magic levitating gems shooting beams of light is a stock motif and not original with either of them. You might as well claim that they're both stealing the idea from Mrs. Brisby in Don Bluth's 1981 animated feature The Secret of NIMH! Besides, magic power crystals have been a staple of the folklore of Atlantis and a lot of the "new age thinking" (and I'm using the term "thinking" loosely here), so it's not too surprising that both heroines have such a magic gem. Also both gems have blue-white light coming from them, but again that's just visual shorthand. Well, let's face it, if they're going for a sexy outfit that can still pass with a "family audience", then a two piece outfit with a bare midriff is a common solution. Look at Jeannie's outfit in the old 60s tv series I Dream of Jeannie. For all we know it could turn out that Princess Kida had previously been a circus performer and had a pet lion cub. This brings up the point that no story is ever 100% original, created out of a pure vacuum. Every story writer borrows elements and ideas from every story they've ever heard, seen, or read. It's what they do with those borrowed elements that counts. Then George Lucas does Star Wars and suddenly it's all new and fresh again. Anno and Gainax 12 ripped off a lot of other sources in creating their story. As Anno said in an interview with Animage magazine: "I don't think there is much point with Nadia in sticking to originality. There are some anime where they spend years to end up with something original, but boring. Can they make something as fresh and exciting as Nadia with them? I don't know, but the previews look promising, and I for one will be there in the theater on opening day in June cheering them on and hoping they do "something wonderful" with it. For the best and (in my humble opinion) final word on the Lion King vs. Tesuka's Kimba/Jungle Emperor Leo debate, see Frederick Schodt's essay 13 Osamu Tezuka's 'Lion King' from his book Dreamland Japan(1996). Update July 2001 Unfortunately, when all the excitment about this controversy broke in late May and June, I was in the middle of a crunch to prepare work for a conference (and a short personal vacation afterwards) I was going to be at in late June. So I never got a chance to update the page, but then I wanted to wait till I saw the movie before I passed final judgment. There's even less reason to believe there was any Nadia influence after seeing the whole movie. Most of my anime friends summed it up after they saw it by saying stuff like "if there are Nadia elements in there, they're too small to be noticed in everything else going on in there". And as the number of hits to this page has dwindled drastically once the movie hit, I think most fans who have seen the film have come to much the same conclusion. Personally I think they did sneak an homage to Miyazaki into Atlantis. Towards the end (spoiler warning) when Kida floats down from the sky unconscious and Milo walks out to catch her, this is a dead ringer for the opening sequence of Laputa when Pazu catches the unconscious Sheeta as she floats down from the sky. I'm hoping to find out officially if this is true, but for now its the most plausible real reference to anime in the whole film. I've also seen some postings where fans claim that since Wise and Trousdale knew about Miyazaki that therefore they must have known about Nadia. Just having read those two books doesn't even mean I know anything else about British children's literature! Again, over 90% of the professional animators at Disney know nothing more about anime than that their kids like Pokemon. A small minority know about Miyazaki, but they've only seen a few of his films and that's as far as their anime knowledge extends (and from what I've been able to find out, that's the category that Wise and Trousdale seem to fall into). She's also currently the voice actor for Cleo the poodle on the PBS show 16 Clifford the Big Red Dog and has done other cartoons such as Inspector Gadget, Tiny Toon Adventures, and several others. The controversy When I first put this page up back in March I was having trouble getting more than a dozen hits a day on it. The initial anti-Disney ravers on usenet seemed to have died down and I figured this was all going to be a moot point by the time the movie arrived. In May Anime News Network posted an 18 article by Lee Zion along with a 19 table of the alleged similarities between Nadia and Atlantis. The comparisons were either superficial or covered the same ground I'd explained months before on the page above. I wrote to ANN pointing this out, suggesting they put a link to my page and offering to do a counterpoint piece for them. Then another anime fan, Michael Hayden, put up 20 an expanded version of the list on his page, but at least he was courteous enough to put a link to this page. The whole controversy got discovered and next thing I knew I was getting hundreds and then thousands of hits a day. Just to add to that, Hayden did a Japanese translation of his page and that got discovered in Japan. For a while there the hits here from Japan were outnumbering all other hits by about 3 to 1. Then the mainstream news media noticed it and I got mentioned in a couple of articles. Online where Andy called me at work and we had a nice chat about the story, I sent him a medium-sized email with more details and I ended up with only one line in the story. A 22 second piece appeared a week later in the Hollywood Reporter by Chris Marlowe and he never bothered to contact me. In fact although he spelled my name right, he obviously never read past the opening paragraph of my page and so lumped me in with the anti- Disney side of the argument! The comparisons Why am I even bothering with writing all this now? Well, I wish I'd had time back in June to do this when I was getting thousands of hits a day. But I'm still getting hundreds of hits a day, mostly from outside the US from countries where Atlantis hasn't been released yet. So I'm doing this partly just to get it "on the record" and also in hope of adding more light and less heat to the arguments among...
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