In the earliest drawings of Nadia shown by Toho when they were marketing the series overseas before production started, Nadia was distinctly darker and had kinky hair making her look more ethnically African. In fact the sales brochure for the series explicitly refers to her as African. Yet the final character design of Nadia had a more generic ethnic look and standard "anime girl" hair. What happened? Why the change?
For years there were persistent and unconfirmed rumors in the fan
community that this change was caused by fears in the network (NHK) or
somewhere
else that Japanese fans were not ready for a dark-skinned ethnic heroine.
This rumor was given credence because Japan still has a very homogeneous and
closed culture and there is still some contempt towards outside ethnic groups
with which they have little or no contact. (In 1986 Prime Minister Yasuhiro
Nakasone caused an international incident when he told a group of
Japanese politicians
that people in the US were less intelligent than Japanese because US society
included blacks and hispanics.) But was this the real reason for changing
Nadia? Carl Macek suggested it may have been a technical decision rather than
a political one. "You're limited by the color palette you have for television
animation anyway," he said in an interview. "If you make the character too
dark you can't really show their expression."
The mystery was finally solved when Hideaki Anno was asked about it by e-mail. The answer turned out to be quite mundane: Nadia's hair. In the production drawings her hair was quite kinky. Animating hair like that would be difficult to do and they could not guarantee the quality of the work (particularly since some of the work would have to be farmed out to other studios). "There are animators out there who are good enough to do it," said Anno, "but there are far more who aren't. So we changed it to make it easier to animate."
If there ever were any real fears about a negative reaction to Nadia, the explosive popularity of the series and of the character herself quickly dispelled them . That a dark skinned character could, in six months, become the most popular anime character in the Japanese fan polls showed that, at least in this one instance, the Japanese outlook on race was becoming less parochial.
The second mystery centers on the character of Eaton. In the original
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Verne's narrator was the French aristocrat and
scientist M. Pierre Aronnax who, along with his valet, Conseil, were taken on
board the Nautilus after the US warship they were on had been sunk by
it. Now
look at the early character sheet shown here.
Electra has a "Tasha Yar"
haircut and a more modern-looking uniform. Jean and Nadia are in their final
form and everyone else looks close to their final characterizations. But who
are the two guys on the far right? The one with the monocle, cane, cigar and
mustache would certainly pass for an aristocrat, but the name under him is
"Eaton". But the man next to him looks more like a valet and the name under
him is none other than "Conseil". So at one point they had intended to stick
most closely to the original story with a character like M. Aronnax (now
changed from a French aristocrat to a British one) and his valet, but for
whatever reasons, they dropped the valet and changed the character of
Eaton.
The origin of Eaton's name itself is a puzzle with two possible solutions. First he could be named after the famous upper-class boys' school in England, which would seem to be the obvious source. But in Japanese, the name "Eaton" and "Erton" could be pronounced the same, and there is a character in Verne's Mysterious Island by the name of Erton. Again Anno solved the mystery by e-mail; he was actually named after the Verne character, not the school.
Text copyright by Marc Hairston, November 1995
Page moved to http://www.utdallas.edu/research/spacesciences/hairston/lostnadia.html June 2008
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