One of the comments to my recent journals about Nadia, Secret of Blue Water advanced the theory that Disney's animation department ripped off a lot of their ideas from the Nadia show. I had doubts about this, but then decided to watch the Atlantis movie to refresh my memory. Okay, Jean from Nadia and Milo from Atlantis both wear glasses, and Nadia and Princess Kida both wear magic amulets, and both do give the Atlanteans architecture that borrows elements from ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt, or Babylon— but there seems to be universal agreement that Atlantis buildings must have been like that among everyone who's EVER done an Atlantis story.

So let's see.

Nadia turns 15 late in the show, doesn't know she's Atlantean, much less their princess, and the more she learns about them, the more she hates them.

Kida's several thousand years old, though she looks about 25, and has been an active leader of her people since birth. Not too much similarity there!

Jean is a young French boy about Nadia's age, who designs boats and flying machines with his uncle. He has a very positive, go-get-em attitude.

Milo is a shy linguistics professor, probably about 25-30 years old, with a personality far more like songwriting Roger from 101 Dalmations than anyone I've ever seen in any anime.

The relationships may have some similarity, in that both Nadia and Kida are (sometimes) impressed with Jean's and Milo's practical skills, but the Nadia show has so much more time to develop the romance (too much time, perhaps). And both Nadia and Kida can lose their wills and personalities from augmented mystic amulet overdose. But the situations where this happens are very different.

The Atlanteans in Disney's Atlantis are an isolated tribe, more or less helpless against 1914 American adventurers.

The Neo-Atlanteans from Nadia are a bunch of evil world-conquerers, against whom the Earth of 1890 is pretty helpless. Kinda the exact opposite.

The submarine crew of Nemo's Nautilus in Nadia are pretty much your "straight" anime crew, as opposed to crew of misfits (about equally common). The three jewel thieves take on the misfit roles.

Disney's submarine has a crew of misfits, though they are a pretty tight unit. They're all hyperactive jive-talkers like Aladdin's Genie! That's right, a whole crew of Genies! How much comic relief can you take, seriously?

Nadia kind of reminded me of a older Disney movie, at least until she started bathing onscreen, but Atlantis shows just how far Disney had diverged by this time. The tendency toward wild personalities that begins with Cinderella's stepsisters and Cruella DeVille, got accentuated by Genie, Timon and Pumbaa, and kinda goes a little too far in Atlantis. No wait, I have seen this in classic Disney! Alice in Wonderland!