Martian Successor Nadesico

—by Charles McCarter

As we looked back over our feature coverage of anime over the last two years of EX, we realized that while we had given significant attention to much of the "newer" anime, some of the older titles had been somewhat neglected. This was even further evidenced by our readers writing in and asking us about older shows. So we decided that perhaps it was time to widen our focus and include shows that have appeared more than two years ago.
Our theme for this year is, "A Look Forward, A Look Back," and we will try to balance our coverage accordingly. We do this because we believe that anime made ten or fifteen or even twenty years ago is still relevant, and still worthy of our attention. We also feel that we should attempt to broaden the horizons of anime fans. Indeed, many of you have written asking us to put together some sort of "Anime Primer" or a guide for new fans. We hope that covering these older shows will also help fans to discover something they previously weren't interested in or of which they were unaware.
And to launch a year that straddles both the future and the past, there is no better place to start than MOBILE BATTLESHIP NADESICO (or MARTIAN SUCCESSOR NADESICO if you prefer the English title). While at first glance this title may seem to offer nothing new, it synthesizes old standards in such a way as to create a different, and very entertaining, vision.

Captain Yurika and the Strike Cruiser Nadesico.

The Aestevalis mecha in action.

The Story

In the future, Earth is being invaded by an unknown enemy from Jupiter called the Jovian Lizards. These foes began their assault with Mars and then moved on to Earth's moon. At the beginning of the show, Earth was in the process of being invaded.
Of course, the Earth's military forces were next to useless. (Has there even been an anime where the alien invaders were repelled successfully by Earth on the first attempt?) As a result, a private company, Nergal Heavy Industries, as part of the secret Scaparelli project, constructed the Nadesico, a state-of-the-art battleship equipped with a gravity blast, a distortion field, and positron engines, none of which was standard equipment on other Earth ships.
But this new ship seems to create more problems than it could potentially solve. Originally, the Nadesico would be under the command of Nergal and would be used to protect Nergal's interests both on Earth and in space. They would operate in cooperation with the military but would be a fully independent force. Upon seeing the true power of the Nadesico, however, the military attempts to strong arm Nergal into handing it over, saying that such a powerful weapon should be utilized by the military to help defeat the enemy. The Nadesico and her crew find themselves in the odd position of being hunted by both the Earth military and the alien invaders. And you just know that Nergal has their own secret agenda.
And those are just the immediate political and military problems.