This was actually a really hard series to grade, because it's a very up and down series that I have a history with. I first watched it when it was just hitting the states, back in 99 or 2000, long before I had seen enough anime to understand what it was referencing, only that it was an anime about anime, and that alone was amazing and hilarious to me. I very much enjoyed it, though I understood then that it wasn't genius.
Nadesico has aged well, but it bears the scars of its time. It first aired Winter 1996, six months after Neon Genesis Evangelion finished, and before the full effects of the revolution that particular series sparked had come to fruition. The single greatest problem with Nadesico is that it is both a parody and a drama, and being that it is both of these, it requires that the viewer give it the credit it is asking for. This will be a challenge, as the series is too silly to be taken seriously, but too serious to be treated completely light-heartedly.
If you can get into its wavelength, though, it's actually a remarkably well-thought out story that resolves its main plots (though fails to resolve many others), discusses a number of complex topics in a very intelligent way (mature relationships vs childlike relationships, the difficulty of being friends with people you love, the conflict of idealism vs interpreted idealism) and ultimately is about coming to accept things you dislike about things you love, especially through the lens of children's perspectives vs adults perspectives. The line between Children and Adults, and the time of life when they blur, is another major theme, mated as it is within Nadesico with Super Robots vs Real Robots.
The movie, Prince of Darkness, adds to the story, and becomes somewhat darker and more serious, to the story's overall benefit, though I didn't find the ending as satisfying as the series'.
Nadesico is an old series that is often overlooked. It requires a lot of patience and to be given credit, and a lot of people won't be able to muster the investment in the series to appreciate it for what it really has to offer, which is a lot of discussion of being human. It lacks the depth and genius of a work of true brilliance, but you could do a hell of a lot worse than Martian Successor Nadesico.
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