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What’s the chef cookin’ tonight?
The Secret of Cerulean Sand, or Patapata Hikōsen no Bōken (パタパタ{飛|ひ}{行船|こうせん}の{冒険|ぼうけん}, lit. “Flapping Airship Adventure”) is a 2002 Japanese-Korean two-cour steampunk sci-fi adventure anime series loosely adapting Jules and Michel Vernes’ novels The Barsac Mission (1919) and Facing the Flag (1896). It was Telecom Animation Film’s first anime since Cybersix (1999) which Cuban showed previously; you may also know Telecom Animation Film for Moyashimon, Orange, Blue Box, Don’t Toy With Me, Miss Nagatoro, some Rick & Morty anime, and a lot of the newer Lupin III anime. In fact, Yuuichirou Yano, director of Cerulean Sand, also directed Lupin III parts IV and V.
Plot description from Anilist:
Jane’s mother dies when she is born, and her father, a rich English aristocrat, soon remarries to a woman with a son, William, who despises his new father and brother. George and Jane grow up with a dream to make a flying machine. George believes the distant Asian sands hold a secret: a mysterious cerulean sand which can make machines fly. He goes on an expedition to find it, and soon is reported executed for treason. William disappears too. After she recieves an unsigned letter holding a handful of pale-blue sand which floats in the air, Jane is sure her brother is alive and leaves to the East to find him and prove him innocent. There are many mysteries to unravel in store for Jane and her new friends on her journey. But perhaps a mystery should forever remain a mystery…
I first came across this series when looking through the streaming service of Norway’s state broadcaster one day last year. My first reaction upon seeing the thumbnail was, “Oh, they have an anime on NRK TV, nice!”. My second reaction upon reading the title was, “Wait, Den blå sandens hemmelighet? So this show is called ‘The Secret of Blue Sand’? Is this related to Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water?”… As it turns out, no. The two shows have very different Japanese titles, do not take place in the same universe, and don’t really share any people who worked on them, so I have to wonder if the idea to call this show The Secret of Cerulean Sand in English, and translations of The Secret of Blue Sand in French and Norwegian, was some sort of deliberate attempt to get people to think this show was related to Nadia. Although Sandrew Metronome’s Norwegian-subtitled release of Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water was under its English title, apparently. In any case, both Secret of Cerulean Sand and Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water are steampunk sci-fi adventure anime based on works of Jules Verne and starring a teenage girl going on an adventure across the world in a 19th century flying machine, except in the English-speaking anime fandom Cerulean Sand is evidently mega-obscure compared to Blue Water — Anilist says that Blue Water is more popular by a whole order of magnitude. Eight people on Anilist have recommended Blue Water to fans of Cerulean Sand and vice versa, making the former the latter’s top recommendation and the latter the former’s 11th top recommendation. Oh, and Stalin showed Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water last year, if you don’t remember.
Still, even if this anime is obscure in the Anglosphere, it’s still one of only about 70 anime which have been dubbed into Norwegian, and this anime also happens to have a lot of childhood fans in… the Arab World! I’m not joking: looking up the Arabic title, الطاقة الزرقاء, on YouTube, and the top result is a YouTube Kids upload of the theme song with a whole ten million views. Look up the show’s English title and the most viewed of the top results has 45K views. Hell, even the Japanese title and the most viewed of the top results has 157K views. So it quickly became apparent as I was looking into this anime that it is an Arab thing first and foremost. Which I think is pretty cool. The English-speaking anime fandom tends to be pretty insular, at most it has a vague conception of “anime popular in Japan that Anglo fans don’t watch” — but every country has its own history with anime: the anime popular in Latin America aren’t the same as the anime popular in the Arab World aren’t the same as the anime popular in China or Korea or the Former Soviet Union or Italy or France or Germany. So I think it might do us some good to familiarize ourselves with anime that are obscure in the Anglosphere but popular elsewhere.
And yeah, I don’t doubt that this anime is pretty deliberately pulling from Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water and Future Boy Conan plot-wise and works of Studio Ghibli and Hayao Miyazaki in general stylistically. Does Cerulean Sand live up to its inspirations? And how do Norwegian anime dubs compare to English ones? Only one way to find out!
Content warnings and accessibility
Audio description: Not available
Sign language: Not available
Captions: English and Norwegian softsubs
Language of audio: Norwegian
Content warnings:
- Death during childbirth
- Children in peril
- Racism and slavery
christmas-crab-legs You should watch SPARKLE ON RAVEN: The Life of DrillGirl; it is a very good show. {Cēterum|Furthermore} {cēnseō|I think} {iūs auctōris|copyright} {esse dēlendum|must be destroyed}.
