Jules Verne died in 1905, a decade before cinema learned to dream in full, and yet he may be the most filmed novelist who never wrote for the screen. The man wrote about machines that did not exist for audiences who could not have imagined them, and in doing so he built a template so durable that it survived the leap from page to nitrate to celluloid to cel. You can draw a straight line from the engravings in his serialized Voyages Extraordinaires to a Gainax anime broadcast on Japanese television in 1990. The line is not metaphorical. It is a submarine, and the man at its helm has the same name in both: Nemo.
The blueprint nobody could resist
What makes Verne so endlessly adaptable is that he was, secretly, a structural writer rather than a prose stylist. His genius was the premise, not the sentence. Center the earth and send three men toward it. Wrap the globe in a wager and eighty days. Drop a balloon over an unmapped continent. Sink a vessel that no navy can find. Each of these is a machine for generating spectacle, and spectacle is exactly what a visual medium craves and a printed page can only gesture at. When a filmmaker picks up Verne, half the work is already done: the engine is built, the destination is set, all that remains is to render the wonder that the original could only describe.
Then there is the matter of his recurring cast of types, which travel as easily as his plots. There is the gentleman-scientist, courtly and obsessive, who would rather lecture than fight. There is the wondrous machine, treated not as a tool but as a character with moods and a will. And there is the voyage itself as a moral education, a journey that changes the travelers more than it changes the world they pass through. These are not just Verne's furniture. They became science fiction's furniture, and every adaptation that borrows them is paying a debt whether it knows it or not.
Why anime fell hardest
Plenty of cultures adapted Verne, but Japanese animation embraced him with a particular ardor, and it is worth asking why. Part of the answer is structural: a serialized adventure novel and a serialized television anime want the same things, a sturdy quest spine with room for episodic detours, a small found family aboard a vehicle, and a world that reveals itself one marvel at a time. Verne practically storyboarded for a medium that would not be invented for a century. The other part is tonal. Verne is not a triumphalist; underneath the brass and steam there is a deep melancholy, a sense that wonder and grief are the same emotion seen from different angles. That register, the bittersweet awe, is the native key of a great deal of anime.
Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water is the cleanest demonstration. Loosely spun out of a Hayao Miyazaki concept and brought to the screen by Gainax under a young Hideaki Anno, it takes Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and reads it sideways, keeping the Nautilus and its haunted captain while inventing a circus acrobat and an aspiring inventor to ride along. The series understands something profound about its source: that the Nautilus is not a setting but a wound. Nemo's submarine is a man's grief given a hull and a propeller, a refusal to live in the world that took everything from him. Nadia keeps that ache and surrounds it with the sunlit, slapstick energy of a boy-meets-girl adventure, and the collision of the two tones is precisely what Verne was doing all along.
The Nautilus is not a setting but a wound, a man's grief given a hull and a propeller.
You can feel the same Vernian inheritance in works that never cite him directly. The floating fortresses and earnest engineers of The Vision of Escaflowne, the airship romance and machine-as-soul of a hundred steampunk OVAs, the recurring anime conviction that a magnificent vehicle deserves the same character development as its pilot, all of it descends from a Frenchman who loved a cutaway diagram more than a kiss. Even the CLAMP anime, with their gleaming retro-futurist contraptions and globe-trotting questers, are working a vein Verne opened. The aesthetic of looking forward through a backward-glancing lens, of nostalgia for a future that never arrived, is a Verne aesthetic, and anime has cultivated it more lovingly than any other tradition.
Why Nemo keeps coming back
Of all his creations, it is Captain Nemo who refuses to stay dead, and the reason is that Verne left him deliberately incomplete. In Twenty Thousand Leagues the captain is a magnificent enigma; only in the later Mysterious Island do we learn he is an exiled Indian prince, his war on the surface world a war against empire. That gap, that mystery never fully sealed, is an open invitation. A villain is a closed case, but Nemo is a vacancy in the shape of a man, and every era pours its own anxieties into him. He has been a Romantic antihero, a colonial avenger, a tragic father, a literal monster, and in Nadia a wary mentor with the weight of a lost civilization on his shoulders. The character is a mirror that happens to come with a submarine.
That, finally, is the secret of Verne on screen. He did not write characters so much as he wrote vessels, in both senses of the word, hulls that carry us into the dark and empty forms we can fill with our own longing. The machines promise mastery and deliver loneliness. The voyages promise escape and deliver self-knowledge. Adapt him faithfully and you get a thrilling ride; adapt him truly, as Nadia did, and you get the melancholy underneath, the suspicion that the most wondrous machine ever built is still just a place to hide from a world that broke your heart. A hundred and twenty years after his death, we are still climbing aboard, and we are still surprised by how much it hurts to surface.