Nagi-Asu: A Lull in the Sea Anime Review: When Unrequited Love Becomes a Shitty Plot Device
The first draft of this review was me ranting about how much I hated this show. But now that I’ve calmed down a bit, I realize it’s not THAT bad. Nagi-Asu: A Lull in the Sea (or Nagi no Asukara) is a 2013 romance, slice-of-life anime about two separate but connected worlds - a society that is able to live and breathe under the sea, and a society that can only live on land (like normal humans). A group of four sea village friends need to start attending the land village middle school, and the story kicks off from there. Nagi-Asu is currently available on Netflix, which is why I decided to try it out. Otherwise, I would have never heard about this anime or had any intention of putting it on my watchlist. The fact that this anime isn’t widely known or beloved might be because it’s pretty polarizing, but also not praised enough to have garnered widespread attention.
Nagi-Asu is a very beautiful anime, and a lot of it has to do with the fact that it is nautical-themed. I loved the animation of the underwater sequences, and the music itself seems to transport you into this magical and fantastical world where the ocean, land, and sky seem to meld together. It gave me some Little Mermaid vibes, but the humans who can live under the sea are not mermaids or fish-like people - they basically look like any other ordinary human. They got the better end of the evolution stick (in my opinion) and can breathe both under the sea and on land. Other than the visuals and the music, I also liked the backstory of the sea village and how they came to be, which sets up a very interesting premise. There’s some prejudices that people on the land and people in the sea have against each other, but watching the story attempt to bridge that gap between characters and mindsets was very sweet. I definitely wish there was more of that.
Here’s what sparked my negative outlook on this anime: there’s too big of a focus on the unrequited love and messy relationship dynamics in this series. It’s like all of these middle school kids are crushing on people who don’t like them back, and it gets so frustrating, especially towards the latter half of the series. Don’t get me wrong, I love my cheesy romantic plot-lines, but the premise of this anime had so much more promise than just people crying over people who don’t love them back, episode after episode. Also, at around the midpoint of this series, there’s a bit of a shift with the main characters, most notably with more focus being put on two “new” characters. I felt like the insertion of those new characters messed up the character dynamics, and was kind of unnecessary.
In conclusion…
Nagi-Asu is a show that might be more appealing to younger audiences. Middle school-aged Dorene might have gobbled this show up and fell in love with it, because it’s a triple combo threat of gorgeous animation, music, and romance. Now, I mostly think that the story had a lot of promise but got lost in the love triangles/squares/pentagons that the characters were having with each other. If anything, I’ll just play the nautical themed OP as a fond reminder of the good qualities of this show.