Fog is my name and I like to play with my life in so many ways, that’s what they say!
Broadcast as recently as 2002, yet widely unknown and unlicensed, Secret of The Cerulean Sand is a fun, period-set adventure show filled with Vernian Airships and Miyazaki-style colourful, family orientated action.
Cerulean Sand is the story of Jane Buxton, a young girl growing up in a rich, English aristocratic family who ends up on a globe trotting adventure after her scientist brother goes missing – presumed dead – in ‘The East’ (it’s never exactly specified where in the East this is) while desperately searching for a legendary ‘floating liquid’ that can make the construction of all sorts of man-made flying machines possible.
So, bringing along only her butler, a dog and more unrelenting optimism than seems healthy, Jane sets off to locate her Oni-sama. The show can pretty much summed as an old fashioned adventure story – after a fairly slow start made up overly nice encounters with nice people on trains, Cerulean Sand eventually develops in to fast-paced action show, filled with sand-pirates riding deadly jet sleds, huge steam-powered airships carpet bombing small towns, and double-crossing aplenty. For the sheer amount of fairly exhilirating action that occurs (especially towards the end where, for a family show, things become suprisingly brutal) Cerulean Sand can be recommended.
The proviso here being, of course, that the reader realise that Cerulean Sand is most definitely a family show. Stylistically, it has more than a little in common with Miyazaki’s classic Future Boy Conan and Hideaki Anno’s similarly awesome Nadia: Secret of Blue Water, but without the true kinetic artistry of the former or the more dramatic, adult edge of the latter. That is not to say Cerulean Sand is without its own artistic merits – it’s brilliantly animated, expressive, and manages the extraordinary feat of including CGI airships that don’t look entirely shit – but it doesn’t quite have that stamp of brilliance which makes Conan or Nadia what they are.
In fact, more than either Conan or Nadia, what Cerulean mostly reminds me of – and possibly part of the reason I enjoyed it so much – is the cartoons I used to watch as a kid. There’s shades of the charming Around the World with Willy Fog or that masterpiece of 80’s television Mysterious Cities of Gold here – action packed, fun and unpretentious. This is just high adventure, kids getting in crazily dangerous situations, the joy of travelling, seeing the world and soaring through the sky.
On those terms Cerulean Sand can be enjoyed immensely, like a nostalgia trip for something you’ve never actually seen before… definitely worth checking out.
