Les mondes engloutis

I remember whenever I was visiting relatives in Japan, I would always turn on this show "&Acirckadia Monogatari" (Les Mondes Engloutis' Japanese title) on every morning on NHK and I instantly fell in love with it and started my fascination with European animation as well as Asian!

It follows the adventures of two surface children (Bab and Rebekka), mysterious wanderer Spartakus, magical being Akana and two twin ardvark type creatures called Bik and Bak. The end of the world happened long ago, making the floating mystical continent of Arkadia fall beneath the oceans of planet earth. The Arkadian civilization mutate into legless people whom look part human, part jelly-bean and wear strange headdresses and lost memories of the surface world after the creation of their sun, the Shaguma. However, this sun, after many years, is fading away and something must be done, so the children of the Arkadian clan and their organic living spaceship go into the forbidden grottos of this civilization, research their ancestors and create a magical woman from the life force of the ancient Arkadians and named her "Akana".

That is the basic plot, but it gets deeper and deeper with every episode you watch of it, combining original storytelling, with time travel, paradoxes, some comedy, mythological elements and of course, a big cast of colourful characters.

I reccomend this animated series to you. It was a long time since it aired in Japan (have not seen the French version yet, want to though), but it maybe airing in other places, since LME seems to have a cult following in Europe.

I give this show full house in my voting, because I was very little when I saw it, and I loved it then, and so I have to think that I still might.

I would very much like to see this show again, or even better: buy it. But how?

It is available on French DVD, but there are no English subtitles - or in any other language, for that matter. Ergo, I can't buy the French DVD-version.

I therefore ask you, guys:

Is there a DVD version out there, with English subtitles???

"Les Mondes Engloutis" (aka.Arkadia/Spartakus and the Sun Beneath the Sea) has to be one of the most memorable European animations that was played on TV.

There was once a great cataclysm that made a prosperous civilization live underground for the many years that pasted.They have relied on the sun "Saggy" to nourish their world Arkadia,but now,Saggy is fading.Some children entered a forbidden grotto and created a messenger and named her Arcana.Alongside her journey,Arcana meets up with magical twin aardvarks named Bic and Bac,a mysterious wanderer named Spartakus,a spacecraft with a mind of it's own and two kids,Bob and Rebecca.Alongside their journeys,they travel back in time,travel to other worlds and even to unknown places and run into such advisories such as barbarian herders,persistant soldiers/warriors, strange creatures and animals and pirates whom resemble 80's punk rock singers.

Wonderful storyline,intresting and deep character development,good animation and a memorable soundtrack (for once,these toons can sing!).There is nothing corny about this show."Les Mondes Engloutis", alongside "Mysterious Cities of Gold","Ulysse 31" and "Flower Princess Angel" are some of the most memorable shows that children of the 80's got.They got some of the animated "Deutchland Frankenfurters",while kids now-a-days are getting lame "Balogna"!

I watched this show as much as I did the Mysterious Cities of Gold...apparantly MCOG was much more popular...you can buy VCD's from ebay (I have a set myself and they are wonderful quality) but I have yet to find ANY episodes of this series anywhere... I would love to find them again! If you have any idea where I might look, I would greatly appreciate it!

Thanks!

The world building is so very good. The story could only be described as "A Journey to The Center of the World" and "The Odyssey".

And this series was very much ahead of its time, what it explores in the 80s what we explored then and today. (War, power, philosophy, slavery, inequality, oppression and society)

It had a lot of influences too. In the show we see Stanley Kubrick's Monolith.

The show explores ideas of industrialism, natural disasters, isolationism, classism, science gone too far, religion gone too far, and so on. It pretty much did everything.

Having re-watched season 2, I can say that the series took a left turn after season 1. Season 2 seems much too long and the writers knee it too. We get the pirate dance to eat up a couple of minutes, now we have the Arcadia dance which eats up even more time.

It honestly feels like season 2 was too long. It could have ended in 36 episodes not 52.

That being said: I still think that the idea is very good and someone could easily make a remake of the original but with a mainline story. 40 episodes would be enough.