Atlantis: The Lost Empire from Studio Ghibli, particularly in its character design, setting, and story. Although Disney never responded formally to claims of plagiarism, co-director Kirk Wise posted on a Disney animation newsgroup in May 2001, "Never heard of "Nadia" till it was mentioned in this [newsgroup]. Long after we'd finished production, I might add." Both "Atlantis" and "Nadia" were inspired, in part, by the 1870 Jules Verne novel "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea", of which Lee Zion (reporting for Anime News Network) wrote, "There are too many similarities "not" connected with "20,000 Leagues" for the whole thing to be coincidence." Critics also
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea version of the story released in 1916 and later in both the graphic novel and the movie "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen". In Walt Disney's "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" (1954), a live-action Technicolor film version of the novel, Captain Nemo is a European, bitter because his wife and son were tortured to death by those in power in the fictional prison camp of Rura Penthe, in an effort to get Nemo to reveal his scientific secrets. This is Nemo's motivation for sinking warships in the film. Also, Nemo's submarine is confined to a set circular section of the Pacific