Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea as an inhabitant of British Colonial India, "is an inhabitant of an oppressed country". Verne took the name "Nautilus" from one of the earliest successful submarines, built in 1800 by Robert Fulton, who later invented the first commercially successful steamboat. Fulton's submarine was named after the paper nautilus because it had a sail. Three years before writing his novel, Jules Verne also studied a model of the newly developed French Navy submarine "Plongeur" at the 1867 Exposition Universelle, which inspired him for his definition of the "Nautilus". The breathing apparatus used by "Nautilus" divers is depicted as an untethered version
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