JV: The Extraordinary Adventures of Jules Verne, is a animated series from France that carries on the tradition of fictionalizing the life of a historical figure for the purposes of storytelling (see Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter for a more extreme example of this). Verne has been the subject of a previous series, the live-action The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne, but this series aims for a younger audience.
Set in the late 1840's, Verne is teenage law student at the Sorbonne in Paris. Yearning for adventure, he dreams of travelling the world and writing about his exploits. While visiting the offices of a famous travel magazine, to try to talk his way onto an expedition, he thwarts a robbery and gets the attention of the magazine's editor, Professor Artemus, himself a famous world traveller, who hires Jules to be his assistant. Thus begins Jules Verne's adventures around the world and the birth of his career as one the Western world's pre-eminent authors of science fiction and exotic tales.
Jules is very much a young man of action, athletic - though not to a ridiculous degree - and very good at quick thinking and improvisation. He's also a bit of daredevil. He has a talent for engineering and technology (in real life, Verne was a great lover of science and had a solid grounding in practical engineering which he used to work for several years as a patent attorney). Each episode has at least one sequence in which Verne improvises a solution to a problem using materials on hand and his own imagination. The supporting characters include Professor Artemus, who encourages Jules to write about his adventures; the professor's pretty daughter Amelie, who's a good match for Jules in both her athleticism and thirst for adventure; De L'ennui, Artemus' bookkeeper, who constantly worries about how much the professor's expeditions are costing the magazine; Esther, Amelie's nanny, who still frets over her long after the girl has aged out of needing a nanny. And lurking in the background: Captain Nemo himself.
The animation is decent for a TV budget production, with some good shading and lighting effects. The English dub for the main cast is competent and effective, although the voices don't often match the characters' mouth movements. That's a common problem for dubbing a show into another language, but it's not overly distracting here. The characterization is solid, with the main cast never quite straying into cliché territory. Jules is highly intelligent, but sometimes hindered by naiveté for someone who has seen little of the world. There's a romantic tension between Jules and Amalie, with she both occasionally critical of him and yet willing to trust him.
The design of the series is visually pleasing, with a lightweight steampunk aesthetic. The gadgetry is mostly consistent with the time period, although there are a few exceptions. One standout is Jules' belt buckle, which is a veritable Swiss Army Knife, containing retractable blades, a compass and multiple other gadgets. And then, or course, there's the Nautilus......
All in all, this is a fun and entertaining series. Nothing groundbreaking, but surprisingly interesting. It will appeal to fans of Verne, since many of his adventures contain elements that are lifted straight from his stories - including some of the more obscure ones, like The Green Ray - and are introduced as the experiences that inspired his future tales. The program is currently only available on some streaming channel (as of this running, it's on The Roku Channel), but it's worth seeking out if you like animesque adventure, steampunk or retro-futurism.
