The Apparition of Spartakus and the Sun Beneath the Sea
May 24th 2026, written by Cody
Spartakus and the Sun Beneath the Sea was a special cartoon to us as a kid. I'm pretty sure it was the show that opened our eyes to unusual and abstract media.
The way we remembered it, it was an epic and many times frightening journey in the cold and dark layers of the Earth where incomprehensible beings and strange cultures lied that could both be friend or foe. The abstract way it was drawn entranced us; its world felt vast and full of mysteries. Ever since we saw it, we were on the lookout for media that made us feel the same way, and while nothing came close, we found plenty of shows and games to like that were similar in spirit if nothing else.
I decided to revisit it as something like a pilgrimage to the place where our taste in media was born. By the end, the series made me feel even more complicated emotions as the ones I remembered.
Les Mondes Engloutis (The Engulfed Worlds), localized as Spartakus and the Sun Beneath the Sea for English speaking audiences is a post-apocalyptic science fiction adventure series written and created by Nina Wolmark and directed by Michel Gauthier. It was made in France by France Animation which later became the company MoonScoop. They are famous for creating Code Lyoko, The Busy World of Richard Scarry, Hero 108 among many other kind of obscure but still beloved pieces of animation.
Not too much is known about Nina Wolmark in the English speaking world, but from what I could find in French, she's a Belarus-born French author and screenwriter, but she writes (for) many things including articles, dialogue, news reports and songs. She actually wrote the lyrics for Spartakus and the Sun Beneath the Sea's iconic title theme, Theme of Arcadia.
The actual first animated series she (co-)directed was Ulysse 31, which looks like another sci-fi venture. Later she went on to create Les mystérieuses cités d'or and wrote song lyrics for Rahan, fils des âges farouches before Spartakus and the Sun Beneath the Sea saw the light of day. Every animated series she created are very obscure, to the point where the English version of Spartakus and the Sun Beneath the Sea was lost media for a while. Reportedly, it's beloved by those who know it, including the people of Chile, Hungary and of course, France.
If you look around the internet, you can see people rate this show positively. Most commonly people would have the same perception of it as we did: vague memories of its events and fondly remembered mysterious atmosphere and locations.
"Ever since the time of the Great Cataclysm, the Arkadians have lived deep in the center of the Earth. They believed they were the only survivors of this great devastation. Their civilization thrived under the power of their sun, the Tehra... until it began to fail. In desperation, the children of Arkadia broke the law and entered the forbidden Archives, searching for a solution. What they discovered gave them hope. Anxiously, they used their special powers and created a messenger to the people above. They named her Arkana."
This is the opening narration we hear at the start of every episode. It establishes the stakes and goals immediately and since it was meant to be an overarching story as opposed to episodic events with little to no status quo change (as was mostly the style at the time in the west).
The world of Spartakus and the Sun Benerath the Sea has a really interesting premise. It's not 100% directly told, but heavily implied that there was a war so devastating that it shattered Earth into its layers. Each layer contains one or more world with its own atmosphere, creatures and cultures. Since Arkadia is located in the Earth's core, it's implied that their sun is the Earth's core. This is the world our main characters will traverse.
The opening narration is from the English version and it calls the sun of the Arkadians "Tehra". In the original it was called "Shagma" (Shah-g-mah), and this isn't the only name that got changed. I grew up with the Hungarian version where all the names are the same as the French version, so I will be calling the Shagma "Shagma", Shagshag Shagshag and Bob Bob.
Our central character is Arkana, who is a synthetic being made in the image of a human from the surface. Originally, she was the one who was trusted to find humans from the surface who might have the knowledge needed to heal the Shagma, but since she was born yesterday, she's kind of naive and lacks the knowledge to traverse the engulfed worlds. Her first helper and the (space)ship her and the other protagonists will travel with is Shagshag, who is old Arkanian technology with the knowledge to match. Although it is limited by his old software and the fact the the Arkanian ancestors refused to leave any knowledge of technology to their descentants.
When Arkana arrives to the surface, she encounters the secondary protagonist, Spartakus. He's been wandering the layers for a long while, has a lot of knowledge about them and their people, and has friends and foes in many of them. Two humans from the surface also join her: Bob and Rebeka. They of course have knowledge about the surface world and its past, but likewise they're also audience surrogates for children ages 6-10 and 12-15-ish.
That is because despite the high concept worldbuilding and heavy themes, this is very much a kids' series. Case on point: Bic and Bac. They're ancient Arkadian beings in the vague shape (and wearing the title) of armadillos. They generate heat and fire from the same source as the Shagma, but they're mostly there to be cute and/or cool animal companions.
Our other returning characters are the pirates who solely serve as comic relief and are rarely an actual threat. Instead of introducing our main players, I'll let them do it for me.
Every episode is set in a different world and a different obstacle to work through which can vary from helping someone to finding something, to escaping from somewhere. They serve as B-plots besides the main goal of saving Arkadia.
From what I've described it seems like an ambitious, even status-quo breaking show, and in some regards, it is. It has an overarching plot with themes such as slavery, religious psychosis and gender unequality all told in a children's show. But whether it does a good job with any of this is another question.
Spartakus and the Sun Beneath the Sea is a "planet-of-the-week" type cartoon. Like the Back to the Future cartoon, Droids, or the Mr. Peabody and Sherman Show. Although only one of these has planet of the week, all three of them including this series,feature new locations and new characters with new voice actors every episode. This is a rare breed because they need multiple times the resources than something like The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles where the location is generally the same, along with the charaters that inhabit it.
This could work if your company can take a bigger financial blow for the sake of one series like Disney or Lucasfilm, but it's not going to work if you're a relatively recently established animation studio. And so the solution was to cut corners, and that they did.
If you watch the show, you can see that the characters are often off-model or discolored, and they often make the wrong expression or gesture for the sake of reusing pre-existing animation. They also often only animate one body part that's moving, which wouldn't be bad by itself, Hanna-Barbera also often did that, but they did it cleverly, mostly by creating characters with seams around the places the often move (neckpieces to separate the head from the body, sleeves to separate the arms from the body, etc.). Spartakus and the Sun beneat the Sea doesn't use these kinds of seams and partial animation looks jarring every time. Not to mention other glitches like unfinished painting on characters or dusty backlighting.
Though even if resources weren't an issue, it's very obvious that the animators are way more in their element when it comes to animating more exaggerated bouncy characters like the pirates, which is unfortunate since the series is centered around humans in semi-realistic art styles, proportions, and facial features which require subtlety. With hand drawn animation in the 80's for television that is a tall order.
The true star in the visual department is the hand-painted backgroundwork, which can be minimalistic at times, but it's never not evocative. No wonder this series captured so many hearts with its locations alone.
I'm of the belief that cartoons with unconventional or even unappealing looks can shine if the concept and plot is good enough and/or the art direction ties into them. Unfortunately, the rushed art doesn't do any favors for Spartakus and the Sun Beneath the Sea. Dramatic moments have a hard time landing if the facial expressions are off and the animation is limited, and for that reason often badly paced. As for the plot...
In a nutshell, the plot is really allergic to progressing or resolving in any meaningful way. This is especially egregious in season 2 where the plot keeps halting because of someone's out-of-character sudden change-of-heart. Characters looking for each other, someone doing something inconsequential only for the laughs (mostly the pirates) or one or more characters randomly breaking out in song are also common plot-halters. Like I said, the pirate song appears in most episodes, but in seasons 2 we get a song for Bic and Bac too. That's 3-ish minutes of reusable animation per episode.
It wouldn't be that bad to lose 3 minutes per episode to nonsense, but somehow, despite the fact that every episode is 20-ish minutes long, it keeps mismanaging and wasting its own time in a way where very little of substance is happening in most episodes. There are exceptions, for example season 2 episode 10, The Land of the Chameleons or season 1 episode 10 Night of the Amazons are well-paced and high-stakes. Unfortunately though, the most common type of episode we get is like season 1 episode 20, The Prisoners of Lost Time. In which the characters go on a long, slow-paced journey where they're not sure what's going on, and by the end they get a "clue" as to how to save the Shagma. "Clue" is in quotation marks because none of the clues tie into anything, get elaborated on, or end up amounting to anything by the end.
If that wasn't enough, there are fillers where the plot halts for an entire episode for something trivial and unimportant. Pirates-centric episodes are always like that. I think it's good to have some laid-back episodes, but none of these are even interesting or fun at all, and no wonder we had no memory of any of them. There are two clip-show episodes too, season 1 episode 25, Dr. Test and season 2 episode 17, Shagshag's Nightmare, both of which can be skipped altogether. Typically episode quality starts out decent and then dips into bad by the ends of both seasons. Ideally it would be the other way around to build tension and excitement, but sadly we don't get that there.
My biggest gripe, though, is that even good episodes aren't good because they're well written; they're good because they have the plot of something better. The show loves to pilfer from already existing stories and myths and it especially loves stealing their whole plot and then remaking it worse. I mentioned season 1 episode 10 Night of the Amazons as a good example for a good episode of Spartakus and the Sun Beneath the Sea. Well, it's basically 1001 Nights with some other elements introduced that to be fair are interesting. Arkana has to convince the Sultana of a matriarchal society where men are treated as slaves to let Spartakus go. She gets until the third moonrise to give her a good reason. Again, it's not bad on paper, especially because Mighty Matt and Sleazeappeal also get kidnapped and the pirates and the protagonists have to join forces. But as it often happens, it stops being good at the concept stage. The pirates don't do anything at all and Arkana doesn't end up convincing the Sultana, instead she falls asleep when actual interesting worldbuilding lore is being presented to her and the audience. The plot also is solved by Shagshag, who often serves as a get-out-of-jail-free card in other episodes too.
It just makes me feel cheated whenever I realize that I already know the story and that they didn't even put an interesting twist on it. I know that the show is for kids, but I still think that they deserve better than a subpar version of 1001 Nights or Alice in Wonderland or meeting Demosthenes or Galileo Galilei for the duration of a badly paced story, where it's never even explained what makes Arkana and company time travel outside of the show trying to be educational despite it being fiction with its own lore and themes. Especially since I'm sure that children already know many of these stories or people.
Since the plot is underwhelming, the only thing we have left to latch onto are the characters, but I'm sad to say that not even they can save it. Not even they progress past their concept phase and "show don't tell" is ignored every step of the way.
Arkana's naivity and lack of knowledge despite her powers and status rarely if ever manifests. She's usually demoted to a damsel in distress role, or exposition-dumps, or she just does nothing at all. Bob and Rebeka usually move as a unit and they enact the most plot progression, but outside of their sibling dynamic they don't really have much character. Bob is a moody teenage boy and Rebeka is a snarky little girl who's a bit of a know-it-all, that's it. And by itself this wouldn't even be an issue because their role as storytelling devices asks for mostly blank slate characters, but none of the other characters carry them. Bic and Bac are only there to be animal sidekicks and all Shagshag does is complain and get into trouble while occasionally dispensing knowledge. Spartakus is the only one who can be called a proper main character (which honestly is why I think the English title is fitting,) but even he is stuck as a stoic loner who very reluctantly leaves that role for a romance plot with Arkana. He has an interesting backstory and reoccuring people he knows, and he occasionally recognizes something, but this is all he is.
The series is on really shaky legs at this point, and at the point even the smaller offenses feel like grave mistakes. The riddle about "if you can't find the right path, make it yourself" started sounding more like the creators' mantra as the plot kept itself in stasis until the end. I genuinely started groaning every time the narrator recited it. Racial microaggressions that were kind of always present in the show either became worse in season 2 or just started irritating me more on top of everything else that was wasting my time. The fact that we only ever got crumbs for character backstories and worldbuilding stayed a losing game as we were given less and less. I also began hating every comic-relief character for halting the non-existent plot, including Bic and Bac because they don't do anything, but we still get a Bic and Bac centric episode, because that's just what this show needed! I even started feeling the same way about recurring characters like Ashrag and Rainbow because at that point I knew that nothing that happens in this show has any point of utility anymore.
The most offensive one of these for me is the fact that Arkana starts out as a decently enough done born-yesterday character but then gets kidnapped and thirsted at by other characters to an uncomfortable degree. Her relationship with Spartakus is also severely underdeveloped and can only be read as romance in the presence of any other word that could be applicable to what's going on between them. I also do not like either that they're in a relationship when Spartakus is way older and has way more life experience than her. It's just uncomfortable.
By the time I reached the end of the series I was only watching it to say that I finished it, and like everything about the show, it was disappointing.
The actual A plot goes like this: Arkana, Shagshag, Bic, and Bac reaches the surface in episode 1 and Spartakus, Bob, and Rebeka join her. At the end of season 1, the team reaches Arkadia, but they still have no idea how to heal the Shagma. Spartakus reaches his handbrace (MacGuffin 1) towards the Auracite (MacGuffin 2) and that makes the metal fly into the Shagma, healing it. Except in season 2 episode 1 Prophecy of the Auracite, it turns out that that did nothing, actually. So they depart to find out what's actually the solution, and bumble around for 25 more episodes.
In the second to last episode Spartakus randomly comes to the conclusion that the ancestors of the Arkadians (who are alive and kept as prisoners in the gemstone on the forehead of a mask they randomly found in a desert, no it never gets properly explained,) need to be reunited with the Arkadians of today. So he goes to where they're kept, frees them and through cosmic powers he inexplicably has but are never explained, he teleports them to Arkadia. There, they turn into various characters we met along the way that have nothing to do with anything, and then they, the Arkadians, Spartakus and Arkana melt into the Auracite and presumably fly into the Shagma.
I came away from this show loathing it. I didn't expect it to be the grand and beautiful adventure we thought it was at the age of 6, but nor did I expect for it to be such a horrible letdown. Watching this series as an adult felt like being cheated out of so much because of how much of the incredible worldbuilding and concepts were sidelined, including the ending. Not with this budget, not with this animation studio and not with this writer, but this could have been an incredible show.
I adore media full of symbols and abstraction, and I tried really hard to justify the plotholes and the "random bullshit go" attitude of this series, but I couldn't for the life of me find anything outside of cut corners. It really really pained me to realize this, because this very show is the reason why I love symbolism and abstraction. It was unthinkable for me that Spartakus and the Sun Beneath the Sea would be so devoid of it. I knew that it wouldn't hit as hard anymore, but I did not expect it to be at best a 2/10 experience.
But somehow, despite all that, I still have fondness for Arkana and Shagshag who were always our favorites as a kid, same for the especially weird and high-stakes episodes, but the version of them I like don't actually exist. It's definitely nostalgia and the power of the imagination children have, enhanced with the well-composed music we hear ever episode.
Yes, the one thing outside of the background art that I can give it praise for is the music and sound effects. There is a reason I embedded all three songs that have lyrics, you can't go wrong with Vladimir Cosma.
This review is titled "The Apparition of Spartakus and the Sun Beneath the Sea" because despite its lack of quality, it left a permanenet mark on us as people. A version of it that doesn't actually exists influenced so much of us, including the stories we write, the characters we create, and the way we draw them.
Hundreds of people worldwide leave scores of 8-10/10 on IMBD for this series for the same reason we liked it as a kid. This series had video games, merchandise and even comic books made, and people who bought them are saddened to know today that they've been lost to moving houses or to friends that forgot to give them back. Nostalgia is interesting, because isn't it strange to not exist in the form people remember you, and still have an impact?
We haven't found a show that made us feel the same way this one did, and not even the original gives us those same feelings anymore either. But that doesn't mean that we can't keep looking or that we can't make something like that ourselves.
Spartakus and the Sun Beneath the Sea is a show that fails at (almost) everything it attempts, and I would never rewatch it again. Despite all that, it's one of the most special things that happened to us, and it will probably bear that title as long as we're alive.