Legend of the Gold of Babylon
Nov 6, 2015 11:36:58 GMT -5
Douay-Rheims-Challoner and ComradePig like this
Post by Jean-Luc Lemur on Nov 6, 2015 11:36:58 GMT -5
The eighties were a troubled time for poor Arsène Lupin III. This inaugurates a three-part appendix to the original run of reviews.
Legend of the Gold of Babylon
Note: this review has spoilers. It doesn’t matter.
After letting the franchise lay fallow for a few years, by 1984 both a new Lupin television series and new movie project were under development. Plans were ambitious—the “Pink Jacket” television series, creatively under the supervision of Aoki Yuzo (who’d been involved with previous Lupin projects and made the strikingly stylized opening sequences for last week’s episodes), would attempt to merge the more light-hearted humor of the second series with the edge of the original comics. For the new film, Miyazaki (who I’m assuming was initially asked to return but declined) recommended a younger animator named Oshii Mamoru for the task. Things went awry.
The television series never really found its center, visually (so much freedom was allowed for the subcontracting animators that the series’s look changed radically from episode to episode) or tonally, and even the show’s defenders admit the stories themselves were formulaic to an unprecedented degree. Oshii’s preliminary plans for the film were a bit much for Lupin’s corporate masters at TMS. Although little is known about the proposal, much of it supposedly made its way into Oshii’s Angel’s Egg, which Douay-Rheims-Challoner did recommend to me a while back…though it doesn’t quite seem like it would work so well as a Lupin film). Thus a significant portion of the poor television staff was roped into making the film on short notice.
Most of the continued interest in Legend of the Gold of Babylon comes from two places: its presence as companion to the Pink Jacket series and big-screen expression of its aesthetic, and the fact that Suzuki Seijun, the famed (live action) B-movie director, is listed as one of two directors aside with Yoshida Shigetsugu, a director from the series (although uncredited, most assume that Aoki also had a big role in the making of the film, both based on the aesthetic and his absence from the middle third of the Pink Jacket series). Suzuki’s involvement was why this review was suggested to me. I don’t have much insight on Suzuki’s role relative to Yoshida, nor on Suzuki’s other work, but those who are note it fits well with Suzuki’s visuals-first, story logic-second approach. I am not opposed to that approach, but it fails spectacularly here.
One might be able to sacrifice some plot logic in a Lupin film, but one can never sacrifice composition and pacing, something all the Lupin we’ve reviewed so far excelled at. The first two television series and Cagliostro managed to convey a sense of real dimension in action, and Mamo went in the opposite direction to comic book flatness to great effect. Babylon’s animators seemed to think that depicting movement was enough—only some scenes at the primary villain’s mansion, the theft at the Babylonian dig and some elements involving the upside-down ziggurat in the conclusion really provided any interest. It’s the pacing that really kills the film, though—the opening chase between Lupin and Zenigata is barely related to the rest of the film but goes on interminably (and in literal circles). While the film gets better after this, it doesn’t really convey enough energy to keep the viewer interesting, feeling more assembled than actually edited. A well-made story can be outlandish (like Mamo). Babylon isn’t well made.
The Pink series reliance on formula also raises its head—this is actually the first Lupin film centered on a theft. Thefts helped put the story of The Mystery of Mamo in motion, but the actual story was about Mamo’s mystery and Lupin’s tie with Fujiko. The Castle of Cagliostro similarly starts out with a theft, is is fundamentally a revenge movie that seeks to bring a counterfeiter (and abuser) to justice. Legend of the Gold of Babylon is only about a theft. There’s an attempt to give it some contemporary dress-up by making the gold belong to aliens of Halley’s Comet (returning in 1986), but aside from a nice animation sequence it doesn’t amount to much in terms of plot. We go from New York to Babylon and return to New York in the end when Lupin finally figures out how to interpret the spatial data he was plotting earlier. Although it delights me to no end (delights me) that Lupin figures out where the main store of gold is found with a geographical information system (given the time period must have been MapInfo), the answer’s so obvious (even to non-GIS-professionals) that it makes almost half the film seem like pointless time-filling.
We also get eighties New York incarnate in the film’s leading lady—Rosetta, she’s a Lillian Kashtupper-esque senior citizen. She’s surprisingly one of the film’s highlights: drunk, horny, and prone to making outlandish claims about seducing Napoleon and Alexander the Great (yeah, she’s drunk). A significant amount of the film itself takes place in gritty eighties New York, with Fujiko hanging out in a penthouse while Lupin and Jigen are holed up with Rosetta in a down-and-out tenement, which is also a nice change from the usual neutral-to-opulent hideouts (I also like the green windbreaker he’s wearing early on, a successful attempt at making Lupin dress a bit more casually).
This attempt at specificity fails in the Babylon’s attempts at being multicultural. New York is actually racially mixed and INTERPOL is actually international. Unfortunately, it’s been hypothesized that the animators’ vision of multicultural New York came from Ralph Bakshi, and this highly mediated view of New York ends up being a bit uncomfortable for the American viewer. Zenigata’s main plot appears has him judging an INTERPOL beauty contest and then lead the runners-up in a chase for Lupin, something I can only assume was the result of some severe sexual frustration on the part of the writers and animators. It’s as execrable as it sounds, with the sole highlight being the connection between the Chinese officer, Chinjao, and Goemon. It’s a rare bit of effective humor in the film and surprisingly sweet. It’s also only three scenes long. All in all, the stereotypes work against the film, giving it a parochial rather than cosmopolitan attitude.
Nearly as infamous as the jackets is the pink blazer, but that actually works with the film’s colors, which is heavy—too heavy—on midnight blues and golds. In addition to the limited palette the animation’s fairly sloppy, going off-model for little reason other than poor coordination or a rushed production schedule. It’s a relief when we finally hear Yamada Yasuo’s Lupin, whose voice is often the only thing we can latch onto (the others in the gang don’t speak often enough, and Zenigata’s so incompetent he’s barely recognizable). Ohno Yuji’s score is good, extracting a surprisingly amount of pathos from “How Many Miles to Babylon” and successfully adapting Lupin’s theme to eighties synth during the triumphant lifting of the (red herring) gold (the most successful sequence in the film). All of these things are familiar and spirited in a way the rest of the film isn’t.
The central paradox of Babylon is that, as weird as it looks, it’s completely unoriginal and no amount of superficial strangeness can make up for a story that is really just very generically dull. And not only relative to other Lupin stories—there’s a clear attempt to tap into the Zeitgeist with the whole Middle Eastern treasure aspect, but ultimately it just reminds the viewer of superior films like Raiders of the Lost Ark, Ishtar, or Never Say Never Again. And the return of Halley’s Comet takes Rosetta, one of the few distinctive aspects of the film, and rejuvenates her into a generic eighties anime space princess (her age on Earth being the result of a 76-year search for the gold). Ultimately it’s a fitting image to leave the film with: clichéd, shallow, slow, incoherently plotted, inconsistently animated, and littered with humor that’s less off-beat than just off, Legend of the Gold of Babylon is the sort of movie that makes people say “anime” with a dismissive sneer.
Recommended?
No.
Stray Observations
There are a lot of very weird little jokes in this. For instance, Lupin insults Zenigata by saying his gut bacteria are as coiled as his intestines.
Lupin and Jigen are atheists.
As befits a film that spends a lot of time in New York there isn’t much to mention here with respect to cars (though I’m pretty sure DS’s weren’t being used by the French police in the eighties), though when Lupin’s gang leaves Paris there’s a gorgeous shot of one of those old SNCF electric locomotives.
I cannot believe this film is ten minutes shorter than The Castle of Cagliostro (and Legend of the Gold of Babylon isn’t really short for an animated film, either, at one hour and forty minutes).
The timeline of the mafia’s search for the Gold of Babylon is a bit off. By all appearances it seems to take place around 1960—this would make sense given the reference to the 14 July Revolution (in 1958) and the characters’ ages, this is also mentioned as being contemporaneous to Hitler. Part of this is probably aping Indiana Jones, but part of it’s also to set up that Lupin’s greater than Hitler, which is something Rosetta actually tells him at the end. Arsène Lupin III: greater than Hitler. Good job, Lupin!
Next week I definitely need a palate-cleanser, so I’ll be watching the film that attempted to clean up the mess the Pink Jacket series and Legend of the Gold of Babylon left the Lupin franchise in by the mid-eighties: The Fuma Conspiracy. It also fits nicely into the main body of these reviews in that its animation supervisor, Ōtsuka Yasuo, is a colleague of Miyazaki’s who worked on the original series and first two films. It also features Goemon’s wedding, albeit not to Chinjao.
Legend of the Gold of Babylon
Note: this review has spoilers. It doesn’t matter.
After letting the franchise lay fallow for a few years, by 1984 both a new Lupin television series and new movie project were under development. Plans were ambitious—the “Pink Jacket” television series, creatively under the supervision of Aoki Yuzo (who’d been involved with previous Lupin projects and made the strikingly stylized opening sequences for last week’s episodes), would attempt to merge the more light-hearted humor of the second series with the edge of the original comics. For the new film, Miyazaki (who I’m assuming was initially asked to return but declined) recommended a younger animator named Oshii Mamoru for the task. Things went awry.
The television series never really found its center, visually (so much freedom was allowed for the subcontracting animators that the series’s look changed radically from episode to episode) or tonally, and even the show’s defenders admit the stories themselves were formulaic to an unprecedented degree. Oshii’s preliminary plans for the film were a bit much for Lupin’s corporate masters at TMS. Although little is known about the proposal, much of it supposedly made its way into Oshii’s Angel’s Egg, which Douay-Rheims-Challoner did recommend to me a while back…though it doesn’t quite seem like it would work so well as a Lupin film). Thus a significant portion of the poor television staff was roped into making the film on short notice.
Most of the continued interest in Legend of the Gold of Babylon comes from two places: its presence as companion to the Pink Jacket series and big-screen expression of its aesthetic, and the fact that Suzuki Seijun, the famed (live action) B-movie director, is listed as one of two directors aside with Yoshida Shigetsugu, a director from the series (although uncredited, most assume that Aoki also had a big role in the making of the film, both based on the aesthetic and his absence from the middle third of the Pink Jacket series). Suzuki’s involvement was why this review was suggested to me. I don’t have much insight on Suzuki’s role relative to Yoshida, nor on Suzuki’s other work, but those who are note it fits well with Suzuki’s visuals-first, story logic-second approach. I am not opposed to that approach, but it fails spectacularly here.
One might be able to sacrifice some plot logic in a Lupin film, but one can never sacrifice composition and pacing, something all the Lupin we’ve reviewed so far excelled at. The first two television series and Cagliostro managed to convey a sense of real dimension in action, and Mamo went in the opposite direction to comic book flatness to great effect. Babylon’s animators seemed to think that depicting movement was enough—only some scenes at the primary villain’s mansion, the theft at the Babylonian dig and some elements involving the upside-down ziggurat in the conclusion really provided any interest. It’s the pacing that really kills the film, though—the opening chase between Lupin and Zenigata is barely related to the rest of the film but goes on interminably (and in literal circles). While the film gets better after this, it doesn’t really convey enough energy to keep the viewer interesting, feeling more assembled than actually edited. A well-made story can be outlandish (like Mamo). Babylon isn’t well made.
The Pink series reliance on formula also raises its head—this is actually the first Lupin film centered on a theft. Thefts helped put the story of The Mystery of Mamo in motion, but the actual story was about Mamo’s mystery and Lupin’s tie with Fujiko. The Castle of Cagliostro similarly starts out with a theft, is is fundamentally a revenge movie that seeks to bring a counterfeiter (and abuser) to justice. Legend of the Gold of Babylon is only about a theft. There’s an attempt to give it some contemporary dress-up by making the gold belong to aliens of Halley’s Comet (returning in 1986), but aside from a nice animation sequence it doesn’t amount to much in terms of plot. We go from New York to Babylon and return to New York in the end when Lupin finally figures out how to interpret the spatial data he was plotting earlier. Although it delights me to no end (delights me) that Lupin figures out where the main store of gold is found with a geographical information system (given the time period must have been MapInfo), the answer’s so obvious (even to non-GIS-professionals) that it makes almost half the film seem like pointless time-filling.
We also get eighties New York incarnate in the film’s leading lady—Rosetta, she’s a Lillian Kashtupper-esque senior citizen. She’s surprisingly one of the film’s highlights: drunk, horny, and prone to making outlandish claims about seducing Napoleon and Alexander the Great (yeah, she’s drunk). A significant amount of the film itself takes place in gritty eighties New York, with Fujiko hanging out in a penthouse while Lupin and Jigen are holed up with Rosetta in a down-and-out tenement, which is also a nice change from the usual neutral-to-opulent hideouts (I also like the green windbreaker he’s wearing early on, a successful attempt at making Lupin dress a bit more casually).
This attempt at specificity fails in the Babylon’s attempts at being multicultural. New York is actually racially mixed and INTERPOL is actually international. Unfortunately, it’s been hypothesized that the animators’ vision of multicultural New York came from Ralph Bakshi, and this highly mediated view of New York ends up being a bit uncomfortable for the American viewer. Zenigata’s main plot appears has him judging an INTERPOL beauty contest and then lead the runners-up in a chase for Lupin, something I can only assume was the result of some severe sexual frustration on the part of the writers and animators. It’s as execrable as it sounds, with the sole highlight being the connection between the Chinese officer, Chinjao, and Goemon. It’s a rare bit of effective humor in the film and surprisingly sweet. It’s also only three scenes long. All in all, the stereotypes work against the film, giving it a parochial rather than cosmopolitan attitude.
Nearly as infamous as the jackets is the pink blazer, but that actually works with the film’s colors, which is heavy—too heavy—on midnight blues and golds. In addition to the limited palette the animation’s fairly sloppy, going off-model for little reason other than poor coordination or a rushed production schedule. It’s a relief when we finally hear Yamada Yasuo’s Lupin, whose voice is often the only thing we can latch onto (the others in the gang don’t speak often enough, and Zenigata’s so incompetent he’s barely recognizable). Ohno Yuji’s score is good, extracting a surprisingly amount of pathos from “How Many Miles to Babylon” and successfully adapting Lupin’s theme to eighties synth during the triumphant lifting of the (red herring) gold (the most successful sequence in the film). All of these things are familiar and spirited in a way the rest of the film isn’t.
The central paradox of Babylon is that, as weird as it looks, it’s completely unoriginal and no amount of superficial strangeness can make up for a story that is really just very generically dull. And not only relative to other Lupin stories—there’s a clear attempt to tap into the Zeitgeist with the whole Middle Eastern treasure aspect, but ultimately it just reminds the viewer of superior films like Raiders of the Lost Ark, Ishtar, or Never Say Never Again. And the return of Halley’s Comet takes Rosetta, one of the few distinctive aspects of the film, and rejuvenates her into a generic eighties anime space princess (her age on Earth being the result of a 76-year search for the gold). Ultimately it’s a fitting image to leave the film with: clichéd, shallow, slow, incoherently plotted, inconsistently animated, and littered with humor that’s less off-beat than just off, Legend of the Gold of Babylon is the sort of movie that makes people say “anime” with a dismissive sneer.
Recommended?
No.
Stray Observations
There are a lot of very weird little jokes in this. For instance, Lupin insults Zenigata by saying his gut bacteria are as coiled as his intestines.
Lupin and Jigen are atheists.
As befits a film that spends a lot of time in New York there isn’t much to mention here with respect to cars (though I’m pretty sure DS’s weren’t being used by the French police in the eighties), though when Lupin’s gang leaves Paris there’s a gorgeous shot of one of those old SNCF electric locomotives.
I cannot believe this film is ten minutes shorter than The Castle of Cagliostro (and Legend of the Gold of Babylon isn’t really short for an animated film, either, at one hour and forty minutes).
The timeline of the mafia’s search for the Gold of Babylon is a bit off. By all appearances it seems to take place around 1960—this would make sense given the reference to the 14 July Revolution (in 1958) and the characters’ ages, this is also mentioned as being contemporaneous to Hitler. Part of this is probably aping Indiana Jones, but part of it’s also to set up that Lupin’s greater than Hitler, which is something Rosetta actually tells him at the end. Arsène Lupin III: greater than Hitler. Good job, Lupin!
Next week I definitely need a palate-cleanser, so I’ll be watching the film that attempted to clean up the mess the Pink Jacket series and Legend of the Gold of Babylon left the Lupin franchise in by the mid-eighties: The Fuma Conspiracy. It also fits nicely into the main body of these reviews in that its animation supervisor, Ōtsuka Yasuo, is a colleague of Miyazaki’s who worked on the original series and first two films. It also features Goemon’s wedding, albeit not to Chinjao.
