99 “Fighting Jigen” & 101 “Fervent Love at Versailles”
Jul 1, 2016 15:21:53 GMT -5
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Post by Jean-Luc Lemur on Jul 1, 2016 15:21:53 GMT -5
99 “Fighting Jigen”
In his review of Grave of the Fireflies Roger Ebert made note of Isao Takahata’s use of “pillow shots”—moments “halfway between pauses and punctuation” used to give weight to moments, transition between them, or just indulge in the scene or mood. At first thought it might seem odd to put pillow shots in a short, sub-half-hour Lupin cartoon—how can you fit that in with all the plot and setpieces? And indeed, for a lot of episodes in this series this has been the norm, feeling manic without any room to breathe. Add extra plot and you padd an episode. Linger on the plot you have and you have the potential to expand it.
They also feel overstuffed. A lot of Lupin’s best stories aren’t particularly complicated, after all: solve a little riddle, find the loot, defeat an opponent. That leaves a lot of room for space. It’s hard to make a simple story effective, meaning those in-between moments can make or break an episode. Here they certainly make it. We actually have three incredibly simple stories here: a quick getaway from Zenigata in the beginning followed by two parallel stories, both fairly conventional. One’s a treasure hunt, looking for gold deposited by Hannibal in a fictional Pyrenean principlity, lead by Lupin. The other’s a contest between Jigen and a Stoneman, another gunman. We’ve seen both kinds of plots before (though usually the assassin’s after Lupin), and wisely each plot is given just enough time to sort itself out.
These are small stories, but the episode gets the small things perfect. When Jigen’s opponent takes a shot at the rock, a little oblong piece of rock, corresponding to the angle and trajectory of the bullet’s scrape, breaks off. That’s the level of attention on display here. It’s also indicative of subcontracting studio Telecom’s (see here and here) ethic. It’s little surprise that this is the studio that made Cagliostro and that this episode’s director, Shigetsugu Yoshida, ended up the assistant director of that film, too.
But it isn’t all small things. The episode, while nicely pillowed in the middle, has two solid action sequences as well. It opens with a car chase that’s independent of the intersecting Hannibal and assassin plots and closes with Jigen dodging Stoneman. It’s quite a spectacle to see Jigen make panicked, athletic leaps—one of the reasons the somewhat relaxed pace of the middle works is because Jigen’s such a relaxed, controlled, and small-pleasures focused character himself.
Recommended?
Emphatically yes—it’s one of the best of the series and franchise.
Stray Observations
• This is hardly the first Lupin episode to use “pillow shots”—in retrospect the first series, especially the first half, used a lot of them as well. That’s part of the strangely relaxed and moody feel of them, but also allowed for some showing off of the design and care that went into the animation (a big deal since they were aiming for an adult audience).
• Stoneman’s design—essentially a thick slab of muscle with sunglasses bandoliers—strikes me as surprisingly eighties for an episode aired in 1979.
• “Fighting Jigen” is one of the post-episode-79 episodes that isn’t given a relatively direct translation for the title. It is, in Japanese, “The Combat Magnum Scattered in the Wasteland,” which makes sense when considering how the episode’s climax unfolds but also sounds very odd in English.
• This episode marked the first Japanese animated television broadcast in stereo.
101 Fervent Love at Versailles
Here we have one of the few—very, very few—Lupin crossovers. The final four episodes of the third season were adapted from fan story idea submissions, and one of these was a crossover with The Rose of Versailles, a contemporary romance series set in Ancien Régime France involving a sort of lady guardsman/duelist known as Oscar, who wikipedia tells me was a girl raised as a boy due to her father’s disappointment. While the big attraction at the time was the opulent setting, the action—the château-leaping action and swordplay’s really excellent—and Oscar herself. The big attraction today is that this is the only episode to have Lupin fall for a man, or someone he thinks is a man.
And it doesn’t really work. Oscar is, from the perspective of an audience member with no Rose of Versailles knowledge (i.e. me) Oscar is quite obviously a woman from the beginning—her androgyny’s a narrative conceit that I wasn’t aware of, and since Oscar doesn’t self-identify as a man anyway—and she has her own, very Fabian love she wants to reunite with—it’s still a very straight story.
Some credit has to be given for Lupin frankly accepting that he’s in love with a man. Goemon, who’s had his own brush with same-sex attraction, is supportive in his own way: “Male loves male…it can be possible.” It’s Jigen, of all characters, who’s least supportive—maybe he’s feeling jilted (or insecure), but his response is very much a late seventies self-described tough guy’s, saying he won’t work with Lupin after this. To be somewhat—and only somewhat, since it clearly goes beyond this—fair this is an extension of Jigen’s attitude towards working with women. It’s less about there being something wrong with women or men and something wrong with Lupin, whose lechery can get in the way of successfully doing their job. And while the bisexual sex fiend stereotype’s, needless to say, terrible, Lupin does have to be tied to a ship’s mast like Odyseeus at one point in this episode.
Oscar is revealed to be a woman in the end, to the relief (ugh) of all, and the spell that’s kept her young, alive and separated from her (since lithified) love is broken in the longest, nudest (though mostly without nipples) stretch of female nudity on the show. Indeed, apart from the modern Parisian setting (and we get Bourbonist rather than Bonapartist terrorists this time) just about everything in this episode feels off. I can’t really say if feels wrong per se, it certainly is different, more like Lupin and the gang crossed over into someone else’s series rather than vice-versa.
Recommended?
This is a tough one. On the one hand it’s a gorgeous episode with wonderfully-animated action. On the other hand a lot of it hasn’t aged well—I’ve seen this touted as being an example of the Lupin franchise being sexually progressive and that’s honestly a stretch (not as bad as it could have been is more appropriate). And the whole thing does feel just off after the initial theft and confrontation between Lupin and Oscar.
Stray Observations
• Rather than the more traditional tactileneck Lupin opts for the more balletic scoop-neck cat burglar outfit.
• Notably, Fujiko never shows up.
• I wonder if Oscar here was the inspiration, or at least the namesake, for the effeminate male character in The Woman Called Fujiko Mine. I had problems with that character, too. Really, Lupin’s best at gay representation when it’s giving those little, probably unintentional hints about Jigen.
Next week we finally reach the fourth and final season to solve “The Mystery of Demon’s Head Island” (105), be rewarded with “A Cat for You! Dried Bonito for Me!” and discover that “The Wedding Ring is a Cursed Trap” (107).
In his review of Grave of the Fireflies Roger Ebert made note of Isao Takahata’s use of “pillow shots”—moments “halfway between pauses and punctuation” used to give weight to moments, transition between them, or just indulge in the scene or mood. At first thought it might seem odd to put pillow shots in a short, sub-half-hour Lupin cartoon—how can you fit that in with all the plot and setpieces? And indeed, for a lot of episodes in this series this has been the norm, feeling manic without any room to breathe. Add extra plot and you padd an episode. Linger on the plot you have and you have the potential to expand it.
They also feel overstuffed. A lot of Lupin’s best stories aren’t particularly complicated, after all: solve a little riddle, find the loot, defeat an opponent. That leaves a lot of room for space. It’s hard to make a simple story effective, meaning those in-between moments can make or break an episode. Here they certainly make it. We actually have three incredibly simple stories here: a quick getaway from Zenigata in the beginning followed by two parallel stories, both fairly conventional. One’s a treasure hunt, looking for gold deposited by Hannibal in a fictional Pyrenean principlity, lead by Lupin. The other’s a contest between Jigen and a Stoneman, another gunman. We’ve seen both kinds of plots before (though usually the assassin’s after Lupin), and wisely each plot is given just enough time to sort itself out.
These are small stories, but the episode gets the small things perfect. When Jigen’s opponent takes a shot at the rock, a little oblong piece of rock, corresponding to the angle and trajectory of the bullet’s scrape, breaks off. That’s the level of attention on display here. It’s also indicative of subcontracting studio Telecom’s (see here and here) ethic. It’s little surprise that this is the studio that made Cagliostro and that this episode’s director, Shigetsugu Yoshida, ended up the assistant director of that film, too.
But it isn’t all small things. The episode, while nicely pillowed in the middle, has two solid action sequences as well. It opens with a car chase that’s independent of the intersecting Hannibal and assassin plots and closes with Jigen dodging Stoneman. It’s quite a spectacle to see Jigen make panicked, athletic leaps—one of the reasons the somewhat relaxed pace of the middle works is because Jigen’s such a relaxed, controlled, and small-pleasures focused character himself.
Recommended?
Emphatically yes—it’s one of the best of the series and franchise.
Stray Observations
• This is hardly the first Lupin episode to use “pillow shots”—in retrospect the first series, especially the first half, used a lot of them as well. That’s part of the strangely relaxed and moody feel of them, but also allowed for some showing off of the design and care that went into the animation (a big deal since they were aiming for an adult audience).
• Stoneman’s design—essentially a thick slab of muscle with sunglasses bandoliers—strikes me as surprisingly eighties for an episode aired in 1979.
• “Fighting Jigen” is one of the post-episode-79 episodes that isn’t given a relatively direct translation for the title. It is, in Japanese, “The Combat Magnum Scattered in the Wasteland,” which makes sense when considering how the episode’s climax unfolds but also sounds very odd in English.
• This episode marked the first Japanese animated television broadcast in stereo.
101 Fervent Love at Versailles
Here we have one of the few—very, very few—Lupin crossovers. The final four episodes of the third season were adapted from fan story idea submissions, and one of these was a crossover with The Rose of Versailles, a contemporary romance series set in Ancien Régime France involving a sort of lady guardsman/duelist known as Oscar, who wikipedia tells me was a girl raised as a boy due to her father’s disappointment. While the big attraction at the time was the opulent setting, the action—the château-leaping action and swordplay’s really excellent—and Oscar herself. The big attraction today is that this is the only episode to have Lupin fall for a man, or someone he thinks is a man.
And it doesn’t really work. Oscar is, from the perspective of an audience member with no Rose of Versailles knowledge (i.e. me) Oscar is quite obviously a woman from the beginning—her androgyny’s a narrative conceit that I wasn’t aware of, and since Oscar doesn’t self-identify as a man anyway—and she has her own, very Fabian love she wants to reunite with—it’s still a very straight story.
Some credit has to be given for Lupin frankly accepting that he’s in love with a man. Goemon, who’s had his own brush with same-sex attraction, is supportive in his own way: “Male loves male…it can be possible.” It’s Jigen, of all characters, who’s least supportive—maybe he’s feeling jilted (or insecure), but his response is very much a late seventies self-described tough guy’s, saying he won’t work with Lupin after this. To be somewhat—and only somewhat, since it clearly goes beyond this—fair this is an extension of Jigen’s attitude towards working with women. It’s less about there being something wrong with women or men and something wrong with Lupin, whose lechery can get in the way of successfully doing their job. And while the bisexual sex fiend stereotype’s, needless to say, terrible, Lupin does have to be tied to a ship’s mast like Odyseeus at one point in this episode.
Oscar is revealed to be a woman in the end, to the relief (ugh) of all, and the spell that’s kept her young, alive and separated from her (since lithified) love is broken in the longest, nudest (though mostly without nipples) stretch of female nudity on the show. Indeed, apart from the modern Parisian setting (and we get Bourbonist rather than Bonapartist terrorists this time) just about everything in this episode feels off. I can’t really say if feels wrong per se, it certainly is different, more like Lupin and the gang crossed over into someone else’s series rather than vice-versa.
Recommended?
This is a tough one. On the one hand it’s a gorgeous episode with wonderfully-animated action. On the other hand a lot of it hasn’t aged well—I’ve seen this touted as being an example of the Lupin franchise being sexually progressive and that’s honestly a stretch (not as bad as it could have been is more appropriate). And the whole thing does feel just off after the initial theft and confrontation between Lupin and Oscar.
Stray Observations
• Rather than the more traditional tactileneck Lupin opts for the more balletic scoop-neck cat burglar outfit.
• Notably, Fujiko never shows up.
• I wonder if Oscar here was the inspiration, or at least the namesake, for the effeminate male character in The Woman Called Fujiko Mine. I had problems with that character, too. Really, Lupin’s best at gay representation when it’s giving those little, probably unintentional hints about Jigen.
Next week we finally reach the fourth and final season to solve “The Mystery of Demon’s Head Island” (105), be rewarded with “A Cat for You! Dried Bonito for Me!” and discover that “The Wedding Ring is a Cursed Trap” (107).