FINAL REVIEW (?): 145 “Wings of Death:Albatross”/155 “Fare…”
Oct 24, 2015 15:19:15 GMT -5
ComradePig, Pear, and 1 more like this
Post by Jean Luc de Lemur on Oct 24, 2015 15:19:15 GMT -5
Updated 12 Aug. 2016
A Quick Note on the Second Series
The original Lupin III series, though unsuccessful in first airing, gained a large following in syndication and by the mid-seventies it was obvious there was enough demand for a new show. This second installment of Lupin III, colloquially called the “Red Jacket” series because of the shift in Arsène’s attire, was the one that really caught on among viewers. It was eventually translated and syndicated internationally and today forms the bedrock for many people’s vision of Lupin, and most Lupin nostalgia reaches back here. From what I’ve read the currently airing Lupin series, a joint Japanese-Italian production, is very much a direct homage to this show (I may review it after it becomes more easily available with English subtitles).
My own path to Lupin is more idiosyncratic: Miller recommended The Castle of Cagliostro to me, ComradePig posts the trailer to The Woman Named Fujiko Mine, which catches my interest, and I decide to dive deeper into Lupinalia from there. I’ve not taken the plunge into the Red Jacket series for various reasons (HA!), so I’m only going to focus on two episodes made a by a very special guest director: Miyazaki Hayao (albeit working under a pseudonym). They’re also visually and tonally distinct from the rest of the show, sharing more in look and attention (and even music cues) to detail with The Castle of Cagliostro than with the rest of the Red Jacket series (this is, in fact, a general characteristic of the second series, with these and a handful other episodes skewing even closer to Cagliostro because they were made by TMS’s subcontracting studio Telecom, also responsible for the film itself). They’re gorgeous episodes (I couldn’t restrain myself with the screenshots) and form a nice little unit to tie up Miyazaki’s involvement with the Lupin franchise.
145 Wings of Death: Albatross
It is appropriate that a detonator—one easily mistaken for an airplane sparkplug—drives the plot of “Albatross” It is had to believe “Wings of Death: Albatross” is less than a half hour. It feels like it’s less than a half hour, but it doesn’t feel like an episode of a television show but rather a incredibly quick-moving feature film. And once “Albatross” starts up—almost immediately, when Fujiko storms into Lupin, Jigen and Goemon’s dinner, machine gun blaring—it is never not in motion.
A lot of that cinematic feeling comes from how finely it’s animated. In the titular Albatross every rivet, control, upholstery button and molding is in its place, and even in minor backgrounds glimpsed only briefly there’s a wealth of detail: the episode opens with another bunch of sumptuous food shots, Lupin’s short-lived Airstream trailer is packed with stuff, and even in the couple of brief scenes where get a quick glimpse of the unnamed, vaguely-Hanseatic town (northern Europe to Cagliostro’s south) where this episode takes place you can almost count the number of slats on the shutters. And that’s before getting to the foreground, where we again have a real sense of space and dimension.
If in detail “Albatross” is close to Cagliostro, its look is still quite distinct, setting us up for the same universe but a new adventure. While Lupin’s green jacket set Cagliostro up for a cooler, en plein air color palette, the clothing here (both Lupin and Zenigata’s) sets up a lusher palette: pinks, purples browns and olives dominate as opposed to emeralds, greys and blues of Cagliostro (and the more garish subtle than the more garish color of regular episodes of this series). Character proportions stick with the more naturalistic Cagliostro ones, though Fujiko’s now sporting a new, shorter haircut that places her in the late 1970s in a very good way. The villain, Lonebach, is both distinct-looking and has a unique personality, a mix of cruel cunning and childish naïveté.
Fujiko is the dynamo of the story—it’s her entry, theft of Lupin’s Mercedes, and drop of the nuclear detonator that sets the plot in motion. She’s in full “locomotive” mode here, reminiscent of the first bunch of Lupin III episodes where she’d similarly barge through the lives of the more lackadaisical Lupin gang. Despite the very Miyazakian amount of time spent on, in, or around planes, there’s an edge to this story that a lot of his (and Takahata’s) Lupin stories lack. It’s unabashedly violent, mining humor from the tumblings of stick grenades. Lupin may be trying to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons through the underworld, but there’s a sense of self-interest there (of what use is Lupin’s cleverness when it’s upstaged by brute force?) and lust for Fujiko as well.
And it’s the lust that really sets this apart. When I first watched “Albatross” the nudity—we’ve seen it in Lupin before, but from this director—made my jaw drop. It’s an equal-opportunity affair, too, with Lupin and Jigen spending most of the episode un a state of extreme undress after escaping a strip search by Zenigata: “That’s too much,” Zenigata says after being handed Lupin’s underwear and Jigen’s hat. It’s definitely the sexiest Lupin adventure, and while it’s a bit adolescent that’s also part of the charm. Just as there’s a sort of demented innocence to Lonebach’s desire to make Fujiko his wife, there’s an odd sweetness to Lupin and Fujiko’s interactions. Between the great character work and aerial adventure there’s a lot of “sweetness and light,” to borrow Swift’s words praising the Classics.
Stray Observations
• While I’m not exactly sure about the production relation to Cagliostro (there must have been some link-up with the movie department due to the quality of animation), there is one scene that is quasi-reused: Lupin and Jigen’s paired escape, in Cagliostro from the casino, in “Albatross” from Zenigata. There’s an ingenious difference, though—here Lupin and Jigen have their feet shackled and are handcuffed together, so rather that each moving their legs synchronously in “Albatross” Lupin and Goemon alternate between moving their legs together, as if they were just hemispheres in the same body. That’s a lot of words for something so simple and ingenious.
• Zenigata, though he’s in the least state of undress, might be the sexiest one in this episode.
Recommended?
Yes—I think this is Lupin’s greatest half-hour.
155 Farewell My Beloved Lupin
Though Miyazaki’s later statements on Lupin have often translated by amateurs and taken out of context, one gets the impression that it’s not something he’s especially proud of. And to some extent there’s no reason why he should be—it was not his project, it was something he was hired to do. I think that’s part of what makes his Lupin entries so interesting: he was an auteur in the sense Truffaut originally meant the word, someone who puts his stamps on a process he doesn’t have total control over. But you can see those limitations straining, and “Farewell My Beloved Lupin” almost belongs more with his later work than with the rest of the Lupin series.
I mentioned that in some ways The Castle of Cagliostro prefigures Castle in the Sky, and the Laputan robot makes its first appearance here, albeit as a new, Japanese invention rather than the relic of a lost, fantastically advanced civilization. The episode opens with a “Tokyo: 1981” title card; the episode aired in 1980 (we also get fantastic, naturalistic views of the city; it’s also another showcase for Miyazaki’s ability to create a sense of physical depth and layered dimension). Whether it was intended to signal the present of the very near future is irrelevant: “Farewell My Beloved Lupin” is a warning about the possibility resurgent militarism and the destructive power of the violent application of new technology. Chillingly, though described as a robot, as it operates in the episode it is closer to a UAV.
Strangely, Lupin-as-Lupin is absent for most of the episode. The array of false identities is pretty clearly telegraphed early on, so the audience is quickly clued in the Lupin is not Lupin, but rather he’s Zenigata. This is a choice that works surprisingly well, though. We get Lupin’s agility but Zenigata’s civilian authority—crucial in an episode where we need a tribune to stand up to the military. We also get the late Naya Gorō’s voice, which gets to stretch a bit beyond its usual range. Lupin breaks character a bit, and it’s delightful to hear Zenigata’s voice briefly in Lupin’s good-humored intonation before correcting himself. And while Yamada Yasuo’s Lupin was more than capable of grave sincerity—remember “One Chance for a Prison Break”—there’s something rewarding in hearing Zenigata use his authoritative voice for purposes sincere rather than stentorian (a role Naya Gorō would reprise in Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind; the robot’s young female pilot also resembles Nausicaä herself, and, going further back, Rie from “Rescue the Tomboy!”).
The moral thrust of this episode is similar to the previous—preventing the proliferation of a dangerous weapon through the underworld—there’s extra weight here due to the acknowledgment of death and destruction here. The initially quite heavy death count of the early Lupin episodes diminished through the first series before tailing off completely; in Cagliostro the only death was of the villain at the top of the organization, and even in “Albatross” all the villains manage to avoid death.
We actually get a return to smirking Lupin, though with very different effect. In the initial episode it’s a combination of satisfaction from enacting revenge and getting a glimpse of Fujiko in bondage. There’s a satisfaction in destruction here, too, but it’s a righteous one. It’s less a smirk more than a smile masking anger. Indeed, one of the reasons Lupin’s impersonator was so effective was because he impersonated Lupin’s by now well-known humanitarian streak—using the robot for bank robberies demonstrates their destructive potential and turns the public against it, but it also alerts the Underworld to its use.
A certain segment of Lupin fans complains that Miyazaki’s Lupin isn’t Lupin (a view shared by Monkey Punch, the character’s creator), but to me it’s clear the Lupin from “Is Lupin Burning?!” is still here. He still revels in destruction, but now it’s of an arms facility. He’s still connected to the underworld, but uses his connections to regulate it (for his fellow thieves’ benefit as much as the public). Monkey Punch notes on the Mamo DVD that he sought out to create a character that respects no authority. By the time of “Farewell My Beloved Lupin,” Lupin’s leveraged that independence to serve as a pivot point between the Underworld and society as a whole.
Lupin’s rambunctious instincts remain—they’re what give the character such energy, after all—but they’re now tempered by an ethical streak, one he can only maintain because he answers to no one. It feels less like betrayal of character and more like evolution. What makes first decade of animated Lupin—from the original pilot film to “Farewell My Beloved Lupin”—unique is that we can see this evolution unfold over time. Though there’s little in the way of explicit continuity, the evolution of Lupin’s character from gentleman-thief in taste to gentleman-thief in conduct seems to unfold organically. Lupin’s allowed to grow, in contrast to the ageless holding pattern he gets stuck with in much of the later media. “Farewell My Beloved Lupin” is the culmination of this growth process, and ultimately as far as Lupin would go down this route.
Just don’t stick around for the final song—you’ll pray the return of that hippie singing “Lupin…he’s a nice man.”
[Although it’s still a little on the nose, and I may be suffering from Yuji Ohno Stockholm Syndrome, I’ve come to like the final song, in context. Stick through the end.]
A Quick Note on the Second Series
The original Lupin III series, though unsuccessful in first airing, gained a large following in syndication and by the mid-seventies it was obvious there was enough demand for a new show. This second installment of Lupin III, colloquially called the “Red Jacket” series because of the shift in Arsène’s attire, was the one that really caught on among viewers. It was eventually translated and syndicated internationally and today forms the bedrock for many people’s vision of Lupin, and most Lupin nostalgia reaches back here. From what I’ve read the currently airing Lupin series, a joint Japanese-Italian production, is very much a direct homage to this show (I may review it after it becomes more easily available with English subtitles).
My own path to Lupin is more idiosyncratic: Miller recommended The Castle of Cagliostro to me, ComradePig posts the trailer to The Woman Named Fujiko Mine, which catches my interest, and I decide to dive deeper into Lupinalia from there. I’ve not taken the plunge into the Red Jacket series for various reasons (HA!), so I’m only going to focus on two episodes made a by a very special guest director: Miyazaki Hayao (albeit working under a pseudonym). They’re also visually and tonally distinct from the rest of the show, sharing more in look and attention (and even music cues) to detail with The Castle of Cagliostro than with the rest of the Red Jacket series (this is, in fact, a general characteristic of the second series, with these and a handful other episodes skewing even closer to Cagliostro because they were made by TMS’s subcontracting studio Telecom, also responsible for the film itself). They’re gorgeous episodes (I couldn’t restrain myself with the screenshots) and form a nice little unit to tie up Miyazaki’s involvement with the Lupin franchise.
145 Wings of Death: Albatross
It is appropriate that a detonator—one easily mistaken for an airplane sparkplug—drives the plot of “Albatross” It is had to believe “Wings of Death: Albatross” is less than a half hour. It feels like it’s less than a half hour, but it doesn’t feel like an episode of a television show but rather a incredibly quick-moving feature film. And once “Albatross” starts up—almost immediately, when Fujiko storms into Lupin, Jigen and Goemon’s dinner, machine gun blaring—it is never not in motion.
A lot of that cinematic feeling comes from how finely it’s animated. In the titular Albatross every rivet, control, upholstery button and molding is in its place, and even in minor backgrounds glimpsed only briefly there’s a wealth of detail: the episode opens with another bunch of sumptuous food shots, Lupin’s short-lived Airstream trailer is packed with stuff, and even in the couple of brief scenes where get a quick glimpse of the unnamed, vaguely-Hanseatic town (northern Europe to Cagliostro’s south) where this episode takes place you can almost count the number of slats on the shutters. And that’s before getting to the foreground, where we again have a real sense of space and dimension.
If in detail “Albatross” is close to Cagliostro, its look is still quite distinct, setting us up for the same universe but a new adventure. While Lupin’s green jacket set Cagliostro up for a cooler, en plein air color palette, the clothing here (both Lupin and Zenigata’s) sets up a lusher palette: pinks, purples browns and olives dominate as opposed to emeralds, greys and blues of Cagliostro (and the more garish subtle than the more garish color of regular episodes of this series). Character proportions stick with the more naturalistic Cagliostro ones, though Fujiko’s now sporting a new, shorter haircut that places her in the late 1970s in a very good way. The villain, Lonebach, is both distinct-looking and has a unique personality, a mix of cruel cunning and childish naïveté.
Fujiko is the dynamo of the story—it’s her entry, theft of Lupin’s Mercedes, and drop of the nuclear detonator that sets the plot in motion. She’s in full “locomotive” mode here, reminiscent of the first bunch of Lupin III episodes where she’d similarly barge through the lives of the more lackadaisical Lupin gang. Despite the very Miyazakian amount of time spent on, in, or around planes, there’s an edge to this story that a lot of his (and Takahata’s) Lupin stories lack. It’s unabashedly violent, mining humor from the tumblings of stick grenades. Lupin may be trying to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons through the underworld, but there’s a sense of self-interest there (of what use is Lupin’s cleverness when it’s upstaged by brute force?) and lust for Fujiko as well.
And it’s the lust that really sets this apart. When I first watched “Albatross” the nudity—we’ve seen it in Lupin before, but from this director—made my jaw drop. It’s an equal-opportunity affair, too, with Lupin and Jigen spending most of the episode un a state of extreme undress after escaping a strip search by Zenigata: “That’s too much,” Zenigata says after being handed Lupin’s underwear and Jigen’s hat. It’s definitely the sexiest Lupin adventure, and while it’s a bit adolescent that’s also part of the charm. Just as there’s a sort of demented innocence to Lonebach’s desire to make Fujiko his wife, there’s an odd sweetness to Lupin and Fujiko’s interactions. Between the great character work and aerial adventure there’s a lot of “sweetness and light,” to borrow Swift’s words praising the Classics.
Stray Observations
• While I’m not exactly sure about the production relation to Cagliostro (there must have been some link-up with the movie department due to the quality of animation), there is one scene that is quasi-reused: Lupin and Jigen’s paired escape, in Cagliostro from the casino, in “Albatross” from Zenigata. There’s an ingenious difference, though—here Lupin and Jigen have their feet shackled and are handcuffed together, so rather that each moving their legs synchronously in “Albatross” Lupin and Goemon alternate between moving their legs together, as if they were just hemispheres in the same body. That’s a lot of words for something so simple and ingenious.
• Zenigata, though he’s in the least state of undress, might be the sexiest one in this episode.
Recommended?
Yes—I think this is Lupin’s greatest half-hour.
155 Farewell My Beloved Lupin
Though Miyazaki’s later statements on Lupin have often translated by amateurs and taken out of context, one gets the impression that it’s not something he’s especially proud of. And to some extent there’s no reason why he should be—it was not his project, it was something he was hired to do. I think that’s part of what makes his Lupin entries so interesting: he was an auteur in the sense Truffaut originally meant the word, someone who puts his stamps on a process he doesn’t have total control over. But you can see those limitations straining, and “Farewell My Beloved Lupin” almost belongs more with his later work than with the rest of the Lupin series.
I mentioned that in some ways The Castle of Cagliostro prefigures Castle in the Sky, and the Laputan robot makes its first appearance here, albeit as a new, Japanese invention rather than the relic of a lost, fantastically advanced civilization. The episode opens with a “Tokyo: 1981” title card; the episode aired in 1980 (we also get fantastic, naturalistic views of the city; it’s also another showcase for Miyazaki’s ability to create a sense of physical depth and layered dimension). Whether it was intended to signal the present of the very near future is irrelevant: “Farewell My Beloved Lupin” is a warning about the possibility resurgent militarism and the destructive power of the violent application of new technology. Chillingly, though described as a robot, as it operates in the episode it is closer to a UAV.
Strangely, Lupin-as-Lupin is absent for most of the episode. The array of false identities is pretty clearly telegraphed early on, so the audience is quickly clued in the Lupin is not Lupin, but rather he’s Zenigata. This is a choice that works surprisingly well, though. We get Lupin’s agility but Zenigata’s civilian authority—crucial in an episode where we need a tribune to stand up to the military. We also get the late Naya Gorō’s voice, which gets to stretch a bit beyond its usual range. Lupin breaks character a bit, and it’s delightful to hear Zenigata’s voice briefly in Lupin’s good-humored intonation before correcting himself. And while Yamada Yasuo’s Lupin was more than capable of grave sincerity—remember “One Chance for a Prison Break”—there’s something rewarding in hearing Zenigata use his authoritative voice for purposes sincere rather than stentorian (a role Naya Gorō would reprise in Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind; the robot’s young female pilot also resembles Nausicaä herself, and, going further back, Rie from “Rescue the Tomboy!”).
The moral thrust of this episode is similar to the previous—preventing the proliferation of a dangerous weapon through the underworld—there’s extra weight here due to the acknowledgment of death and destruction here. The initially quite heavy death count of the early Lupin episodes diminished through the first series before tailing off completely; in Cagliostro the only death was of the villain at the top of the organization, and even in “Albatross” all the villains manage to avoid death.
We actually get a return to smirking Lupin, though with very different effect. In the initial episode it’s a combination of satisfaction from enacting revenge and getting a glimpse of Fujiko in bondage. There’s a satisfaction in destruction here, too, but it’s a righteous one. It’s less a smirk more than a smile masking anger. Indeed, one of the reasons Lupin’s impersonator was so effective was because he impersonated Lupin’s by now well-known humanitarian streak—using the robot for bank robberies demonstrates their destructive potential and turns the public against it, but it also alerts the Underworld to its use.
A certain segment of Lupin fans complains that Miyazaki’s Lupin isn’t Lupin (a view shared by Monkey Punch, the character’s creator), but to me it’s clear the Lupin from “Is Lupin Burning?!” is still here. He still revels in destruction, but now it’s of an arms facility. He’s still connected to the underworld, but uses his connections to regulate it (for his fellow thieves’ benefit as much as the public). Monkey Punch notes on the Mamo DVD that he sought out to create a character that respects no authority. By the time of “Farewell My Beloved Lupin,” Lupin’s leveraged that independence to serve as a pivot point between the Underworld and society as a whole.
Lupin’s rambunctious instincts remain—they’re what give the character such energy, after all—but they’re now tempered by an ethical streak, one he can only maintain because he answers to no one. It feels less like betrayal of character and more like evolution. What makes first decade of animated Lupin—from the original pilot film to “Farewell My Beloved Lupin”—unique is that we can see this evolution unfold over time. Though there’s little in the way of explicit continuity, the evolution of Lupin’s character from gentleman-thief in taste to gentleman-thief in conduct seems to unfold organically. Lupin’s allowed to grow, in contrast to the ageless holding pattern he gets stuck with in much of the later media. “Farewell My Beloved Lupin” is the culmination of this growth process, and ultimately as far as Lupin would go down this route.
Just don’t stick around for the final song—you’ll pray the return of that hippie singing “Lupin…he’s a nice man.”
[Although it’s still a little on the nose, and I may be suffering from Yuji Ohno Stockholm Syndrome, I’ve come to like the final song, in context. Stick through the end.]
