Post by Jean-Luc Lemur on Nov 20, 2015 16:32:36 GMT -5
Bye Bye Liberty Crisis
Contemporary relevance of the below image coincidental
The eighties really weren’t Lupin’s decade. Despite his enduring popularity in reruns, essentially all new television, film, and video landed with a thud—and a mostly well-deserved one at that. Another theatrical film or television series was not in the cards, video involved too many compromises (Fuma only came in on-budget because it omitted the standard voice actors, which made audiences lose interest). The only avenue left unexplored was the TV movie—a large enough budget for the standard cast (and composer), but without the more exacting animation demands of theatrical film or video. Bye Bye Liberty Crisis, directed by anime old hand (and storyboard artist on the first Lupin III series) Dezaki Osamu, was the first of these television specials. The first of twenty-four to twenty-six, depending on how you’re counting—from 1989 to 2013 (or 2014, again depending on how you’re counting), these were Lupin’s main home, largely following roughly the same format as Bye Bye Liberty Crisis.
Early on it’s easy to see why Bye Bye Liberty Crisis was such a success—of the three eighties Lupin outings longer than thirty minutes it feels the most immediately familiar. Hearing Ohno Yuji’s score and leitmotifs are a big part of that. Hearing Yamada Yasuo and Naya Gorō again is a large part of that. Seeing the characters look like toned-down versions of their Red Jacket series looks is part of that.
While everything seems back to normal in the opening sequence—Lupin, disguised as Zenigata, tries to steal from INTERPOL and makes a narrow aerial escape—it turns out in the film that the eighties have not been as unkind for Lupin the character as they have been for Lupin the franchise. After that spirited introduction we see Lupin in a funk, announcing his retirement from theft to pursue his relationship with Judy. Judy’s an obvious floozy who takes Lupin for everything he has and leaves him in credit card debt, which is what sends him back into crime.
So while this Lupin sounds and looks a lot like previous ones his pathetic side is turned to eleven. This isn’t wholly new—The Mystery of Mamo toyed with Lupin as a send-up of your Belmondos and Delons, but he was still exceeding clever. In Bye Bye Liberty Lupin’s main talent seems to be in riding the waves of chance, plus some luck in finding in operating flying equipment. The former’s quite an accomplishment, of course, but there’s something off-putting in just how un-savvy Lupin is here. While I’ve never really bought into the idea that Lupin’s rich or has some amassed family treasure he can draw on—he strikes me as the sort who’d blow through money pretty quickly, the idea of him blowing through credit cards is just so…uncool.
In fact, Lupin seems seriously ill-equipped for the eighties. The cause for Lupin’s theft of INTERPOL—and his funk thereafter—is the accuracy of INTERPOL’s computers in predicting his movements, a reuse of a plot element from “The First Move Wins the Computer Operation.” As skilled as Lupin and Jigen may be with gadgets, computers mostly confound them here. One of the big treasures of the film the Neovirus (really more a worm), which Lupin and Jigen have trouble understanding at first. They only get by through Michael, a boy-genius. It’s to Dezaki’s credit that Michael never really gets annoying—he’s used sparingly, he’s not that much of a know-it-all, and there’s a sadness about him that keeps him sympathetic.
To be fair to Lupin and Jigen, though, Bye Bye Liberty Crisis doesn’t have that great of an idea of how computers work, either (it’s telling that “The First Move” demonstrates a much more sophisticated understanding of computer modeling than this film). That’s smartly minimized, though—in some ways Bye Bye Liberty Crisis can be seen as an inversion of The Mystery of Mamo. Whereas in Mamo the fantastic events were simply an instance of Clarke’s Law—the apparent magic is just advanced technology—in Liberty much of the technology is just cover for the occult, complete with pentagrams, hexagrams, secret societies, demonic possession and magic halitosis (seriously). It’s all thoroughly ridiculous (early in the film the Statue of Liberty is stolen with a suitcase-packed balloon, after all), but the world’s loopy enough that nothing really seems out of place.
Dezaki deserves a lot of credit for making this all work. His competent and energetic direction allows the film to move quickly and relatively artfully. Although it does not quite measure up to either of the first two films (or even some episodes of the series) aesthetically, it is still an excellent example of good work done under constraint: Bye Bye Liberty Crisis legitimately feels cinematic, with bold scene-setting and well-choreographed action.
The film’s entirely set in America, and while it’s New York doesn’t have the…character…of Babylon’s it still effectively captures some seventies-eighties grit (Jigen’s contact, Rooster, wouldn’t be out of place in The Taking of Pelham 123), many of the scenes in the New York and the Grand Canyon are gorgeous, and the New Orleans interlude gives a chance for Ohno to take some jazzy indulgences.
There’s also a return to some of the Lupin franchise’s more adult edge, mostly missing in the previous two films. Goemon gets an actual love story with the film’s non-Fujiko female lead, Isabella. Their chance meeting organically leads to a budding romance, albeit one hindered by Goemon’s sense of duty and assorted stoic hang-ups, complicated of course by Lupin’s eventual infatuation with her. The tense group dynamic resurfaces, with the leads often at odds even as they work together. And the film takes a surprisingly somber turn at the end—while Michael’s search for his mother seems like something out of countless low-budget or direct-to-video animated films from the late eighties and early nineties, it doesn’t unfold that way at all.
Yet Bye Bye Liberty Crisis also feels a bit less special than previous Lupin films. There are a lot freeze-frames (a Dezaki signature, evidently) and streaky backgrounds as characters lunge at one another. And while the male character design generally remains distinctive, Isabella is a typical circa-1990 anime girl and the size of Fujiko’s eyes has ballooned. Unlike previous Lupin installments, which either led the way or set their own path aesthetically, Bye Bye Liberty Crisis only to be following the general trend in Japanese animation. There’s also liberal reuse of Lupin clichés—the aforementioned computer, Fujiko starting off on the villain’s side, aerial escapes, secretive cults, black (or midnight blue)-clad mooks, etc.
That reuse, though, is part of the appeal, and goes hand-in-hand with the return to older character designs, of the original cast, of Ohno, and of Lupin’s adult edge. This is Lupin as he was before, without any crazy experimentation or egregious compromises. Bye Bye Lady Liberty strays into the weird and improbable, but ultimately it’s familiar, and that’s its great strength. While the TV films get much-deserved flack for often being derivative and repetitive, when you’re only getting one a year it doesn’t seem so bad.
Recommended?
It’s hard to say—while it moves along nicely, Bye Bye Liberty Crisis is in many ways quite mediocre and its flaws only magnify on reflection—it would be better to say it accomplished what it set out to do than to actually call it a success [originally recommended as follows: Yes, though with reservations]. Bye Bye Liberty Crisis feels like what Legend of the Gold of Babylon wanted to be: surreal but entertaining, and a return to style of Lupin storytelling from the late 1970s while simultaneously moving it forward into the eighties. The problem is that its success hinges partly that it being a return to form [rewording]—I feel like Bye Bye Lady Liberty would only really work on someone fairly familiar with either Mamo or the Red Jacket show, and then only after an extended absence.
The tension between keeping Lupin new and familiar is what plagues the three eighties films. Legend of the Gold of Babylon went for aesthetic reinvention, but it was sloppily executed and had a rote story. Both Fuma and Liberty went for evolution, developing the Green and Red aesthetics and storytelling further, respectively, with Liberty being the one that stuck due to the cast. I also think it was the inferior film in most respects, but ultimately both have the issue of being just well-executed. Lupin, ultimately, could not be advanced into the eighties (or nineties or noughts), only continued. And I wonder whether, to some extent, Lupin can’t escape the mid-twentieth century—Lupin finally moved forward in narratively and aesthetically in The Woman Named Fujiko Mine, but that was essentially a period piece.
Stray Observations
• The Checker cabs are oddly sleak in Bye Bye Lady Liberty. Jigen also drives a car twin-grilled car from the fifties—in the first shot I thought it might be a Chrysler 300 (very Jigen), but it ended up being a Volvo Amazon (somehow even more Jigen).
• Bye Bye Liberty Crisis really excels in its depiction of rail, though. There’s an extended sequence featuring the Alaska Central Railroad (with accurate livery, though I’m sure more luxurious coaches). We also get a great view of the old Amtrak inverted arrow logo as Zenigata and Michael’s diesel soot-covered train pulls into a fittingly-depressing Penn Station—it honestly brought me back to my childhood a bit.
• Fujiko takes off her heels before engaging in some catburgling. Hey Jurassic World, you were showed up by a Japanese cartoon from the eighties!
Next week I will not be “running the series” of Lupin TV movies. I’ll be skipping forward with Voyage to Danger for next week. This serves as a nice epilogue to the main body of reviews, covering the Green Jacket series and assorted spin-offs, since this was directed by Ōsumi Masaaki, he of the first run of Lupin III episodes. It’s both his final involvement in the series and Ōsumi’s one chance to finally do Lupin his way, without network meddling.
Contemporary relevance of the below image coincidental
The eighties really weren’t Lupin’s decade. Despite his enduring popularity in reruns, essentially all new television, film, and video landed with a thud—and a mostly well-deserved one at that. Another theatrical film or television series was not in the cards, video involved too many compromises (Fuma only came in on-budget because it omitted the standard voice actors, which made audiences lose interest). The only avenue left unexplored was the TV movie—a large enough budget for the standard cast (and composer), but without the more exacting animation demands of theatrical film or video. Bye Bye Liberty Crisis, directed by anime old hand (and storyboard artist on the first Lupin III series) Dezaki Osamu, was the first of these television specials. The first of twenty-four to twenty-six, depending on how you’re counting—from 1989 to 2013 (or 2014, again depending on how you’re counting), these were Lupin’s main home, largely following roughly the same format as Bye Bye Liberty Crisis.
Early on it’s easy to see why Bye Bye Liberty Crisis was such a success—of the three eighties Lupin outings longer than thirty minutes it feels the most immediately familiar. Hearing Ohno Yuji’s score and leitmotifs are a big part of that. Hearing Yamada Yasuo and Naya Gorō again is a large part of that. Seeing the characters look like toned-down versions of their Red Jacket series looks is part of that.
While everything seems back to normal in the opening sequence—Lupin, disguised as Zenigata, tries to steal from INTERPOL and makes a narrow aerial escape—it turns out in the film that the eighties have not been as unkind for Lupin the character as they have been for Lupin the franchise. After that spirited introduction we see Lupin in a funk, announcing his retirement from theft to pursue his relationship with Judy. Judy’s an obvious floozy who takes Lupin for everything he has and leaves him in credit card debt, which is what sends him back into crime.
So while this Lupin sounds and looks a lot like previous ones his pathetic side is turned to eleven. This isn’t wholly new—The Mystery of Mamo toyed with Lupin as a send-up of your Belmondos and Delons, but he was still exceeding clever. In Bye Bye Liberty Lupin’s main talent seems to be in riding the waves of chance, plus some luck in finding in operating flying equipment. The former’s quite an accomplishment, of course, but there’s something off-putting in just how un-savvy Lupin is here. While I’ve never really bought into the idea that Lupin’s rich or has some amassed family treasure he can draw on—he strikes me as the sort who’d blow through money pretty quickly, the idea of him blowing through credit cards is just so…uncool.
In fact, Lupin seems seriously ill-equipped for the eighties. The cause for Lupin’s theft of INTERPOL—and his funk thereafter—is the accuracy of INTERPOL’s computers in predicting his movements, a reuse of a plot element from “The First Move Wins the Computer Operation.” As skilled as Lupin and Jigen may be with gadgets, computers mostly confound them here. One of the big treasures of the film the Neovirus (really more a worm), which Lupin and Jigen have trouble understanding at first. They only get by through Michael, a boy-genius. It’s to Dezaki’s credit that Michael never really gets annoying—he’s used sparingly, he’s not that much of a know-it-all, and there’s a sadness about him that keeps him sympathetic.
To be fair to Lupin and Jigen, though, Bye Bye Liberty Crisis doesn’t have that great of an idea of how computers work, either (it’s telling that “The First Move” demonstrates a much more sophisticated understanding of computer modeling than this film). That’s smartly minimized, though—in some ways Bye Bye Liberty Crisis can be seen as an inversion of The Mystery of Mamo. Whereas in Mamo the fantastic events were simply an instance of Clarke’s Law—the apparent magic is just advanced technology—in Liberty much of the technology is just cover for the occult, complete with pentagrams, hexagrams, secret societies, demonic possession and magic halitosis (seriously). It’s all thoroughly ridiculous (early in the film the Statue of Liberty is stolen with a suitcase-packed balloon, after all), but the world’s loopy enough that nothing really seems out of place.
Dezaki deserves a lot of credit for making this all work. His competent and energetic direction allows the film to move quickly and relatively artfully. Although it does not quite measure up to either of the first two films (or even some episodes of the series) aesthetically, it is still an excellent example of good work done under constraint: Bye Bye Liberty Crisis legitimately feels cinematic, with bold scene-setting and well-choreographed action.
The film’s entirely set in America, and while it’s New York doesn’t have the…character…of Babylon’s it still effectively captures some seventies-eighties grit (Jigen’s contact, Rooster, wouldn’t be out of place in The Taking of Pelham 123), many of the scenes in the New York and the Grand Canyon are gorgeous, and the New Orleans interlude gives a chance for Ohno to take some jazzy indulgences.
There’s also a return to some of the Lupin franchise’s more adult edge, mostly missing in the previous two films. Goemon gets an actual love story with the film’s non-Fujiko female lead, Isabella. Their chance meeting organically leads to a budding romance, albeit one hindered by Goemon’s sense of duty and assorted stoic hang-ups, complicated of course by Lupin’s eventual infatuation with her. The tense group dynamic resurfaces, with the leads often at odds even as they work together. And the film takes a surprisingly somber turn at the end—while Michael’s search for his mother seems like something out of countless low-budget or direct-to-video animated films from the late eighties and early nineties, it doesn’t unfold that way at all.
Yet Bye Bye Liberty Crisis also feels a bit less special than previous Lupin films. There are a lot freeze-frames (a Dezaki signature, evidently) and streaky backgrounds as characters lunge at one another. And while the male character design generally remains distinctive, Isabella is a typical circa-1990 anime girl and the size of Fujiko’s eyes has ballooned. Unlike previous Lupin installments, which either led the way or set their own path aesthetically, Bye Bye Liberty Crisis only to be following the general trend in Japanese animation. There’s also liberal reuse of Lupin clichés—the aforementioned computer, Fujiko starting off on the villain’s side, aerial escapes, secretive cults, black (or midnight blue)-clad mooks, etc.
That reuse, though, is part of the appeal, and goes hand-in-hand with the return to older character designs, of the original cast, of Ohno, and of Lupin’s adult edge. This is Lupin as he was before, without any crazy experimentation or egregious compromises. Bye Bye Lady Liberty strays into the weird and improbable, but ultimately it’s familiar, and that’s its great strength. While the TV films get much-deserved flack for often being derivative and repetitive, when you’re only getting one a year it doesn’t seem so bad.
Recommended?
It’s hard to say—while it moves along nicely, Bye Bye Liberty Crisis is in many ways quite mediocre and its flaws only magnify on reflection—it would be better to say it accomplished what it set out to do than to actually call it a success [originally recommended as follows: Yes, though with reservations]. Bye Bye Liberty Crisis feels like what Legend of the Gold of Babylon wanted to be: surreal but entertaining, and a return to style of Lupin storytelling from the late 1970s while simultaneously moving it forward into the eighties. The problem is that its success hinges partly that it being a return to form [rewording]—I feel like Bye Bye Lady Liberty would only really work on someone fairly familiar with either Mamo or the Red Jacket show, and then only after an extended absence.
The tension between keeping Lupin new and familiar is what plagues the three eighties films. Legend of the Gold of Babylon went for aesthetic reinvention, but it was sloppily executed and had a rote story. Both Fuma and Liberty went for evolution, developing the Green and Red aesthetics and storytelling further, respectively, with Liberty being the one that stuck due to the cast. I also think it was the inferior film in most respects, but ultimately both have the issue of being just well-executed. Lupin, ultimately, could not be advanced into the eighties (or nineties or noughts), only continued. And I wonder whether, to some extent, Lupin can’t escape the mid-twentieth century—Lupin finally moved forward in narratively and aesthetically in The Woman Named Fujiko Mine, but that was essentially a period piece.
Stray Observations
• The Checker cabs are oddly sleak in Bye Bye Lady Liberty. Jigen also drives a car twin-grilled car from the fifties—in the first shot I thought it might be a Chrysler 300 (very Jigen), but it ended up being a Volvo Amazon (somehow even more Jigen).
• Bye Bye Liberty Crisis really excels in its depiction of rail, though. There’s an extended sequence featuring the Alaska Central Railroad (with accurate livery, though I’m sure more luxurious coaches). We also get a great view of the old Amtrak inverted arrow logo as Zenigata and Michael’s diesel soot-covered train pulls into a fittingly-depressing Penn Station—it honestly brought me back to my childhood a bit.
• Fujiko takes off her heels before engaging in some catburgling. Hey Jurassic World, you were showed up by a Japanese cartoon from the eighties!
Next week I will not be “running the series” of Lupin TV movies. I’ll be skipping forward with Voyage to Danger for next week. This serves as a nice epilogue to the main body of reviews, covering the Green Jacket series and assorted spin-offs, since this was directed by Ōsumi Masaaki, he of the first run of Lupin III episodes. It’s both his final involvement in the series and Ōsumi’s one chance to finally do Lupin his way, without network meddling.