79 Diamonds Gleam in a Robot’s Eye 84 Leave Revenge to Lupin

79 Diamonds Gleam in a Robot’s Eye
Or, “Ice, Robot”



You’ve probably come across something where you can recognize the artistry of it but just cannot like it? I am starting to feel that way about Yuzo Aoki’s episodes of Lupin III. They’re clearly impressively made—while he, like all the animators, had to work within the seventies TV budget constraints, he used this as an excuse to make strikingly flat and expressive compositions, even if movement was sometimes a little awkward. And he has a superb feeling for heightening mood through setting and color—look at the image above, where Lupin and his gang are avoiding a near collision and night, illuminated by the headlamps of the opposing vehicle. If you just saw this sequence—or any other number of short sequences in “Diamonds Gleam in a Robot’s Eye”—you’d think this episode was great. But it’s not.

Or at least it isn’t to me—this episode is an unabashed comedy, and I just found it annoying. It’s just pitched wrong—again we’re in Aoki’s New York (which never feels right to me), ostensibly in the 1970s though all our opponents have a prohibition-era gangster sort of aesthetic. Well, not the moll, though, whose hairstyle is quite 1979 and whose voice is appropriately, annoyingly squeaky. As far as antagonists go they’re an unusually loud, annoying bunch. The actual caper—over a diamond-making robot—is also pretty outlandish, but not in any compelling way.

Recommended?
To me, this episode is a gorgeous idiot—so much artistry in its animation, but stupid, so loudly unfunny that it’s unbearable, though if your sense of humor bends that way it would be a worthwhile. My negative opinion, I should note, puts me very much against the grain of Lupin fandom.

Stray Observations
• I initially thought Mr. Pot, the scientist who invents the diamond-making robot, might have been a recurring character—he’s described as that “weird scientist who tries to sell his gadgets to Lupin once in a while,” as if he’s shown up before. This is his only appearance, though.
• Mr. Pot lives in a dilapidated building in a great Manhattan location. Oh, the seventies.

84 Leave Revenge to Lupin

Here’s another episode which combines an improbably invention with a lot of visual bravura, though of a totally different character:





It’s a pretty gripping opening, right? But it’s against a finely-rendered background, with an ordinarily-proportioned figure running in realistic, three-dimensional motion. The episode starts out as a grounded crime drama, with Jigen’s old mentor, an American gangster named Joe Spade, on the run. As “Diamonds” may be the most stylized of Aoki’s episodes this is likely the most styled of Telecom’s, but it comes from a different place. Rather than emphasizing the two-dimensionality and unreality of animation, “Leave Revenge to Lupin” uses it to take its naturalistic style futher—the two guest leads, Spade and his Marsaillaise girlfriend—are either elderly or in late middle age, and the animators relish the opportunity to draw figures with age and character.



This reflects Spade’s infirm state—we see him struggle to load his gun, coupled with a flashback to him taking a beardless young hotshot Jigen under his wing. It’s a very different type of story than most of the ones we’ve seen so far, more reminiscent of first series crime tales like “An Assassin Sings the Blues” than anything we’ve seen so far.

And it’s a set-up.

“Leave Revenge to Lupin” is a heist story after all, and amazingly it revolves around a piece of technology more improbable than a diamond-making robot. But the technology or loot never takes the center stage. The story remains one about the relationship between Jigen and his mentor, and that’s what elevates it above a lot of the capers we’ve seen so far.

While I decided to focus on Aoki’s and Telecom’s contrasting approaches to the series (the former cartoonish, the latter naturalistic), there isn’t the sense of auteurism that was in first first series, with Ōsumi establishing a clear creative direction and then Miyazaki and Takahata changing course (incidentally their design sensibilities were quite compatible, even with the shift from Mercedes to FIAT). They were essentially showrunners, though. Authorship in the second Lupin series is more matrical: in one column is writing, in the next storyboarding, and in the final one the execution of the actual animation (indeed, near the end of these reviews we’ll encounter an episode where Aoki is in column two and Telecom in column three). Thus one cannot really ascribe paternité to Aoki nor the Telecom team in the same way, just influence. The silliness or seriousness a particular second series episode of the second series is has more to do with who wrote than who guided it to visuals.

But, as we saw in “Diamond” certain sensibilities still reinforce one another, and the naturalism of Telecom’s approach pays off here in a way that it doesn’t in stories such as “The Woman Pops Fell For,” where the heightened emotion coupled with heightened style pushed the story further and further from reality.



The grounded style here does the opposite: while the gimmick of the heights is outlandish, the more naturalistic style prevents the sort of tonal mismatch seen in other second series episodes. With the look subdued, the themes of trust and betrayal are able to take center stage, resulting in an episode stronger than its plot outline might suggest, and lends gravity to the more fantastic sequences. This silly story packs a punch.

Recommended
Yes.

Stray Observation
• This week in odd proverbs: “I like pretty girls, but hate killers and octopuses.”

• The hand gestures in this episode are on point, big and expressive but very real looking.

• We get the rare implicit reference to Jigen’s American heritage and the likewise rare explicit mention of Lupin being of French nationality.

• We are now out of the Hulu woods and onto episodes only available on Crunchyroll. That means we no longer have the punny titles, and luckily we’ve gotten rid of the goofy English-language title card, too. Instead we get the original Japanese one that includes a bit of action from the opening sequence, the circular shatter here being from the hit of a pool ball.



Next week, given the “matrical” authorship of the first series outlined above, I am abandoning the auteur-centered project I outlined here; the realization that watching every Aoki episode would lead me to more episodes like “Diamonds Gleam in a Robot’s Eye” also played a role. I’m therefore just going through based on whatever looks interesting or has some kind of reputation. So next week we’re jumping back to the very beginning of the second series for the first episode, “The Dashing Episode of Lupin III (or, “Return of Lupin III”) and the second episode, “A Bouquet of Bills Blossom in Rio's Sunset” (or, “Funs, Buns, & Fun in the Sun”). Incidentally these are based loosely on the first two chapters of Maurice Leblanc’s Arsène Lupin, gentleman-cambrioleur, which I am also reading at the moment (courtesy of Project Gutenberg), which should make for an interesting comparison.