Post by Jean Luc de Lemur on Jul 8, 2016 20:18:22 GMT -5
105 The Mystery of Demon’s Head Island
I mainly mention this because it was a Telecom-directed episode. There’s some interesting stuff going on thematically under the surface. Lupin holds up the Heike crab as an example of the transfiguration of the samurai from The Tale of the Heike; if you’ve seen the original Cosmos you’ll recall that this is an example of artificial selection, where crabs with samurai-like faces are preferentially thrown back. There’s a sort of parallel evolution happening with the Heike’s final heir, though degeneration would be more appropriate. His sexual proclivities won’t result in the production of an heir—his head more towards serial killing more than anything else. That’ obviously creepy and threatening, but so is his chief advisor, who advises that Fujiko be kept alive at least as breeding stock.
This indictment of hereditary royalty’s strong (and, in more explicit form, presages Cagliostro’s condemnation of the sexual politics of the institution), but to a large extent we’ve seen this before in “A Bridal Gown Doesn’t Suit Fujiko”. We’ve hit one of the big problems with this fourth and final season for Lupin III Part II: exhaustion. There’s a fair amount more recycling here. There’s also a degree of desperation, throwing stuff on the wall and seeing what sticks. “Bridal Gown” is a tightly-constructd episode that manages to extract a fair amount of suspense from its simple setup. “Demon’s Head Island,” on the other hand, avoids building suspense and fills time with all manner of gimmickry and gadgetry, another fourth series trademark. It also sets the tone for future episodes in a couple of other ways: focusing on the Lupin gang penetrating or escaping a fortified setting and a generally darker, more adult (though not necessarily more mature) tone. Both of these will pay off later, but not here.
These all contribute to the episode’s problems, but the big one has to be with Fujiko’s role, which is, like many of this episode’s issues, not unique to this installment. She ends up trapped and can do little but yell “Help, Lupin!” over and over again. It’s a bit annoying, and a stark contrast to the character’s ability to take initiative in other episodes in this series. Even when Fujiko ended up in a similar situation in “Bridal Gown” it was because part of her and Lupin’s plan involved putting her in such danger—it was a risk they knew they were taking. I’m not really a fan of damsel Fujiko in most cases, and I’d say it’s a knock against the second series as a whole for really establishing this aspect of her character, at least in animation (compare this to the only rescue Fujiko episode of the original series, “An Assassin Sings the Blues,” where the fact that someone’s managed to incapacitate her establishes the situation as dangerous and, even after the rescue, she manages to fire the episode’s concluding shot).
Recommended?
No—although Telecom episodes are usually a cut above the median, this episode’s mainly noteworthy for how well it showcases this season’s, and series’s, weaknesses.
106 A Cat for You! Dried Bonito for Me!
Self-aware humor can be difficult to pull off—knowing you’re telling an unfunny story does not, on its own, rescue an unfunny story. Parody of comedy is likewise difficult. “A Car for You! Dried Bonito for Me!” manages to pull off both, serving as an effective send-up of Lupin III Part II’s more ridiculous episodes.
it helps that, while the episode is fairly self-reflexive, it isn’t really meta. There’s no fourth wall-breaking here, with all the humor happening within the episode’s narrative world, with the broader parody of Lupin episodes coming from the audience’s own knowledge of such episodes. The loot of this episode is pretty ridiculous. It’s a pure media invention. Vivian, an aspiring actress whose aspirations are floundering, decides to claim that Lupin stole something of hers as a publicity stunt. Not having thought this through, she improvises a story about a cat that sharpens pencils. Most of the reporters walk out but one—a kid with hsi own self-published Child Times—stays behind, and the story ends up spreading.
This has two results. One is that Lupin finds himself accused of stealing a cat, which he thinks will hurt his dangerous reputation. I think this exchange says it all:
![[Fujiko]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/SqeP0n1CqzMDvRa1aK6wSg-3Ti55fuKk8onKd_-E9sOCiwYswqjcLf7HYg1oKYWZf18W0uTcLp_r30QeEg5jv5-DaiaZbPdRMMnH72XUmj-23Tr1-us-DYCXIEczkMROFHP_LuJwpZ11gsHZYNcoWBi7VYRLJgSqXLN9i9Uuzlx4335h55TtMNA4gSqNsEZ5Lxo_7gfkDHI9s8vwV2QH6mf3xsUlIXvWSGHeoST80v5yVROHF_Qk6Q5CPcdKuggbiwSuGHqSx08vNXgTo0ZmwgcbHa7g6909KFVWT5SxRAr9RMgFnHz3J6lRlVDrA417EDMuEr1sdN9JUMzu2OmcGIUA9PJ_hZx_hzT4TG_NtyoQSWIUfxPuhUMwpX76iSpwdtj1vKnjhNoBznYENkMXU2IqQ6_h3UfLacibk7hjNenozgnlayZdHvgQrCww-KCnGXKQY00dPqf73TCaG3M9-AsFRiSbHn9IdULEEzIZKq9zEGtHVgo-zzsRumCBA9W6IIO0UFvxR0o6lybfKUbG0wPgcjn6VRx3ExHWXoTCm5U0_FBVt4voKUQx4whGEp4YFHRKVW8__E1rLuR7Wu6wcW9GEbTwcScs=w905-h677-no)
This reflects, of course, how Lupin’s rough edges have been sanded off over time. In any event Lupin and the gang now have to find and return said pencil-sharpening cat to squash any such rumors. Of course, the other result is that a couple of small-time cons do present a pencil-sharpening cat, turning Lupin’s fruitless search into a manic chase.
This is another New York-based Yuzo Aoki comedy, and while it has some similarities with [/a]“Diamonds Gleam in a Robot’s Eye” it manages to avoid that episode’s worst pitfalls. Partly that’s due to making the silliness a plot point rather than a condition of the story, but it’s also due to a more even feeling overall. But it’s also due to the new look.
The Castle of Cagliostro, largely animated in the hiatus between seasons three and four, wields wide influence over this season’s look. The fourth season’s character design, color palette, and overall look were all tweaked to harmonize with Cagliostro, reigning in the episode-by-episode fluctuations in look that characterized the third season. This is particularly noteworthy in Aoki’s case, given that his episodes were often among the most flamboyant. There’s still a fair amount of his flat abstraction here—witness how well the heel and can are composed above—but it’s moderated by the more naturalistic look, making the episode flow better. It also means that this is the first of Aoki’s New York episodes that actually feels like it takes place in the New York—it‘s a bit empty (probably a consequence of the expense of animating extras), but it manages to capture a bit of run-down Lower East Side in the texture of the backgrounds.
Finally, it’s because the characterization works better. One of my big problems with “Diamonds” was with how annoying the main villains were—dumb, annoying, squeaky-voiced, every flavor of obnoxious. A key shift—in addition to better voice-acting—is that Vivian and the conmen, though hardly bright, aren’t actually the villains. “A Cat for You! Dried Bonito for Me!” is as much their story as it is Lupin and company’s, and it is a true comedy in the classic tradition—everyone gets a happy ending.
Recommended?
Yes.
107 A Wedding Ring Is an Accursed Trap
Although Fujiko’s key to a lot of episodes, she’s rarely the actual protagonist. This is one of the rare—perhaps the only in any Lupin media, barring her own series—exceptions. It’s an oddly intimate portrait, too—we start with Fujiko’s dream/nightmare of marrying Lupin (with Zenigata officiating), moving on to her surprisingly elegant morning routine. We also see her formulating a plan to steal the Hope Diamond and share it with Lupin, seeing our standard plot from a reversed point-of-view.
There’s usually a bit of karmic payback in the Lupin gang’s schemes, denying them the loot for the sake of humor or karma or standards-and-practices. If there’s any judgment about their activities it’s cosmic, and we in the audience are usually firmly on their side. That universal judgment is actively personified here with a little demon guarding the Hope. Also unusually, there’s also a bit of judgment in the episode’s treatment of our leads, mainly Fujiko.
The demon’s antics are depicted as something of a just comeuppance for Fujiko’s greed and manipulations, which feels very off. We watch this show for, well, greed, manipulation, and revenge, in this series treated in a very lighthearted manner but greed, manipulation and revenge nonetheless. It can’t help but feel like Fujiko’s being singled out a bit because her method of thieving—one that’s often better at yielding results than Lupin’s more extravagant and gadget-oriented modus operandi—is somehow wrong. Unladylike might be another way of putting it—it’s hard to avoid the feeling that Fujiko’s judged more harshly for being a thief, to somebecause, because she’s Fujiko.
And ultimately that sours the episode for me—it would be a perfectly fine little trifle on its own, with the added appeal of a slightly different POV. But there’s an odd shadow of judgment that’s cast over what should be a guilty pleasure.
Recommended?
It has its moments but ultimately falters for me.
Stray Observations
• As the Hope Diamond theft implies, this takes place in DC. Strangely we don’t get much in the way of monuments, but we go get a fair amount of bland, postwar buildings and traffic, so it feels authentic enough. The animators clearly had a lot of fun with the traffic, too—it’s one of the best car-spotting episodes, featuring a Corvair, Alfetta, and other interesting midcentury sedans.
• We get a sequence near some cliffs—I guess Lupin and Fujiko went all the way out to Appalachia in the course of a few seconds—and after a crash an actual (and lame) English pun: “I’m tired.”
• In the Smithsonian Lupin stands face-to-face with a guillotine from the French Revolution—doubly threatening given his (possible) noble ancenstry and the fact that the death by guillotine was still on the books in France as of this episode’s airing (the final execution happened in 1977, though).
Next week we look for “The Iron Cutter Sword with Blues” (108) wonder “Is the Invader Safe Open?” (111).
I mainly mention this because it was a Telecom-directed episode. There’s some interesting stuff going on thematically under the surface. Lupin holds up the Heike crab as an example of the transfiguration of the samurai from The Tale of the Heike; if you’ve seen the original Cosmos you’ll recall that this is an example of artificial selection, where crabs with samurai-like faces are preferentially thrown back. There’s a sort of parallel evolution happening with the Heike’s final heir, though degeneration would be more appropriate. His sexual proclivities won’t result in the production of an heir—his head more towards serial killing more than anything else. That’ obviously creepy and threatening, but so is his chief advisor, who advises that Fujiko be kept alive at least as breeding stock.
This indictment of hereditary royalty’s strong (and, in more explicit form, presages Cagliostro’s condemnation of the sexual politics of the institution), but to a large extent we’ve seen this before in “A Bridal Gown Doesn’t Suit Fujiko”. We’ve hit one of the big problems with this fourth and final season for Lupin III Part II: exhaustion. There’s a fair amount more recycling here. There’s also a degree of desperation, throwing stuff on the wall and seeing what sticks. “Bridal Gown” is a tightly-constructd episode that manages to extract a fair amount of suspense from its simple setup. “Demon’s Head Island,” on the other hand, avoids building suspense and fills time with all manner of gimmickry and gadgetry, another fourth series trademark. It also sets the tone for future episodes in a couple of other ways: focusing on the Lupin gang penetrating or escaping a fortified setting and a generally darker, more adult (though not necessarily more mature) tone. Both of these will pay off later, but not here.
These all contribute to the episode’s problems, but the big one has to be with Fujiko’s role, which is, like many of this episode’s issues, not unique to this installment. She ends up trapped and can do little but yell “Help, Lupin!” over and over again. It’s a bit annoying, and a stark contrast to the character’s ability to take initiative in other episodes in this series. Even when Fujiko ended up in a similar situation in “Bridal Gown” it was because part of her and Lupin’s plan involved putting her in such danger—it was a risk they knew they were taking. I’m not really a fan of damsel Fujiko in most cases, and I’d say it’s a knock against the second series as a whole for really establishing this aspect of her character, at least in animation (compare this to the only rescue Fujiko episode of the original series, “An Assassin Sings the Blues,” where the fact that someone’s managed to incapacitate her establishes the situation as dangerous and, even after the rescue, she manages to fire the episode’s concluding shot).
Recommended?
No—although Telecom episodes are usually a cut above the median, this episode’s mainly noteworthy for how well it showcases this season’s, and series’s, weaknesses.
106 A Cat for You! Dried Bonito for Me!
Self-aware humor can be difficult to pull off—knowing you’re telling an unfunny story does not, on its own, rescue an unfunny story. Parody of comedy is likewise difficult. “A Car for You! Dried Bonito for Me!” manages to pull off both, serving as an effective send-up of Lupin III Part II’s more ridiculous episodes.
it helps that, while the episode is fairly self-reflexive, it isn’t really meta. There’s no fourth wall-breaking here, with all the humor happening within the episode’s narrative world, with the broader parody of Lupin episodes coming from the audience’s own knowledge of such episodes. The loot of this episode is pretty ridiculous. It’s a pure media invention. Vivian, an aspiring actress whose aspirations are floundering, decides to claim that Lupin stole something of hers as a publicity stunt. Not having thought this through, she improvises a story about a cat that sharpens pencils. Most of the reporters walk out but one—a kid with hsi own self-published Child Times—stays behind, and the story ends up spreading.
This has two results. One is that Lupin finds himself accused of stealing a cat, which he thinks will hurt his dangerous reputation. I think this exchange says it all:
This reflects, of course, how Lupin’s rough edges have been sanded off over time. In any event Lupin and the gang now have to find and return said pencil-sharpening cat to squash any such rumors. Of course, the other result is that a couple of small-time cons do present a pencil-sharpening cat, turning Lupin’s fruitless search into a manic chase.
This is another New York-based Yuzo Aoki comedy, and while it has some similarities with [/a]“Diamonds Gleam in a Robot’s Eye” it manages to avoid that episode’s worst pitfalls. Partly that’s due to making the silliness a plot point rather than a condition of the story, but it’s also due to a more even feeling overall. But it’s also due to the new look.
The Castle of Cagliostro, largely animated in the hiatus between seasons three and four, wields wide influence over this season’s look. The fourth season’s character design, color palette, and overall look were all tweaked to harmonize with Cagliostro, reigning in the episode-by-episode fluctuations in look that characterized the third season. This is particularly noteworthy in Aoki’s case, given that his episodes were often among the most flamboyant. There’s still a fair amount of his flat abstraction here—witness how well the heel and can are composed above—but it’s moderated by the more naturalistic look, making the episode flow better. It also means that this is the first of Aoki’s New York episodes that actually feels like it takes place in the New York—it‘s a bit empty (probably a consequence of the expense of animating extras), but it manages to capture a bit of run-down Lower East Side in the texture of the backgrounds.
Finally, it’s because the characterization works better. One of my big problems with “Diamonds” was with how annoying the main villains were—dumb, annoying, squeaky-voiced, every flavor of obnoxious. A key shift—in addition to better voice-acting—is that Vivian and the conmen, though hardly bright, aren’t actually the villains. “A Cat for You! Dried Bonito for Me!” is as much their story as it is Lupin and company’s, and it is a true comedy in the classic tradition—everyone gets a happy ending.
Recommended?
Yes.
107 A Wedding Ring Is an Accursed Trap
Although Fujiko’s key to a lot of episodes, she’s rarely the actual protagonist. This is one of the rare—perhaps the only in any Lupin media, barring her own series—exceptions. It’s an oddly intimate portrait, too—we start with Fujiko’s dream/nightmare of marrying Lupin (with Zenigata officiating), moving on to her surprisingly elegant morning routine. We also see her formulating a plan to steal the Hope Diamond and share it with Lupin, seeing our standard plot from a reversed point-of-view.
There’s usually a bit of karmic payback in the Lupin gang’s schemes, denying them the loot for the sake of humor or karma or standards-and-practices. If there’s any judgment about their activities it’s cosmic, and we in the audience are usually firmly on their side. That universal judgment is actively personified here with a little demon guarding the Hope. Also unusually, there’s also a bit of judgment in the episode’s treatment of our leads, mainly Fujiko.
The demon’s antics are depicted as something of a just comeuppance for Fujiko’s greed and manipulations, which feels very off. We watch this show for, well, greed, manipulation, and revenge, in this series treated in a very lighthearted manner but greed, manipulation and revenge nonetheless. It can’t help but feel like Fujiko’s being singled out a bit because her method of thieving—one that’s often better at yielding results than Lupin’s more extravagant and gadget-oriented modus operandi—is somehow wrong. Unladylike might be another way of putting it—it’s hard to avoid the feeling that Fujiko’s judged more harshly for being a thief, to somebecause, because she’s Fujiko.
And ultimately that sours the episode for me—it would be a perfectly fine little trifle on its own, with the added appeal of a slightly different POV. But there’s an odd shadow of judgment that’s cast over what should be a guilty pleasure.
Recommended?
It has its moments but ultimately falters for me.
Stray Observations
• As the Hope Diamond theft implies, this takes place in DC. Strangely we don’t get much in the way of monuments, but we go get a fair amount of bland, postwar buildings and traffic, so it feels authentic enough. The animators clearly had a lot of fun with the traffic, too—it’s one of the best car-spotting episodes, featuring a Corvair, Alfetta, and other interesting midcentury sedans.
• We get a sequence near some cliffs—I guess Lupin and Fujiko went all the way out to Appalachia in the course of a few seconds—and after a crash an actual (and lame) English pun: “I’m tired.”
• In the Smithsonian Lupin stands face-to-face with a guillotine from the French Revolution—doubly threatening given his (possible) noble ancenstry and the fact that the death by guillotine was still on the books in France as of this episode’s airing (the final execution happened in 1977, though).
Next week we look for “The Iron Cutter Sword with Blues” (108) wonder “Is the Invader Safe Open?” (111).