Post by Jean Luc de Lemur on Oct 10, 2016 15:14:13 GMT -5
Blood Seal-Eternal Mermaid & Where We Stand Now
“In Rome, I conversed with philosophers who felt that to extend man’s life is to extend his agony and multiply his deaths.” Jorge Luis Borges, “The Immortals” (trans. James E. Irby)
Green vs. Red asked why we watch (or, from the animators’ perspective, make) Lupin films; Blood Seal-Eternal Mermaid asks a similar question from an in-universe perspective—why is Lupin a thief, and more specifically why is he this kind of thief, going for grand schemes when he could apply his intelligence to much more lucrative lower-hanging fruit? Much as Green vs. Red brought up questions of continuity in the Lupin name. It turns Arsène I was after the eponymous eternal mermaid’s treasure, locked behind the titular seal, while Lupin III gets a teenage hanger-on, Maki, who dreams of becoming a thief herself.
Unlike Green vs. Red, which wallows in its search for meaning, Blood Seal lets these big thematic questions give the story flavor but keep them from overpowering it. This also allows the questions to be resolved without being totally answered—in the end, Lupin isn’t totally sure why he’s the sort of thief he is, either. And it’s oddly satisfying—who can really point out our motivations for our work or play, anyway? All he knows is that he enjoys the challenge and the adventure, and that’s enough. It’s the same meta-message we get almost every time in the last ten years when Lupin’s reached for meaning, but there’s something refreshing about the light touch here.
And the film’s wise to keep the focus on the adventure, because it’s one of the most credible ones in the whole run of TV specials. Blood Seal, in addition to the bits of spice with Lupin’s search for purpose, has great action and a fairly unique plot tying into the Japanese legend of the ningyo—translated here as mermaid—and Buddhist attitudes about immortality and impermanence. It’s an interesting twist on the Euro-American fountain of youth narrative I’m familiar with—immortality here is less a reward than it is a curse.
Blood Seal falls a little short of being a masterpiece—its story could have used some more focus and tightening, and there’s still some reliance on hoary special clichés (a young, orphaned tagger-along for Lupin, a secret society-military contractor villain, Fujiko’s multiple back-and-forths throughout the story), but even those are handled fairly well. The old formula has not been abandoned, but it finally feels refreshed here. And while the film has a few too many parts, the chase and action sequences stand out as among the best in the television specials.
Part of that might be due to the fact that there was a major behind-the scenes changeover. Blood Seal marks the largest cast changeover since the shift from the original pilot film to the first series, with new actors for Fujiko, Zenigata and Goemon. Accompanying the partial changeover in cast is a light makeover in appearance, abandoning the recognizable but unremarkable look of most specials for something a bit more classic-looking. While Blood Seal is often referred to as “Miyazakian” in its look (more on that later), I see it as more a hybrid of the various late-seventies looks, recapturing the feel of the best of that era without being tied down to any specific installment.
In the context of Blood Seal’s story “Miyazakian” refers to a bit more than just look, though—Lupin’s drawn into the plot, in part, by Maki, who wants to become a thief in part to steal her surrogate older sister, Misa, back from the villain. The bond between the two girls is given a fair amount of time—this is one of the few Lupin installments that actually passes the Bechdel test—and Lupin with an honorable justification for his mission. Although the Blood Seal addresses why Lupin steals, it definitely puts him more in the role of gentleman than cambrioleur (the same goes for Lupin grand-père).
If this special is Miyazakian, though, it’s also Miyazakian in the sense that Nausicaä or Princess Mononoke—it really earns the name Blood Seal. While watching the opening sequence I was under the impression that we were getting our typical soft-pedaled Lupin TV violence—guns shot out of hands, sliced muzzles, that sort of thing. I was surprised to see the blood splattered all over the walls in the aftermath. Blood Seal must set the franchise record for exanguination—it’s full of slices, splatters, sprays, ancient ritual devices that seem more like a product of the Classic Maya than the medieval Japanese, and even a beheading on a resurrected grotesque merman. Wild swings in tone between Lupin installments is nothing new, but this has some of wildest swings within one—I honestly found it kind of exciting, but to each their own.
This tonal collision reflects another way Blood Seal was a turning point—after this special the Lupin animated franchise would fork in two. Less than four months the very different The Woman Called Fujiko, which doubled down on the strange, took the aesthetic back past the late seventies and went full period piece, and had Fujiko lead the story. And since then the two aesthetics—the conventional look of Blood Seal and the more intensely stylized look of Fujiko—have roughly alternated, running parallel without overlapping. Two different versions of the franchise, coexisting at once and each occupying their own niche.
Blood Seal was also the beginning of the end of the television specials—it was followed by the terminally bland The Travels of Marco Polo-Another Page and the shameless Miyazaki ripoff Princess of the Breeze-Hidden City in the Sky (the title’s all you really need; while I haven’t seen this one everything I’ve read makes it sound dire). Since then the specials have either been in the Woman Called Fujiko continuity (Jigen’s Gravestone and the upcoming Goemon-centric one) or were re-edited from the new, “Blue Jacket” series (more on that below). The yearly specials are no more, and Lupin seems to have put the red jacket in the back of the closet for now.
For all it does right, Blood Seal failed to solve the main problem of the specials. Fujiko and its spinoffs continuity, like like Episode 0 have the advantage of being prequels, giving the characters a journey. Lupin gets something of an arc, but it’s a gentle confirmation of what we already know and like about him. Most development and suspense comes from how the gang interacts with the guest characters, or from what development the guest characters have themselves. Some of the later specials seem to straddle the line between being Lupin stories with prominent guests and stories where Lupin and the gang guest-star in someone else’s story. Blood Seal wisely sticks to the former—these one-offs are seldom as interesting as our leads, and they usually don’t have the built-in store of goodwill (or if they do they get it via cliché, something Blood Seal isn’t immune to with its orphaned moppets).
But Blood Seal does have strong echoes in the recent “Blue Jacket” series. “Blue Jacket” is better looking, but the design—modernized late-seventies—is similar. There’s a degree of reliance on guest stars, sinking some episodes, but the major recurring guest cast—Rebecca, Nyx, Robson—gets a degree of development that the specials don’t allow for, and the division into episodes allows gives both gives the main arc a chance to breathe and allows for smaller moments in there. And both Blood Seal and “Blue Jacket” make a point of emphasizing Lupin’s more chivalrous aspects. He’s not quite a static character in the fourth series—the extra room to breathe allows for his relationship with Rebecca to develop—but Lupin’s still the an archetypal gentleman-cambrioleur.
Although the specials and “Blue Jacket” are certainly more family-friendly than Fujiko and its spinoffs, I don’t think tone, content, or even look (“Blue Jacket” looks to me like it owes a bit to Jigen’s Gravestone) is the main thing that separates them. “Blue Jacket” touches on mature themes, if a bit less intensely, and Fujiko and its spinoffs have a sense of humor and play, if one that’s less broad. The main difference, I think, is in who Lupin is. While in Blood Seal we see Lupin reflect on why he goes on adventures, in the first episode of The Woman Called Fujiko we actually see Lupin starting to seek greater challenges. Since he’s taking bigger risks for the first time, Lupin’s reach might exceed his grasp, so Lupin’s suspense in-episode is our suspense in the audience.
It’s notable that in both Blood Seal and “Blue Jacket” Lupin essentially takes on a student. The Lupin we see here knows what he’s doing—we’re seeing a character who’s grown into a master thief, and the enjoyment comes from knowing that, whatever might happen, we’re watching someone fully in control.
Recommended? Yes—Blood Seal is certainly flawed, but has a measure of extra energy and creativity that the other specials lack.
Stray Observations
• A number of contemporary reviews of Blood Seal criticize its use of fantasy, which is only barely papered-over with some pseudoscientific speculation at the end. I find this kind of odd—Blood Seal is one of the more Indiana Jones-ish installments and does it well, and frankly the pure fantasy works better for me than the clichéd action-sci-fi/spy-fi that features in a lot of the specials. And some degree of pure fantasy’s been in Lupin from almost the beginning.
• I ended up starting a The Woman Called Fujiko Mine rewatch and damn I’d forgotten how good it is—this was actually, after Cagliostro, my entrepôt to Lupin, so I wasn’t sure how it would hold up. And damn, it’s still one of the best Lupin iterations.
• There’s no connection between Blood Seal and Borges—I just happened to be reading him and the quote seemed appropriate (though “The Immortals” is probably the closest Borges comes to an adventure story that takes place outside of a library).
Next time is probably going to be some time in the future—I’ve read one volume of the original comic and would like to read a bit more before making a write-up, but that’s going to take time and that’s a luxury I don’t have at the moment. So, this space will become active again, but not necessarily soon.[/i]
“In Rome, I conversed with philosophers who felt that to extend man’s life is to extend his agony and multiply his deaths.” Jorge Luis Borges, “The Immortals” (trans. James E. Irby)
Green vs. Red asked why we watch (or, from the animators’ perspective, make) Lupin films; Blood Seal-Eternal Mermaid asks a similar question from an in-universe perspective—why is Lupin a thief, and more specifically why is he this kind of thief, going for grand schemes when he could apply his intelligence to much more lucrative lower-hanging fruit? Much as Green vs. Red brought up questions of continuity in the Lupin name. It turns Arsène I was after the eponymous eternal mermaid’s treasure, locked behind the titular seal, while Lupin III gets a teenage hanger-on, Maki, who dreams of becoming a thief herself.
Unlike Green vs. Red, which wallows in its search for meaning, Blood Seal lets these big thematic questions give the story flavor but keep them from overpowering it. This also allows the questions to be resolved without being totally answered—in the end, Lupin isn’t totally sure why he’s the sort of thief he is, either. And it’s oddly satisfying—who can really point out our motivations for our work or play, anyway? All he knows is that he enjoys the challenge and the adventure, and that’s enough. It’s the same meta-message we get almost every time in the last ten years when Lupin’s reached for meaning, but there’s something refreshing about the light touch here.
And the film’s wise to keep the focus on the adventure, because it’s one of the most credible ones in the whole run of TV specials. Blood Seal, in addition to the bits of spice with Lupin’s search for purpose, has great action and a fairly unique plot tying into the Japanese legend of the ningyo—translated here as mermaid—and Buddhist attitudes about immortality and impermanence. It’s an interesting twist on the Euro-American fountain of youth narrative I’m familiar with—immortality here is less a reward than it is a curse.
Blood Seal falls a little short of being a masterpiece—its story could have used some more focus and tightening, and there’s still some reliance on hoary special clichés (a young, orphaned tagger-along for Lupin, a secret society-military contractor villain, Fujiko’s multiple back-and-forths throughout the story), but even those are handled fairly well. The old formula has not been abandoned, but it finally feels refreshed here. And while the film has a few too many parts, the chase and action sequences stand out as among the best in the television specials.
Part of that might be due to the fact that there was a major behind-the scenes changeover. Blood Seal marks the largest cast changeover since the shift from the original pilot film to the first series, with new actors for Fujiko, Zenigata and Goemon. Accompanying the partial changeover in cast is a light makeover in appearance, abandoning the recognizable but unremarkable look of most specials for something a bit more classic-looking. While Blood Seal is often referred to as “Miyazakian” in its look (more on that later), I see it as more a hybrid of the various late-seventies looks, recapturing the feel of the best of that era without being tied down to any specific installment.
In the context of Blood Seal’s story “Miyazakian” refers to a bit more than just look, though—Lupin’s drawn into the plot, in part, by Maki, who wants to become a thief in part to steal her surrogate older sister, Misa, back from the villain. The bond between the two girls is given a fair amount of time—this is one of the few Lupin installments that actually passes the Bechdel test—and Lupin with an honorable justification for his mission. Although the Blood Seal addresses why Lupin steals, it definitely puts him more in the role of gentleman than cambrioleur (the same goes for Lupin grand-père).
If this special is Miyazakian, though, it’s also Miyazakian in the sense that Nausicaä or Princess Mononoke—it really earns the name Blood Seal. While watching the opening sequence I was under the impression that we were getting our typical soft-pedaled Lupin TV violence—guns shot out of hands, sliced muzzles, that sort of thing. I was surprised to see the blood splattered all over the walls in the aftermath. Blood Seal must set the franchise record for exanguination—it’s full of slices, splatters, sprays, ancient ritual devices that seem more like a product of the Classic Maya than the medieval Japanese, and even a beheading on a resurrected grotesque merman. Wild swings in tone between Lupin installments is nothing new, but this has some of wildest swings within one—I honestly found it kind of exciting, but to each their own.
This tonal collision reflects another way Blood Seal was a turning point—after this special the Lupin animated franchise would fork in two. Less than four months the very different The Woman Called Fujiko, which doubled down on the strange, took the aesthetic back past the late seventies and went full period piece, and had Fujiko lead the story. And since then the two aesthetics—the conventional look of Blood Seal and the more intensely stylized look of Fujiko—have roughly alternated, running parallel without overlapping. Two different versions of the franchise, coexisting at once and each occupying their own niche.
Blood Seal was also the beginning of the end of the television specials—it was followed by the terminally bland The Travels of Marco Polo-Another Page and the shameless Miyazaki ripoff Princess of the Breeze-Hidden City in the Sky (the title’s all you really need; while I haven’t seen this one everything I’ve read makes it sound dire). Since then the specials have either been in the Woman Called Fujiko continuity (Jigen’s Gravestone and the upcoming Goemon-centric one) or were re-edited from the new, “Blue Jacket” series (more on that below). The yearly specials are no more, and Lupin seems to have put the red jacket in the back of the closet for now.
For all it does right, Blood Seal failed to solve the main problem of the specials. Fujiko and its spinoffs continuity, like like Episode 0 have the advantage of being prequels, giving the characters a journey. Lupin gets something of an arc, but it’s a gentle confirmation of what we already know and like about him. Most development and suspense comes from how the gang interacts with the guest characters, or from what development the guest characters have themselves. Some of the later specials seem to straddle the line between being Lupin stories with prominent guests and stories where Lupin and the gang guest-star in someone else’s story. Blood Seal wisely sticks to the former—these one-offs are seldom as interesting as our leads, and they usually don’t have the built-in store of goodwill (or if they do they get it via cliché, something Blood Seal isn’t immune to with its orphaned moppets).
But Blood Seal does have strong echoes in the recent “Blue Jacket” series. “Blue Jacket” is better looking, but the design—modernized late-seventies—is similar. There’s a degree of reliance on guest stars, sinking some episodes, but the major recurring guest cast—Rebecca, Nyx, Robson—gets a degree of development that the specials don’t allow for, and the division into episodes allows gives both gives the main arc a chance to breathe and allows for smaller moments in there. And both Blood Seal and “Blue Jacket” make a point of emphasizing Lupin’s more chivalrous aspects. He’s not quite a static character in the fourth series—the extra room to breathe allows for his relationship with Rebecca to develop—but Lupin’s still the an archetypal gentleman-cambrioleur.
Although the specials and “Blue Jacket” are certainly more family-friendly than Fujiko and its spinoffs, I don’t think tone, content, or even look (“Blue Jacket” looks to me like it owes a bit to Jigen’s Gravestone) is the main thing that separates them. “Blue Jacket” touches on mature themes, if a bit less intensely, and Fujiko and its spinoffs have a sense of humor and play, if one that’s less broad. The main difference, I think, is in who Lupin is. While in Blood Seal we see Lupin reflect on why he goes on adventures, in the first episode of The Woman Called Fujiko we actually see Lupin starting to seek greater challenges. Since he’s taking bigger risks for the first time, Lupin’s reach might exceed his grasp, so Lupin’s suspense in-episode is our suspense in the audience.
It’s notable that in both Blood Seal and “Blue Jacket” Lupin essentially takes on a student. The Lupin we see here knows what he’s doing—we’re seeing a character who’s grown into a master thief, and the enjoyment comes from knowing that, whatever might happen, we’re watching someone fully in control.
Recommended? Yes—Blood Seal is certainly flawed, but has a measure of extra energy and creativity that the other specials lack.
Stray Observations
• A number of contemporary reviews of Blood Seal criticize its use of fantasy, which is only barely papered-over with some pseudoscientific speculation at the end. I find this kind of odd—Blood Seal is one of the more Indiana Jones-ish installments and does it well, and frankly the pure fantasy works better for me than the clichéd action-sci-fi/spy-fi that features in a lot of the specials. And some degree of pure fantasy’s been in Lupin from almost the beginning.
• I ended up starting a The Woman Called Fujiko Mine rewatch and damn I’d forgotten how good it is—this was actually, after Cagliostro, my entrepôt to Lupin, so I wasn’t sure how it would hold up. And damn, it’s still one of the best Lupin iterations.
• There’s no connection between Blood Seal and Borges—I just happened to be reading him and the quote seemed appropriate (though “The Immortals” is probably the closest Borges comes to an adventure story that takes place outside of a library).
Next time is probably going to be some time in the future—I’ve read one volume of the original comic and would like to read a bit more before making a write-up, but that’s going to take time and that’s a luxury I don’t have at the moment. So, this space will become active again, but not necessarily soon.[/i]
