Post by Jean Luc de Lemur on Jan 13, 2022 23:23:03 GMT -5
Lupin III: Part VI
Episode 0, “The Times”
The series starts with a little one-off “Episode Zero” which serves as a goodbye to Kiyoshi Kobayashi, who has been voicing Jigen since the proof-of-concept film from 1969. It’s a nice little homage to the character—Miyazaki semi-controversially said that there’s nothing to Jigen beyond shooting, eating and drinking, and this embraces that, with Jigen repeatedly saying he wants nothing more than a good meal and some booze. It’s always good when they highlight the low-key bon vivant side of Jigen’s character; I rewatched the first series recently and it was nice seeing a Jigen that hadn’t been flanderized into sullen seriousness. Still, Zenigata’s on the gang’s tail and Jigen bests him with the next best thing to food and booze: bullets and booze. There’s nothing really substantive, the “is our franchise too old for this?” act is itself kind of old, and I’m not sure if it’s the best message to celebrate an actor who’s retiring (same with the repeated “I just want to relax”-type statements), but it’s nice and filling.
It’s on the high high end of the category but I’d still go with Inessential. I kind of think one of Kobayashi’s last regular, in Fujiko Mine’s Lie, is a better send-off as it’s his last go as a kind of cheerful Jigen in classic moment-grabbing supporting character mode.
Episodes 1-12 [spoilers, though I don’t say much about plot]
I knew a come-down from Part V was almost inevitable—Part V worked on a high level in terms of characterization and storytelling while remaining (more-or-less) all-ages
accessible, balanced modern storytelling with classic reference, and was just fun overall. I expected a follow-up on the level of Part IV, which tried to strike the same balance, but didn’t do it quite as well and added a bit of goofiness, but was still good and fun overall. Part VI is divided in two so I cannot give a full overview yet, but as far as the “first act” of Part VI is concerned, it is a major departure.
The departure is that Part VI, so far, sucks, and sucks very hard. These first twelve episodes—termed the “first act” as there’s a split in story and creative teams between the two parts of the series—have a decent case for being the worst stretch of Lupin ever. They’re bad in multiple dimensions, meaning there’s often no angle to even attempt a redemptive reading of most of these episodes. They’re just bad.
Like the previous two series, there’s a split between arc and standalone episodes. The leads’ character designs seem less a synthesis and evolution of previous incarnations (as in Parts IV and V) than an averaging and genericizing. While “Episode 0” shares the Parts IV-V color scheme and character designs, Lupin’s jacket unexpectedly shifts back to green, and with a purple shirt, slightly more rounded (in Lupin’s case often bulb-headed), bigger-eyed character designs too. It all looks like a step backward, and gives the impression of a series is aimed younger. The secondary characters are very blah, middle-of-the-road anime types. Where budget really shows is in any action scene, especially when it requires some kind of vehicle. Low-res cars swerve back-and-forth in front of paper-flat, photo-filtered backgrounds. The show just seems cheap, overall, and it’s embarrassing both in the context of recent entries in this franchise and television generally.
The poor action’s especially fatal because Lupin really does rely on verve to get through things, and this series really verve to make up for its poor storytelling. The main arc isn’t really interesting—there’s a shadowy organization operating in the shadows of the UK government, Lupin gets involved, and so does a modernized Sherlock Holmes, with the murdered John Watson’s tween daughter tagging along.
The idea of a Lupin-vs-Holmes story dates back to Maurice Leblanc himself, who set the original Lupin against (not kidding) Herlock Sholmes (it also first with the rotating European countries of Parts IV and V). Unfortunately the modernized Holmes characters are all very dull and we spend a lot of time with them. Young Watson’s a stereotypical modest-but-with-a-twinge-of-girlish-enthusiasm anime private (well, public) school girl (with none of Ami or Dolma’s drive or personality). Holmes strikes me not so much as a modern anime Holmes but even worse, a boring contemporary Holmes from a by the numbers live-action drama. The Lupin gang’s essentially all at their personality ground states, barely characterized beyond what’s absolutely plot-necessary, sanded down nearly to spheres.
There’s an expectation for these characters to be clever and none of them really are—they’re able to point out contrivances that move the story forward, but that’s not quite the same thing. The arc’s incredibly padded, mainly to give the illusion of intrigue and deduction rather than simple added complication. This includes devices like putting large parts of the arc in flashback, or revealing plot elements at odd moments as a bad substitute for actual surprise. Some of this would be forgivable but there’s barely any action or character (no verve!), so the whole thing unfolds via a lot of talking, expositing, and explaining. It’s not hard to follow, but it’s hard to muster attention.
For the standalone episodes they made the interesting—and you’d think good—choice of outsourcing them to a bunch of different guest writers, under a broad rubric that they do literary homages too. Even with outside help these episodes share the main arc’s weaknesses. Main cast characterization remains blah with guest characters staying infuriatingly cutesy or generic. A lot of the guest writing’s pretty dumb too, and mostly not winning dumb in the sense Lupin can often be. There’s also a “the Co-Prosperity Sphere wasn’t all bad” holodeck/time travel two-parter. 个屁!
More interesting, though, are the pair of episodes from anime auteur Mamoru Oshii. Oshii was originally tapped for what became The Legend of the Gold of Babylon but was fired in part for deviating too far from the Lupin formula (having an aged Lupin, for instance) and going too meta. Some of Oshii’s elements stayed in the film and others—including the major treasure, a fossilized angel—were incorporated into his short, abstract video animation “Angel’s egg”. He picks more from his draft film’s bones for his two episodes here.
The first, covering metafiction and pattern-breaking, is “The Killers in the diner,” a multi-layered quasi-adaptation of Hemingway’s short story, starting with a relatively straightforward adaptation with our leads playing the roles of the story’s protagonists. It’s fun to see—the pair of killers is clearly Lupin and Jigen, for instance, but they’re not disguised as they usually are in this franchise: we can still tell who they are—it’s not just some unusually-good mask, and while you can tell it’s their voice actors they aren’t really doing character voices. It also reveals how much better Oshii’s grasp of these characters is in that they seem like themselves rather than placeholders, despite the more-convincing-than-usual disguise. It’s the only funny episode of the series, and along with Oshii’s other story the only to have a hint of ruthlessness. The transition to the broader story reveals some of the same flaws as elsewhere in the season (namely an over-reliance on exposition, though it’s better executed here). The story may lack resolution, but so do a lot of other Lupin episodes—the only difference is that it’s in the foreground, not as they’re driving off into the distance. Though I’m in the minority on this, “The Killers in the diner” is the clear series highlight, and the only episode that stands up to multiple viewings.
Oshii’s second, “Darwin’s Bird,” starts another exposition dump, brutal but thankfully over early. After that it’s the best-paced of the half-series and again Oshii demonstrates a superior grasp of character, recognizing Fujiko’s a better choice for lead and using Lupin very well in two different roles (Fujiko and Lupin voice actors Miyuki Sawashiro and Kanichi Kurita are very good here). All of that just eases you to the probably-guessed-at conclusion. The visuals are a mixed bag, too—there are some of the best of the series, but near the conclusion they falter, though this might be partially the director’s intent.
Another thing that Oshii episodes have going for them is that neither of them are cute. There’s a real sense, given the less sophisticated character dynamics and plotting, that this was aimed at a younger audience. There are a lot of running or one-shot blandly innocent child or tween characters (we even get Lupin telling an angel-faced, tussled-haired tween Moriarty to stay out of trouble), and many of the adult characters are either cool and distant father figures à la our 21st century Herlock Sholmes or broad stereotypes. The song over the end credits, “Milk Tea,” is somehow cutesier than the 1985 series’s “Fairy Night,” and louder too. It’s rare a problem since there’s usually no mood for “Milk Tea” to step all, which is pretty damning in and of itself. Lupin’s usually unapologetic light entertainment, but so far Part VI shows how unsatisfying it is to be left with truly nothing after a half hour.
Overall, Not Recommended, a true 屎蛋 of a half-season, but…
Oshii’s “The Killers in the diner” gets a solid Recommended. As for his other entry, “Darwin’s Bird,” even without the me-specific objections I think it’s still too shallow, twist-dependent, and in the shadow of Oshii’s other work to get a recommendation.
Stray observations
• The series’s second half is being made under different creative direction, and the one episode out is both more promising and a lot closer to what I expected (“Milk Tea” is gone too).
• The end of the big UK arc is a pretty clever trope subversion—the big shady organization has seen so much institutional rot that it’s turned absolutely powerless. That would be a cool reveal were it done in an interesting way, i.e. one with actual detective work and one that didn’t seem like an excuse to avoid spending money on a big action finale.
• Albert, the shady French intelligence officer from the last series, reappears here. It doesn’t matter.
• Zenigata’s given a sort of minder-assistant in the form of a Detective Yata. Giving Zenigata a companion’s a good idea that never seems to quite work but Yata seems low-key enough to actually succeed in the role. However, we can’t judge here because we barely see either of them anyway.
• The new Jigen’s fine, but the character is mostly in what’s become his default mode; interestingly they seem to be trying to bring in Kobayashi’s age rather than starting from a younger point. Really, though, there’s little to say about the characterization of everybody because nothing interesting’s done with them.
• Fujiko’s unusually nice and good this series so far, which adds to the “aimed younger” impression.
• I couldn’t muster much enthusiasm for the car-spotting in this given that most of them looked like they were made in SketchUp in 2012, but we get some stereotypically British ones like 80s Jags and Astons, with Lupin in a Triumph TR4 (also seen in “An Assassin sings the blues”, driven by Fujiko, and driven by Lupin in Goodbye, partner). Lestrade drives, of all things, the French civil servant’s favorite, a Citroën C6.
• Oddly, every watch we see up close is a Jaeger-LeCoultre.
• I really do worry about the reception of Part V—I definitely got the impression this was made on a much lower budget, so maybe Part V wasn’t the success I’d hoped it would have been. That would also explain the reversion to a less sophisticated type of storytelling as well. I hope that’s not the case, as I’ve been spoiled by basically a pretty continuous run of decent-to-great Lupin since I first watched Cagliostro six or so years ago.
• I’ve seen this called “worst since the 80s,” with the implication clearly being “worst since Pink Jacket.” I don’t think Pink Jacket really was bad, though—it just never did anything that stood out. When was the last almost entirely mediocre twelve-episode stretch? I’m tempted to say way the back in the Red Jacket series, though calling this the “worst since Part II” seems wrong because a couple of those seasons were 52 episodes long and produced by multiple companies, just a completely different paradigm in television production.
As the second half of the series is currently airing weekly, eventually, as in a few months, we’ll see how the rest of Part VI turns out.
Next week, though, I review the 1995 theatrical film, Farewell to Nostradamus. Is it a lost treasure, or deservedly obscure?
Episode 0, “The Times”
The series starts with a little one-off “Episode Zero” which serves as a goodbye to Kiyoshi Kobayashi, who has been voicing Jigen since the proof-of-concept film from 1969. It’s a nice little homage to the character—Miyazaki semi-controversially said that there’s nothing to Jigen beyond shooting, eating and drinking, and this embraces that, with Jigen repeatedly saying he wants nothing more than a good meal and some booze. It’s always good when they highlight the low-key bon vivant side of Jigen’s character; I rewatched the first series recently and it was nice seeing a Jigen that hadn’t been flanderized into sullen seriousness. Still, Zenigata’s on the gang’s tail and Jigen bests him with the next best thing to food and booze: bullets and booze. There’s nothing really substantive, the “is our franchise too old for this?” act is itself kind of old, and I’m not sure if it’s the best message to celebrate an actor who’s retiring (same with the repeated “I just want to relax”-type statements), but it’s nice and filling.
It’s on the high high end of the category but I’d still go with Inessential. I kind of think one of Kobayashi’s last regular, in Fujiko Mine’s Lie, is a better send-off as it’s his last go as a kind of cheerful Jigen in classic moment-grabbing supporting character mode.
Episodes 1-12 [spoilers, though I don’t say much about plot]
I knew a come-down from Part V was almost inevitable—Part V worked on a high level in terms of characterization and storytelling while remaining (more-or-less) all-ages
accessible, balanced modern storytelling with classic reference, and was just fun overall. I expected a follow-up on the level of Part IV, which tried to strike the same balance, but didn’t do it quite as well and added a bit of goofiness, but was still good and fun overall. Part VI is divided in two so I cannot give a full overview yet, but as far as the “first act” of Part VI is concerned, it is a major departure.
The departure is that Part VI, so far, sucks, and sucks very hard. These first twelve episodes—termed the “first act” as there’s a split in story and creative teams between the two parts of the series—have a decent case for being the worst stretch of Lupin ever. They’re bad in multiple dimensions, meaning there’s often no angle to even attempt a redemptive reading of most of these episodes. They’re just bad.
Like the previous two series, there’s a split between arc and standalone episodes. The leads’ character designs seem less a synthesis and evolution of previous incarnations (as in Parts IV and V) than an averaging and genericizing. While “Episode 0” shares the Parts IV-V color scheme and character designs, Lupin’s jacket unexpectedly shifts back to green, and with a purple shirt, slightly more rounded (in Lupin’s case often bulb-headed), bigger-eyed character designs too. It all looks like a step backward, and gives the impression of a series is aimed younger. The secondary characters are very blah, middle-of-the-road anime types. Where budget really shows is in any action scene, especially when it requires some kind of vehicle. Low-res cars swerve back-and-forth in front of paper-flat, photo-filtered backgrounds. The show just seems cheap, overall, and it’s embarrassing both in the context of recent entries in this franchise and television generally.
The poor action’s especially fatal because Lupin really does rely on verve to get through things, and this series really verve to make up for its poor storytelling. The main arc isn’t really interesting—there’s a shadowy organization operating in the shadows of the UK government, Lupin gets involved, and so does a modernized Sherlock Holmes, with the murdered John Watson’s tween daughter tagging along.
The idea of a Lupin-vs-Holmes story dates back to Maurice Leblanc himself, who set the original Lupin against (not kidding) Herlock Sholmes (it also first with the rotating European countries of Parts IV and V). Unfortunately the modernized Holmes characters are all very dull and we spend a lot of time with them. Young Watson’s a stereotypical modest-but-with-a-twinge-of-girlish-enthusiasm anime private (well, public) school girl (with none of Ami or Dolma’s drive or personality). Holmes strikes me not so much as a modern anime Holmes but even worse, a boring contemporary Holmes from a by the numbers live-action drama. The Lupin gang’s essentially all at their personality ground states, barely characterized beyond what’s absolutely plot-necessary, sanded down nearly to spheres.
There’s an expectation for these characters to be clever and none of them really are—they’re able to point out contrivances that move the story forward, but that’s not quite the same thing. The arc’s incredibly padded, mainly to give the illusion of intrigue and deduction rather than simple added complication. This includes devices like putting large parts of the arc in flashback, or revealing plot elements at odd moments as a bad substitute for actual surprise. Some of this would be forgivable but there’s barely any action or character (no verve!), so the whole thing unfolds via a lot of talking, expositing, and explaining. It’s not hard to follow, but it’s hard to muster attention.
For the standalone episodes they made the interesting—and you’d think good—choice of outsourcing them to a bunch of different guest writers, under a broad rubric that they do literary homages too. Even with outside help these episodes share the main arc’s weaknesses. Main cast characterization remains blah with guest characters staying infuriatingly cutesy or generic. A lot of the guest writing’s pretty dumb too, and mostly not winning dumb in the sense Lupin can often be. There’s also a “the Co-Prosperity Sphere wasn’t all bad” holodeck/time travel two-parter. 个屁!
More interesting, though, are the pair of episodes from anime auteur Mamoru Oshii. Oshii was originally tapped for what became The Legend of the Gold of Babylon but was fired in part for deviating too far from the Lupin formula (having an aged Lupin, for instance) and going too meta. Some of Oshii’s elements stayed in the film and others—including the major treasure, a fossilized angel—were incorporated into his short, abstract video animation “Angel’s egg”. He picks more from his draft film’s bones for his two episodes here.
The first, covering metafiction and pattern-breaking, is “The Killers in the diner,” a multi-layered quasi-adaptation of Hemingway’s short story, starting with a relatively straightforward adaptation with our leads playing the roles of the story’s protagonists. It’s fun to see—the pair of killers is clearly Lupin and Jigen, for instance, but they’re not disguised as they usually are in this franchise: we can still tell who they are—it’s not just some unusually-good mask, and while you can tell it’s their voice actors they aren’t really doing character voices. It also reveals how much better Oshii’s grasp of these characters is in that they seem like themselves rather than placeholders, despite the more-convincing-than-usual disguise. It’s the only funny episode of the series, and along with Oshii’s other story the only to have a hint of ruthlessness. The transition to the broader story reveals some of the same flaws as elsewhere in the season (namely an over-reliance on exposition, though it’s better executed here). The story may lack resolution, but so do a lot of other Lupin episodes—the only difference is that it’s in the foreground, not as they’re driving off into the distance. Though I’m in the minority on this, “The Killers in the diner” is the clear series highlight, and the only episode that stands up to multiple viewings.
Oshii’s second, “Darwin’s Bird,” starts another exposition dump, brutal but thankfully over early. After that it’s the best-paced of the half-series and again Oshii demonstrates a superior grasp of character, recognizing Fujiko’s a better choice for lead and using Lupin very well in two different roles (Fujiko and Lupin voice actors Miyuki Sawashiro and Kanichi Kurita are very good here). All of that just eases you to the probably-guessed-at conclusion. The visuals are a mixed bag, too—there are some of the best of the series, but near the conclusion they falter, though this might be partially the director’s intent.
This time the angel skeleton is Satan’s, and we don’t get a good view probably out of a sense that it’s something our eyes should not see; I can’t tell if that was the intent, though, as neither the scene’s lighting nor the depictions of fossils in the episode overall very good.
That noted, for personal reasons (such as multiple graduate degrees in the geosciences, including a masters specialization paleo—something) I had a very hard time getting through the exposition and, despite the craftsmanship, I just couldn’t enjoy this one.Another thing that Oshii episodes have going for them is that neither of them are cute. There’s a real sense, given the less sophisticated character dynamics and plotting, that this was aimed at a younger audience. There are a lot of running or one-shot blandly innocent child or tween characters (we even get Lupin telling an angel-faced, tussled-haired tween Moriarty to stay out of trouble), and many of the adult characters are either cool and distant father figures à la our 21st century Herlock Sholmes or broad stereotypes. The song over the end credits, “Milk Tea,” is somehow cutesier than the 1985 series’s “Fairy Night,” and louder too. It’s rare a problem since there’s usually no mood for “Milk Tea” to step all, which is pretty damning in and of itself. Lupin’s usually unapologetic light entertainment, but so far Part VI shows how unsatisfying it is to be left with truly nothing after a half hour.
Overall, Not Recommended, a true 屎蛋 of a half-season, but…
Oshii’s “The Killers in the diner” gets a solid Recommended. As for his other entry, “Darwin’s Bird,” even without the me-specific objections I think it’s still too shallow, twist-dependent, and in the shadow of Oshii’s other work to get a recommendation.
Stray observations
• The series’s second half is being made under different creative direction, and the one episode out is both more promising and a lot closer to what I expected (“Milk Tea” is gone too).
• The end of the big UK arc is a pretty clever trope subversion—the big shady organization has seen so much institutional rot that it’s turned absolutely powerless. That would be a cool reveal were it done in an interesting way, i.e. one with actual detective work and one that didn’t seem like an excuse to avoid spending money on a big action finale.
• Albert, the shady French intelligence officer from the last series, reappears here. It doesn’t matter.
• Zenigata’s given a sort of minder-assistant in the form of a Detective Yata. Giving Zenigata a companion’s a good idea that never seems to quite work but Yata seems low-key enough to actually succeed in the role. However, we can’t judge here because we barely see either of them anyway.
• The new Jigen’s fine, but the character is mostly in what’s become his default mode; interestingly they seem to be trying to bring in Kobayashi’s age rather than starting from a younger point. Really, though, there’s little to say about the characterization of everybody because nothing interesting’s done with them.
• Fujiko’s unusually nice and good this series so far, which adds to the “aimed younger” impression.
• I couldn’t muster much enthusiasm for the car-spotting in this given that most of them looked like they were made in SketchUp in 2012, but we get some stereotypically British ones like 80s Jags and Astons, with Lupin in a Triumph TR4 (also seen in “An Assassin sings the blues”, driven by Fujiko, and driven by Lupin in Goodbye, partner). Lestrade drives, of all things, the French civil servant’s favorite, a Citroën C6.
• Oddly, every watch we see up close is a Jaeger-LeCoultre.
• I really do worry about the reception of Part V—I definitely got the impression this was made on a much lower budget, so maybe Part V wasn’t the success I’d hoped it would have been. That would also explain the reversion to a less sophisticated type of storytelling as well. I hope that’s not the case, as I’ve been spoiled by basically a pretty continuous run of decent-to-great Lupin since I first watched Cagliostro six or so years ago.
• I’ve seen this called “worst since the 80s,” with the implication clearly being “worst since Pink Jacket.” I don’t think Pink Jacket really was bad, though—it just never did anything that stood out. When was the last almost entirely mediocre twelve-episode stretch? I’m tempted to say way the back in the Red Jacket series, though calling this the “worst since Part II” seems wrong because a couple of those seasons were 52 episodes long and produced by multiple companies, just a completely different paradigm in television production.
As the second half of the series is currently airing weekly, eventually, as in a few months, we’ll see how the rest of Part VI turns out.
Next week, though, I review the 1995 theatrical film, Farewell to Nostradamus. Is it a lost treasure, or deservedly obscure?
