Lupin III: Cagliostro no Shiro

STORY:

It's a fairly simple story, but it's done well. The moments when this movie went full-on cartoon were the moments it definitely shined.

ART:

I like the old hand-drawn art, even thought it's pretty rudimentary. It gives it a certain charm, and sometimes makes you wonder 'It's from 1979... How did they do that?'

SOUND:

The English voice actors are alright. The only ones that really stood out were Fujiko and Lupin himself. Some of the other ones sounded kind of like they were bored. Plus, they literally translated his name to 'Wolf', which would be confusing if you didn't know what the name Lupin is ... derived from. The sound design for this movie was really well done, and the soundtrack is really good!

CHARACTER:

The movie assumes you already know these characters, so it doesn't bother with introductions. That being said, I didn't already know these characters, so I felt a little lost basically throughout the whole runtime. I like the characters, but it would have been nicer if they gave a bit of an introduction to some of them so non-Lupin viewers wouldn't be in the dark.

ENJOYMENT:

Most of the reason my enjoyment was slightly hampered was because of what I mentioned under "CHARACTER", but the story was nice, the gadgets were cool, and the soundtrack was jazzy and cool, too.

OVERALL:

It's a fun movie, but it's made for people who are already acquainted with Lupin III. If that doesn't stop you, it's still fun.

Recent reading has convinced me that film does not usually suit being treated like a 'mechanical' or 'immediate medium', in the way music and painting are or can immediate because of their independence from representation. Film, by nature of the camera capturing actual imagery, does not have this freedom, so the best films treat the content of the frame as a kind of poetry which requires the audience to place it within the context of their experience to make it beautiful. Animation doesn't really work the same way though; it can be truly a mechanical art because rather than showing us life in motion it ... can just show only motion instead, the way a dance also can. The life is often incidental, and takes a back seat to pure visceral catharsis of motion. The reason this film is interesting to me is that it jumps in between this meaningless immediate style of artistry and the more traditional film style, which is subservient to our understanding of the images.

Two animation cuts are sublime: The car, which is entirely too small to properly contain the men within, rides up an almost vertical hill and is filled with leaves and birds which creates a furious maelstrom of green and red, within which the drivers thrash around. Lupin, dressed in scuba gear and swimming stealthily through a pipe, is spat out into a chamber and to avoid falling he frantically tries to swim breast stroke up the stream, and does so in total silence, before eventually succumbing to the pull of gravity and dropping like a rock.

Both of these cuts rest on the imagery within, otherwise they wouldn't function as visual comedy, and both also only work based on their utilisation of the free movement of animation. They are both small miracles within the wider context of the film, which is certainly very good even for me who doesn't usually care much about silly adventure movies.