I just saw Lupin III: Legend of the Gold of Babylon
I just saw Lupin III: Legend of the Gold of Babylon
For those who don’t know, Lupin III is an extremely long-running extremely popular japanese multi-media franchise. In the west, its most popular entry is probably The Castle of Cagliostro, a film in the franchise directed by Hayao Miyazaki before Studio Ghibli was formed. The Lupin franchise in Japan is a little bit like the James Bond / 007 franchise in the UK, if James Bond also had the pattern of TV presence of Doctor Who (i.e., constantly in the 70s and 80s, followed by nothing for decades except specials for the super-fans, followed by a return to TV sometime around 2010). Lupin III started out as a manga with a very Mad Magazine style and a very Hunter S. Thomson attitude, and was massaged by Miyazaki for all-ages television into the story of a ‘gentleman thief’.
Anyhow, Legend of the Gold of Babylon is one of the many, MANY Lupin movies. This one came out in 1985. It’s generally not considered a good entry, but my feelings about this are more complicated.
First: this movie is extremely Japan-in-1985.
Japan was in full-on Economic Miracle / Bubble Economy at this point in history, and people were moving to the city in droves, drinking tea with gold flakes to show how bougie they were, doubling and tripling down on the dedication to corporate capitalism already skewered in Japanese movies like *Giants and Toys* in the 50s, listening to the style of pop music we now call City Pop (and associate with vaporwave & futurefunk), and for the first time, living the lives that fashion and lifestyle magazines had been trying to sell them since the 1920s.
This movie checks all those boxes! It takes place half in New York City and half in Iraq & Kuwait. It has a city pop opening theme and the climax of the film involves gold dust falling from the sky. Everybody is living a luxurious life in this movie, including a homeless drunk old woman. The tone is *extremely* light and goofy, even by Lupin standards.
So, for the good:
Very occasionally, we have some really technically-interesting art (usually in the form of matte-painting backgrounds or SFX).
The plot premise is extremely creative, too, and incorporates elements that would have been incredibly obscure in 1985 (basically, it’s cribbing hard from Zechariah Sitchin — and while the Lupin franchise has always been ‘with it’, with its 2015 season ‘Lupin III Part 5’ focusing on cryptocurrency, deadpools, crypto-locker viruses, the Snowden scandal, social media celebrity and its relation to law enforcement, and other such things, cribbing plots from Sitchin in 1985 is much more impressive).
The bad:
This movie spends a lot of time on set pieces that are totally unimpressive (basically because the animation is too sloppy in them), and some of these set pieces are also basically unconnected to the plot. (Really only the final set piece lands, although the rest tend to be conceptually interesting things let down by the execution.)
The cell animation is terrible. The linework in general is melty — every character is constantly off-model in a distracting way. All the female characters have ‘lips’ that are warped colored donuts around their mouths, and these donuts don’t necessary even touch their mouths on the inside edge. This poor linework is practically lampshaded in the opening scene, where we meet an off-brand version of two of the characters, discover that the reason they look weird is that they are actually impersonators, and then run into the actual versions of those characters — who are exactly as melty and off-model!
With the exception of a couple matte backgrounds & the SFX shots in the tail end of the film, the coloring is way off. Shots that are meant to look gloomy or dramatic end up being too bright, generally, and the colors of explosions are especially strange (sometimes the dominant color in an explosion animation is a sickly pale green, with clearly-delineated layers of bright pink and yellow inside it).
This movie has weird racist depictions of:
* arabs (who are shown as fat minstrel-show-black-men in turbans, and are given no speaking lines at all, despite half the movie taking place in their homeland)
* kenyans (who speak english for some reason, or otherwise only say “kenya”)
* russians (who only say ‘harasho’ but have giant tits for some reason)
* chinese (one chinese character dresses in a hanfu and mostly says “ni hao” except for a few circumstances where she spontaenously speaks english; the other says nothing but “me kill lupin” & is dressed like a stereotypical 1880s coolie)
and, remarkably enough for an anime (although not so remarkable for the Lupin franchise since he is a major supporting character):
* japanese (but it’s worse this time: at one point he dramatically cuts lightning in half; he says his catch phrase “once again I have cut something worthless” about four times; he falls in love at first sight with the chinese girl despite them never exchanging words, and this is described by other characters as “the mystery of the orient”)
This movie has so much singing in broken english, and it bothers me a lot, but what’s more, it’s poorly done too! The plot hinges on a nursery rhyme that I am confident was made up for the movie, but that all the characters claim to know. (And tiny nitpick: Fujiko whistles the theme tune to the TV show while idling laying on a haystack, and not only is she terrible at whistling, but the tempo of the tune is entirely inappropriate for the situation — and nobody would ever, ever, whistle that theme tune at the original tempo. It’s a complicated jazz tune & she was trying to whistle the embellishments FFS.)
The weird:
The fuckin’ plot! I kinda love it. The premise is that the fall of babylon was caused by a comet-riding alien that gathered all of the gold in babylon to create a tower of babel out of solid gold and then dropped it (whole, but upside down) into New York City along with tablets explaining how to find it, and then an alien emmissary has been reincarnated every 76 years into the form of a drunken dictator-chasing woman with a candalabra who needs to find and stand on top of the tower as the comet passes in order to return to her home planet. Meanwhile, Lupin’s desire to steal the gold of this tower pits him against a sociopathic oedipal drama-queen scion of an ex-mafia family who has prophetic dreams, and his would-be-usurper poison-fly-swatter-wielding butler/enforcer.
The UFO scenes at the end have features of UFO lore that I basically never see in pop culture depictions — like the outside of the UFO phasing in and out of translucency to reveal the inner engine structure, and the whole thing turning into a blur of light. Also, the saucer UFO formed out of bits of light from a very biological looking mothership.
For basically no reason at all, there’s a bar in this movie that is themed after the Richard Carradine / Vincent Price flop The Monster Club. It is called The Monster Club Bar, and everyone is supposed to wear rubber masks provided by the bartender.
This movie takes place in a version of New York City where a building overlooking Times Square has a giant hollow mechanical face where it is possible to ride motorcycles through its orifices and use its tongue as a ramp. And when this happens, people spontaneously form a betting ring (with professionally-made tickets) around who will win the ‘race’.