Oh this film!
On one hand it clearly wants to be Castle of Cagliostro, heavily borrowing design elements from it. On the other, of these Funimation releases so far, it contains content far closer to that of early Lupin. There’s more naked flesh here than the previous 5 put together, along with a torture/bondage scene that could be straight out those early Lupin episodes. It’s an odd mix for sure, not helped by the lowest quality animation I’ve seen in a Lupin III film.
Had it looked like an early Lupin, or even “Sexy Lupin 3″ I think it could have worked, but it just feels off.
Still, nice camel animation. They do a bang up job getting cartoon camels to look and move like real camels. In fact they seem to have done a lot of research on the setting, apparently going as far to hire
a dancer to act as a model.
How much do the characters look like the animators might have seen a Monkey Punch drawing at some point in their lives?
This is the special I had in mind when I included this review criteria.
Lupin’s design is far too soft, there’s nothing roguish about him. And the performance in the animation doesn’t mesh with the voice performance. It’s all very sedate and generic. Same with Jigen.
Fujiko doesn’t look anything like Fujiko. If she didn’t have Fujiko’s voice you wouldn’t know it was her.
Zenigata looks bug-eyed, and so far Goemon hasn’t even showed up.
All the other characters look like generic TMS designs. Lara the guest female lead in fact looks closer to a Tezuka heroine than a Monkey Punch one.
OK. Goemon’s showed up now. He seems to have gotten lucky and looks half decent. Perhaps it is because he never has that much expression anyway.
How ludicrous are the capers?
No opening caper. We do get some classic Lupin tricks in the first action scene though. However it suffers a little from going to one country and staying there for a long time rather than jetting all over
the place.
How much is Goemon involved in the story, rather than just a third act deus ex machina?
Goemon is a deus ex machina on at least two occasions. His involvement in the plot seems like something thrown together to get him in the film. He gets one decent character-based scene when he rescues Fujiko. Oh, and Zantetsuken gets broken as an afterthought to the main plot. He really got the short end of the stick here.