Hayao Miyazaki’s Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro Anime Movie Review (4K) — Scotland Loves Anime 2024
Embarking on an overview of an animation career as illustrious as famed director Hayao Miyazaki’s is a daunting endeavour, partly because it seems everyone else has already done it. What else could I possibly add to the reams of text already produced by myriad other anime reviewers and film critics? While I’ve taken deep dives into the filmographies of such prominent auteurs as Katsuhiro Otomo, Makoto Shinkai, Mamoru Hosoda, and Keiichi Hara without much trepidation, there’s something about Miyazaki, and the culture surrounding his films, that’s led me to mostly avoid appraising his work. It’s not as if Miyazaki needs me to lavish attention on his oeuvre, there’s little of his movie output that’s obscure or hard to find.
While his stunning 1986 film Laputa: Castle in the Sky was only the second ever anime film I’d seen, (the first was Osamu Tezuka’s Phoenix 2772), I’ve yet to write about it. I’ve always felt this queasy sense of inevitability —that if I write about enough anime, eventually I’ll end up covering Miyazaki, whether I really want to or not. That proved true when last year I reviewed his latest film, The Boy and the Heron, an equally beguiling and bemusing movie that played to massive general audiences. I tend to review whatever anime I’m lucky enough to see in my local cinema, so that’s where my Miyazaki review career began. It’s taken eleven months to return, this time to the opposite end of the Miyazaki spectrum, with the Scotland Loves Anime 2024 showing at the Glasgow Film Theatre of his first ever theatrical feature, Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro, in its shiny new 4K restoration.
Castle of Cagliostro stars world-famous thief Lupin the third, supposedly the grandson of French novelist Maurice Leblanc’s gentleman thief Arsene Lupin character. (Atlus’ famed JRPG Persona 5 also took direct inspiration from the Lupin novels, even naming the game’s prominent coffee shop after Leblanc himself.) Miyazaki’s early career began with humble inbetweening work on television animation, and in 1970’s first Lupin III TV animation series, he began to gradually work his way up the ladder from key animator to eventual episode director. While he worked on multiple other TV shows in the 1970s, often in partnership with future Studio Ghibli co-founder Isao Takahata, it was 1979’s Castle of Cagliostro that provided Miyazaki’s big break into theatrical animation.
By 1979, Lupin had already starred in two lengthy TV series, in addition to his long-running manga, first written and illustrated by the unfortunately-nicknamed Monkey Punch back in the sixties. 1978 marked Lupin III’s debut theatrical feature with The Secret of Mamo, which surprisingly got a contemporaneous English dub for Japan airlines, and three further English dubs from various other companies over the following decades. Secret of Mamo was directed by Soji Yoshikawa, and though Castle of Cagliostro is technically its sequel, most Lupin III stories are essentially standalone capers that share a central cast of characters.
In Castle of Cagliostro, Miyazaki began to hone his cinematic style, aspects of which we see reflected again and again in his later films — strong female characters with agency and wit, a love of flying machines, grand fantastical castles and magnificent vistas, and light-hearted adventure. His singular approach to adaptation is visible here too — just like his versions of Howl’s Moving Castle and The Boy and the Heron are almost unrecognisable when compared to their source texts, his version of Lupin III is very different to the character’s portrayal in other media.
Monkey Punch’s manga Lupin is sneaky, underhanded, ruthless, horny, and almost pathologically selfish. He’s a hardened criminal, mostly out for himself. There’s a dark side to the original manga — although it’s funny, Lupin himself isn’t a particularly moral or empathetic character. In Miyazaki’s hands, Lupin is an action hero, much more akin to a James Bond or Indiana Jones, sacrificing his own wellbeing for the sake of a pretty girl. This Lupin does the things he wants to because they’re right, and although pecuniary interest is high on his list of priorities, most of his actions in Castle of Cagliostro are driven more by altruism rather than avarice. At the time, Lupin fans reacted with disdain at Miyazaki’s softened version of their beloved antihero.
While I’ve read some of the original manga (which had a few chapters published in UK magazine Manga Mania back in the mid-1990s), and have seen some of the more recent Lupin III TV episodes, I don’t count myself as a particularly rabid Lupin III fan. To be honest, I can take or leave the franchise, so I’ve no great investment in the character or what Miyazaki does with him. Compared to his almost deformed, wiry manga incarnation, Miyazaki’s Lupin is more rounded and conventionally cartoony, while retaining much of his exaggerated hyperactivity. Cagliostro’s character designs certainly reflect Miyazaki’s involvement, with main heroine Clarisse seeming almost like a prototype for Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind’s titular main character — she’s even portrayed by the same voice actress!
At the time of production, Castle of Cagliostro was the most expensive Japanese animated movie to date, though it was turned around in an astonishing seven months. Miyazaki, used to the punishing schedule of TV animation production (where an an entire episode’s animation may need to be produced within a single week) never found making Castle of Cagliostro much easier. Anime movie cels needed to be drawn with far more detail, a higher frame count, and with much greater complexity. It’s a testament to Miyazaki’s skill and leadership ability that he was able to complete his first movie on time. Without time in the schedule to scout locations, he used materials he’d already collected for his previous Heidi TV series, helpfully also set in the European Alps.
Castle of Cagliostro’s backgrounds are indeed beautiful, a precursor to Studio Ghibli’s signature style, with dramatic natural vistas — mountains, cliffs, and enormous, deep, blue lakes. Funnily enough, in the 1980s, laserdisc arcade game Cliff Hanger re-purposed footage from both Secret of Mamo and Castle of Cagliostro. Lupin’s mad escapades, including literally hanging from a cliff in Cagliostro, made an excellent fit for that genre of game (not dissimilar to Don Bluth’s Dragon’s Lair and Space Ace arcade cabinets).
From the opening scene of Lupin and his accomplice Jigen fleeing the police following a casino robbery, Castle of Cagliostro rarely lets up, racing from memorable set-piece to set-piece. The fairly thin story has Lupin investigating a massive international money counterfeiting conspiracy based somewhere in the tiny Alpine country of Cagliostro. As a youth ten years previously, Lupin attempted (and failed) to infiltrate Count Cagliostro’s imposing castle, and now he’s found an excuse to try his luck again. On the way he finds himself embroiled in the Count’s scheme to marry Princess Clarisse, a girl Lupin first met during his original trip to the country. Clarisse mostly plays a damsel in distress role, though she’s not completely helpless, attempting to escape her fate under her own steam.
While Lupin is pissed off that the money he liberated from the casino at the start of the film was counterfeit, his plans for revenge are mostly subsumed by concern for Clarisse. Unusually for Lupin III, he has little romantic interest in her, treating her more like a little sister. Clarisse sees him somewhat differently… Unlike the previous Secret of Mamo, Lupin’s sex drive is sanitised to the point where it’s almost absent here, even when he inevitably crosses paths with long term love interest/rival/sometime antagonist Fujiko Mine. It’s clear he likes her, but their relationship seems more playful, without much sexual tension.
Fujiko is a fascinating character — fiercely independent, mostly very self-interested, she’s incredibly adept at creative disguises and sneaky spycraft. She’s after the counterfeiting plates, though she’s not above helping Lupin out when he stumbles into trouble. She clearly packs an entire wardrobe for her planned heists, as we see her as a tightly-buttoned-up ladyservant, a TV reporter, and even in full camouflage combat gear! She’s not afraid to randomly shoot and ask questions later, but even then she’s not quite as hard-edged as she appears in the original comics, and some of the other anime.
Rounding out Lupin III’s core cast is samurai Goemon (apparently the thirteenth Geomon, following the original, legendary sixteenth century warrior), who to be fair doesn’t really do a whole lot other than provide Lupin backup. Inspector Zenigata, the Javert to Lupin’s Jean Valjean, is despatched by Interpol, as usual, to hunt down Lupin, but seems far more interested in uncovering the counterfeiting ring. At one point he and Lupin are even forced to work together, which just about breaks Zenigata’s mind. His frustrations regarding Interpol’s political compromises lead to a hilarious scene towards the end.
Count Cagliostro is a suitably dastardly villain without any redeeming features at all, which is unusual for Miyazaki. He’s a creep, a bully, and most likely a fascist, especially because he keeps an army of KKK-like pointy-headed goons in his employ, along with some amusingly creepy sharp-fingered ninjas. He forces Clarisse to marry him purely for personal gain, with no regard for her feelings, which he views as completely irrelevant. His eventual comeuppance is satisfactorily visceral, and final. Miyazaki’s love for flying machines is represented by the Count’s dinky little autogyro copter that of course Lupin eventually turns against him.
While Castle of Cagliostro is certainly a product of the late 1970s, there’s still a certain timelessness to all of Miyazaki’s films, including here. His simple character designs still hold up, and the deranged set pieces remain as entertaining and funny as ever. Lupin’s ascent up the castle’s roof makes me feel sick with vertigo, which is honestly a compliment, and the climactic pursuit up the rotating gears inside the clock tower still looks marvellous even to this day. There’s no wonder Disney homaged the sequence a few years later in Basil, The Great Mouse Detective. That Miyazaki achieved such an incredible sequence without CG animation, and in such a short production time, is nothing short of miraculous.
Tonally, Castle of Cagliostro is full of daft slapstick humour, and never gets too frightening or dark. Miyazaki utilises age-old techniques like squash-and-stretch, especially with Lupin’s uncommonly pliant body, to evoke a Fleischer-esque classic cartooniness all but missing from modern anime and even Western animation. While my favourite film out of the nine I saw at Scotland Loves Anime 2024 was undoubtedly WWII-era biopic Totto-chan, my daughter’s boyfriend, who accompanied us, is an animation student, and he loved Castle of Cagliostro the most. That makes sense, because this is a movie that celebrates the very existence of the animated medium, it’s a work that couldn’t exist anywhere else.
Lupin III in live action would be embarrassingly stupid, but in animation, especially when made by the terrifyingly-skilled hands of Hayao Miyazaki, The Castle of Cagliostro is a certified classic. It’s extremely accessible to anyone, regardless of familiarity or otherwise with the franchise. That also means it’s very different to almost every other Lupin III anime, except perhaps those 1970s episodes from Part 1 and 2 that Miyazaki himself worked on. I’m glad I finally got around to watching this, and perhaps I’ll take a look at a few other Lupin III films at some point in the future.
That brings my Scotland Loves Animation 2024 coverage to a belated close. It’s been fun, and I’m very much looking forwards to next year’s festival. Check out the rest of my SLA 2024 reviews via the links below, and I’ll be back soon, hopefully to review some other movies or TV shows. Thanks for reading!
Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro (4K)
Director: Hayao Miyazaki
Screenplay: Hayao Miyazaki and Haruya Yamazaki
Character design: Hayao Miyazaki and Yasuo Ōtsuka
Based on: Lupin III (manga) by Monkey Punch
Music: Yuji Ohno
Studio: Tokyo Movie Shinsha
JP distributor: Toho
JP theatrical release: 15th December 1979
Runtime: 110 minutes
Language: Japanese with English subtitles
BBFC rating: 12
