Enough ranting, here I am still working my way through Miyazaki’s older films. The latest I’ve seen is The Castle of Cagliostro, now available on a Special Edition DVD. This 1979 feature film was the first to be directed by Miyazaki as he was moving up from TV work.
For copyright reasons, it’s been obscured that the film is all about the characters from the long-running Lupin III series of manga and TV. Arch-criminal Lupin is the grandson of Arsene Lupin of French literature, here embarking on an epic adventure with his usual accomplices, somewhere in Central Europe.
After raiding a casino, Lupin notices that rather than being incredibly rich, he merely has a carful of counterfeit cash. He decides to pursue the fake notes back to their source – the royal castle in a small duchy - Cagliostro. As he gets near, he encounters a very young bride trying to escape the castle, and his mission suddenly becomes far more complicated and dangerous than he had ever imagined.
Even in 1979, Miyazaki has to walk a precarious tightrope between providing a family film, and being faithful to the bawdy violence of the original manga, which portrayed Lupin as a ‘ladykiller’. While there’s action, a little slapstick, and some exaggerated face-pulling to please younger viewers, there’s also a little blood, lots of gun-play, a little swearing, an under-age wedding, and several characters smoking like chimneys! Like Spielberg begging the censors not to cut Jaws and the Indiana Jones movies, Miyazaki has to push boundaries to keep both audiences happy.
Miyazaki and his crew also try to achieve the best animation they can. They never shy away from ambitious 'camera moves' – like point-of-view shots, or complicated tracking shots. Complex three-dimensional objects like the auto-gyro or the workings of the clock-tower would have to have been realised without the aid of computers. The result is so successful that it's hard to guess what year it was made, the animation looks so advanced.
Article comments
1 - Maximillian
"Steam Boy (director Mamoru Oshii’s first feature since Akira)"
AKIRA and GHOST IN THE SHELL are both influential anime that have impressed me greatly. But of course it was Katsuhiro Otomo that directed AKIRA and STEAM BOY. Mamoru Oshii was the director of GHOST IN THE SHELL, INNOCENCE and AVALON.