Miyazaki Madness, Part 1: "Lupin the 3rd: The Castle of Cagliostro" is essential Miyazaki
A new classic reviews series begins with a look at Hayao Miyazaki's first feature
On Thursdays, I’m publishing reviews of classic movies, including pieces that have never appeared online before taken from my book 200 Reviews, available now in Paperback or on Kindle (which you should really consider buying, because it’s an awesome collection!). We finished our Rocky in Review series last week, and are moving on this week to our second series, tracking the filmography of my all-time favorite movie director - and newly minted two-time Oscar winner with his win last week for The Boy and the Heron - Hayao Miyazaki! We will be looking at all of his theatrical feature films along with the movies he wrote but did not direct, for a total of 15 weeks of Miyazaki Madness! The series begins today with Miyazaki’s first feature film, 1979’s outstanding The Castle of Cagliostro. Enjoy…
Lupin the Third: The Castle of Cagliostro
1979, Dir. Hayao Miyazaki
Originally written in 2016, first published in 200 Reviews
Despite my love for Hayao Miyazaki, The Castle of Cagliostro had always been the one big gap in my familiarity with his oeuvre – or perhaps because of my love for the director, since I think part of the reason I waited so long to finally give this film a watch was knowing, especially after he announced his retirement following The Wind Rises, that once I saw Cagliostro, that was it. No more ‘new’ Miyazaki. This was the last one I had yet to see, and no matter how many great things I had heard about it, I could not help but find myself approaching Cagliostro with a sense of melancholy, knowing that once I finally laid eyes on it, that would be the end of this particular journey of cinematic discovery I started many years ago.
And I had heard many great things about it, as much praise if not more than accompanies all of Miyazaki’s other classics. Since long before I finally sat down to watch the movie, I have been fascinated by the legacy of Cagliostro, an anime film that exists as part of a much larger franchise – this was not even the first Lupin the Third theatrical feature – yet which has stood completely on its own, its reputation dwarfing the parent series especially outside of Japan. The film is beloved around the world first and foremost as a film, on its own terms, its influence felt in both animated and live-action adventure cinema across the globe. Especially when one considers the traditional role of the TV anime film adaptation – products produced relatively quickly to capitalize on the success of the series and, more importantly, to further fuel merchandising endeavors – The Castle of Cagliostro holds a sort of miraculous place in film history. Is there any analogue for it, within or without the world of Japanese animation? A hugely significant director who got his cinematic start with a franchise film that would quickly become part of a classic canon in its own right? In Western terms, it would be as if there was one James Bond film that was recognized as a major pillar of world cinema, apart from the rest of the series, working within the conventions while simultaneously transcending them to create something artistically revelatory.
The Castle of Cagliostro is, indeed, a revelation. Having finally watched it, I feel foolish, for while it is true this marks the end of my time discovering ‘new’ Miyazaki films – unless he comes out retirement again, which is of course entirely possible – I feel not melancholy but overwhelming joy to finally have this wonderful movie as a part of my life. Some films with historical and cultural reputations as vast as Cagliostro can be difficult to enjoy for a variety of reasons – age, excess hype, the spoilers that can be picked up through cinematic osmosis, etc. – but this is absolutely not one of them, for Cagliostro is indeed a knockout, as vibrant and essential an entry in the Miyazaki canon as any other, and I would imagine there is barely a moment from start to finish that does not feel as thoroughly fresh and energized now as it did nearly 40 years ago.
The first thing one notices, evident from the moment the film starts, is how deep Miyazaki’s propensity for adventure runs in his films, and how effortless it all feels when he fully indulges that part of himself. I have always thought Miyazaki is one of the world’s greatest (and most underrated) stagers of action sequences, his instincts for choreography, pace, and scale proving endlessly exhilarating in works like Laputa: Castle in the Sky and Porco Rosso, and even permeating less overtly ‘adventure’-driven films like Spirited Away (the purging of the river spirit is a textbook lesson on how to stage a cinematic set-piece). But The Castle of Cagliostro is perhaps the film where he most fully exercised the adventurous side of his creative brain, and watching it, one can simply feel how fundamental those instincts are for him. From the first car chase to the absurdly stylish climax, the creative energy flows boundlessly, and while I am certain a great deal of work went into each and every frame, there is a quality to the entire film that just feels positively effortless.
It’s this energy that fuels the film’s greatest quality, which is its incredible sense of surprise, a degree of ingenuity to how small scenes and larger set-pieces alike play out, with actions and reactions constantly moving in a direction that feels wholly organic and entirely unexpected at the same time. Take, for example, the sequence in which Lupin, attempting to sneak his way into the eponymous castle, impersonates the Inspector. That’s not an unfamiliar set-up, but the punchline, the masterstroke in Lupin’s zany plan, is to run straight up to the guards, tell them the real Inspector is Lupin in a costume, and convince them to go running after the actual Inspector, thus causing a massive ruckus and the perfect distraction. It’s hilarious, the kind of pay-off that works both because it is surprising and because it furthers Lupin’s idiosyncratic characterization.
The film is probably Miyazaki’s funniest for precisely this reason – a character like Lupin gives the director license to go out on a limb with his comedy, and the further he goes, the funnier things get – but that penchant for surprise also leads to some truly jaw-dropping moments. When Lupin prepares to scale his way to the castle’s North tower and free the Princess Clarisse, he initially starts to prepare a sort of grappling device, carefully laying out a logical plan that we can easily imagine leading to the desired outcome. But instead, Lupin fumbles the device, goes chasing after the runaway wire, and nearly falls off the edge of the roof – only to take an impromptu jump and leap, in two wide, soaring steps, the distance between the roof and the tower. It’s an iconic moment, one I have seen excerpted elsewhere, but I completely forgot about that existing knowledge in the moment, just as I found my breath quite literally taken away by the sheer impossible majesty of that image. There are very few moments in the whole of my cinematic life that have ever made me genuinely gasp, but this is one of them, and I cannot imagine any other director even being able to imagine such an audacious moment, let alone have the skill to execute on it. By the time the final act rolls around, we have been conditioned to expect the unexpected, but that never stops Miyazaki from being able to pull one over on the audience, with Lupin’s climactic trick containing so many joyous twists and turns it all becomes positively dizzying.
Lupin himself is not, of course, a creation of Hayao Miyazaki’s, for although the director was instrumental in bringing the character to life in animation (both in this film and in the 1971 TV series that preceded it), the character was created by manga author Monkey Punch, who in turn developed the series as a playful twist on Maurice Leblanc’s famous early 20th-century literary series (Lupin III is the grandson of Leblanc’s protagonist, Arsene Lupin). Nevertheless, it’s hard to watch The Castle of Cagliostro and not sense some parallels between Lupin and the film’s director, for the qualities that make Lupin such a lovable, dynamic protagonist – namely his endless, almost naïve sense of confidence, his belief in achieving the seemingly impossible affirmed at every turn – are shared by Miyazaki as a filmmaker. The Castle of Cagliostro is nothing if not an absurdly confident debut feature, with a sense of creativity and scale that far outpaces its budgetary and production restrictions (the film was produced in less than half a year, and looks only moderately less impressive than later Miyazaki films that would spend two to four times that amount in production).
Just consider how much of Miyazaki’s voice comes through loud and clear in this first film, even as he works within the boundaries of a preexisting franchise. Some elements aren’t there yet – he wouldn’t work with composer Joe Hisaishi until Nausicaä, though regular Lupin composer Yuji Ohno delivers a terrific score here – but many are; the character designs technically stem from Monkey Punch’s manga, but they’re largely bent to the specific visual style of Miyazaki and animation director Yasuo Otsuka, and the characters original to the film, like Clarisse, are clear prototypes of future Miyazaki protagonists (she’s a dead-ringer for Nausicaä).
So much of this is pure Miyazaki. Those gentle yet detailed backgrounds bursting with color; that propensity for adventure and imaginative set-pieces; the fascination with mechanics and transportation, as in that first car chase; those quiet, contemplative moments that give the film room to breathe, such as when Lupin sits by the lake and contemplates where he has met Clarisse before as the sun sets in the distance. So much of this is fundamentally, recognizably Miyazaki, and yet the piece that feels most powerfully like a portent of things to come is the sensitivity and humanity with which Miyazaki treats his female characters. It’s not like there is automatically a ton of room in this story for dynamic female characters, given the zany male protagonist and adventure film archetypes being worked with, but Miyazaki still does everything he can to make the primary female characters – Princess Clarisse and fellow thief Fujiko – shine, imbuing them with a firm sense of agency that makes the entire film more dynamic and unpredictable.
From moment one, Clarisse is far from a typical damsel in distress, introduced to us making an attempted escape via car chase, and the moment it comes time for Lupin to first cross paths with her, his heroics end in him passing out, and her having to revive him before quickly running off once more. Similarly, the big second-act rescue sequence climaxes with Lupin getting shot, ultimately allowing Clarisse to become the driving force of the scene – a scene which culminates with Clarisse grabbing a firing Gatling gun around the barrel to protect her friends.
Eat your heart out, Rambo. Clarisse is a goddamn badass.
Combined with the way Fujiko operates as this unpredictable, equally offbeat yang to Lupin’s yin, one senses Miyazaki is the kind of storyteller who, from the beginning, simply desire to write strong characters, of any gender, and that it would probably offend him on a basic creative, artistic level to ever write a woman who wasn’t interesting and governed by her own sense of personality and agency. And while The Castle of Cagliostro has proved a massively influential film around the world, for directors of live-action and animated cinema alike, it is too bad that perhaps the greatest lesson it has to offer – that allowing all parts of one’s cast to be interesting and dynamic elevates the entire creative enterprise – has not been taken fully to heart by otherwise similar adventure films.
While the film is not quite Miyazaki’s most overtly ‘Western’ aesthetically – that title would belong to something like Kiki’s Delivery Service or Porco Rosso – it still takes its cues from a lot of real-world European geography and architecture, making use of research Miyazaki did for a Pippi Longstocking series that ultimately went unmade. The abundant Christian imagery in the final act is a particularly striking for how big Miyazaki swings, with the visuals in the climactic wedding sequence proving some of the most terrifying, grotesque, and audacious of his entire career. Between the endless ritualistic robed marchers and the strange mask worn by the villainous Count, there is a stretch of this film that looks like what we might see if Eyes Wide Shut climaxed with a marriage ceremony, and it is fascinating, horrifying, and hauntingly gorgeous in equal measure.
The film ends with an unexpected poignancy that presages the depth of humanity and feeling that would characterize Miyazaki’s later works. Clarisse expresses her desire to join Lupin on his life of adventure, and in a wonderful bit of character animation, he physically struggles before choosing to deny her, knowing that when all is said and done, she is and can be a better person than he is, telling her that in winning her own freedom, she has fought her way out of the darkness and into the light – a place which he knows, deep down, he cannot permanently inhabit. It’s a lovely little scene, and while the film does not need that moment to be great, it gives the entire story an additional sense of weight it would not have otherwise.
And then Lupin leaves with Jigen and Goemon, and Fujiko taunts him haven successfully stolen the counterfeit plates, and Inspector Zenigata rushes off after them, and everyone is returned to their same starting roles, as they must be in a franchise film such as this. And yet, nothing about the ending feels like an easy slap of the reset button, nor does it feel as if there is a lack of consequence and weight to the proceedings. There is a sly awareness of convention, and in accepting them so jubilantly – with Clarisse, the new character, and the one who will not continue past this film, shifting subtly to our point-of-view for this conclusion – there is something almost profound about how Miyazaki resets the chessboard in the final moments.
The film is triumphant, a joy on every level, and if it is not among Miyazaki’s ‘deepest’ films, it hardly matters given the level of ingenuity, invention, and passion on display here. The Castle of Cagliostro is not a Studio Ghibli movie, but in taking what was a fairly routine commercial assignment and making something bold, masterful, and groundbreaking out of it, Miyazaki set the stage for the kind of values his future Studio would come to embody.
NEXT WEEK: Hayao Miyazaki changes the course of anime history with the epochal 1984 classic Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind…
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