Review: Takeshi Koike's "Lupin the IIIrd" Trilogy, 10 Years On

Movie of the Week #16 is an anime triple feature

Welcome to Movie of the Week, a Wednesday column where we take a look back at a classic, obscure, or otherwise interesting movie each and every week for paid subscribers. Follow this link for more details on everything you get subscribing to Fade to Lack!

Lupin the Third rejuvenated itself in more ways than one with the 2012 TV anime The Woman Called Fujiko Mine. It was the first time Lupin had returned to television as a weekly half-hour anime since the final broadcast of Lupin the Third Part III in 1985; it had a refreshed voice cast after the retirements of three of the five series leads, including for title character Fujiko Mine, now played by Miyuki Sawashiro; and it was the first installment in the franchise creatively headed by women, with Sayo Yamamoto as the series’ director and Mari Okada as the ‘series composer,’ right around the time she started breaking out as the most prolific and lauded anime writer of the era. Most importantly, it boasted a radically new and inventive aesthetic, not just for the Lupin franchise, but for television anime on the whole. Its design language, led by Takeshi Koike as character designer and animation director, went back to Monkey Punch’s original manga for inspiration, not just in the character designs – which Yamamoto directed Koike to keep close to the manga depictions – but in the fierce, fast, sketchy line work of Monkey Punch’s drawings. The anime mostly banishes inking from its vocabulary, with all the characters and most of the backgrounds sketched in with pencil, usually with a heavier tip so we can see the uneven, rough texture of the graphite. Visually, it is all incredibly striking, a bold piece of avant-garde pop that feels like a book of sketches come to life, their sense of shape-shifting anarchy fully intact.

It’s a blessing, then, that the thirteen episodes of The Woman Called Fujiko Mine weren’t all we got from this corner of the Lupin universe. While the series continued with more traditional anime on television, Takeshi Koike came back to direct what grew into a trilogy of follow-up films, released in 2014, 2017, and 2019. I say ‘films,’ but how exactly one classifies them is up for debate – they’re each in the range of 50 minutes long, and are all technically comprised of two segments with a break in the middle, so they’re really each 2-part OVAs (original video animations), though all had theatrical releases as well, and certainly boast robust-enough production values to look and move like cinema.