We’ve made it to the home stretch. Just a month left in this challenge, and it’s time for a slight shift in direction that I’ve been planning for awhile. We’re going to be talking about directors now, one at a time. Each night I’ll be writing about a show or movie, with a few shows or movies by a specific director in a row, followed by a biographical and analytical post on the director and his or her filmography. These posts will all be prone to major spoilers, but most of the media we’re covering is going to be fairly old. Still, I’m going to try to have a “Read More” divide before I dig into the meat of any show. So here we go.
Title: Lupin the Third: The Woman Called Fujiko Mine
Episodes: 13
Released: 2012
Director: Sayo Yamamoto
Studio: TMS Entertainment
There are few franchises in anime and manga with the staying power of Monkey Punch’s Lupin III. Since its beginnings as a Weekly Manga Action series in 1967, there have been multiple anime adaptations, animated and live actions movies, TV specials, musicals, video games and other manga released.
Thanks to the shear number of adaptations created in its five decades, the cast of Lupin III functions sort of like the cast of the Batman franchise. The characters are more or less archetypes and wardrobes that can be interpreted quite differently depending on the telling. We should recognize them, know the basics of their relationships, and have a general idea of the sort of things they will and won’t do, but the nuance and a certain amount of the personal history can be flexible.
The titular characters Arsène Lupin III, grandson and successor of gentleman thief Arsène Lupin. The original Arsène Lupin is the protagonist of a number of stories by French author Maurice Leblanc. Lupin III is a combination of Leblanc’s character, James Bond and Bugs Bunny. This brings us to Fujiko Mine, the requisite “Bond Girl” of the series.
Fujiko began as a series of girls-of-the-week, all sharing the same name. Over time, she developed into a single character, a voluptuous femme fatale, love interest, rival thief and sometimes partner of Lupin and his gang.
In anime and manga, it seems to me that Fujiko is the fountainhead from which many other femme fatale characters spring. Faye Valentine from Cowboy Bebop, Bulma from Dragon Ball, Nami from One Piece, Mai Valentine from Yu-Gi-Oh!, the Major from Ghost in the Shell, and even Lust from Fullmetal Alchemist all owe a little bit to Fujiko Mine.
In 2012, Fujiko received her own anime Lupin the Third: The Woman Called Fujiko Mine. It serves as a sort of loose prequel to many of the other shows in the franchise as well as a celebration of the series’s leading lady. This was director Sayo Yamamoto’s second time in the driver’s seat on a full series, and she was given full creative control. Both the time period in relation to other Lupin III works and the focus on Fujiko were her choices.
The series, produced by longtime Lupin III animators TMS Entertainment, is artistically lavish, dark in tone, openly sexual and deeply intriguing. It’s also odd and sometimes disturbing. Its tone and overt sexuality (with a lot of nudity) are said to be more in line with Monkey Punch’s manga than the more familiar and family friendly anime adaptations of years past.
I haven’t watched even half of all the Lupin III stuff there is, but one thing I always appreciate is its difficult to place time period. Any given episode of any given show within the franchise is likely to include elements from anywhere between World War I to the heyday of disco, and it just works. The Woman Called Fujiko Mine is no exception.
Besides providing introductions and meet ups for most of the core cast of the franchise, this entry delves (or suggests that it will delve) into Fujiko’s past. Even though I think spoilers are fair game, I’m not going to try to explain away the twists and turns of the series. Suffice it to say that I did not expect the conclusion, and I found it very satisfying.
The series starts as if it were a series of mostly unrelated stories featuring the same core cast. This proves to be a bit of slight of hand at about the halfway mark when plot threads from the first several episodes begin to form a spider’s web that our characters have become unknowingly entangled in.
There is a designer hallucinogenic drug being distributed by a major pharmaceutical company. The drug makes people see others with owl heads, and the company takes advantage of this with a shadowy cabal of Owlmen serving a mysterious leader.
I don’t think there’s any direct link between Fujiko Mine’s owl-ish enemies and Batman’s Court of Owls, but I do find it interesting that this series started development just a few months before the Court of Owls debuted in 2011.
The Owlmen of this series are involved with a lot of unsavory goings-on. There are some really disturbing (though not graphic) depictions of children and adults being tortured. There are plenty of people being manipulated, and a lot of the manipulation is directed at Fujiko and the people around her.
One plot I found interesting (though the source of my handful of complaints about the series) is a subplot surrounding Inspector Zenigata’s lieutenant.
Back in 1972, Riyoko Ikeda debuted her shojo manga series The Rose of Versailles in manga magazine Margaret. The series is set in France around the time of the French Revolution, and an anime was produced by TMS Entertainment. The main character is Oscar, a woman raised and disguised as a man who serves as a palace guard. The series is noted both for being a very influential shojo manga and for the then-unusual yuri (lesbian) overtones between Oscar and one of her proteges.
In The Woman Called Fujiko Mine, Zenigata’s protege and lieutenant Oscar is introduced. Oscar is unique to this entry in the franchise. He is an extremely feminine young man (capable of going undercover as a teenage girl) who has a deep, obsessive love for Zenigata. He is an ambiguously French orphan who Zenigata once saved when he jumped into a river rather than hand over his last coin to bullies.
I can’t prove outright that this Oscar is meant to be a reference to the Oscar of The Rose of Versailles. He is very nearly a shadow of her though, right down to their character designs. The Rose of Versailles character did make an appearance in a much earlier Lupin III series.
Besides the parallels to the shojo manga character, Oscar also serves as an antagonist to Fujiko, and a foil for her in many ways. Oscar is obsessed with Zenigata who seemingly has a much more fatherly affection for the young man. This obsession, perhaps due to outside manipulation, gets very dark. We’re never once given a hint that Oscar’s obsession could bear any fruit, but it does drive the main plot at times.
Zenigata, in a very out of character scene, sleeps with Fujiko. Oscar is standing outside the door, and this begins a downward spiral and a disturbing hatred for Fujiko. Oscar dedicates himself to taking down Fujiko, going to ever more desperate lengths. Throughout this his look gets more feminine, until he begins impersonating Fujiko to frame her for crimes. But in the end, Oscar is being manipulated by the Owlmen, and it turns out he’s a victim of their machinations as well, though how long they’ve been influencing him is unclear.
I’ll be honest, I haven’t had time to digest this show all the way. I’m not sure I really understand the purpose or drive of this arc, but I do like the interplay with the main plot’s themes of disguise, identity and desire.
So that’s what I’ve got to say about Lupin the Third: The Woman Called Fujiko Mine. Unfortunately, I’m not going to have time to watch another of Yamamoto’s shows so tomorrow’s post we’ll be talking about her and her career. Until tomorrow!
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