Lupin III doesn't dream - A brief analysis of its early days' success

The following is the translation of the first of a series of articles that I've written (and I'm currently writing) about Lupin III, both anime and manga, on my italian blog. I've always thought that Lupin III, especially the manga side, in the west has been lacking of real attention from the critic and that's why I've decided to try and fill this void. I hope this is going to be useful or, at least, interesting to someone in the Lupin's fandom.

Before his jacket started changing color after color, Lupin III was born in black and white on the pages of a new magazine that was about to be one of the most famous manga magazine ever. The year was the 1967 and the 30-years-old Kazuhiko Katō, known for his previous work "Playboy School" ( プレーボーイ入門), was asked to be the key artist of the soon to be launched Weekly Manga Action, Futabasha's new manga magazine addressed to adults. While hastily looking for a story to draw, Kato started remembering how much he loved to read the adventures of the gentleman thief Arséne Lupin written by Maurice Leblanc and so he decided to make a manga about Lupin, but he also decided to adjust the character to his personal style and for a modern audience. The choice of using a french character and his peculiar drawing style, which for the japan audience was impossible to be distinguished from a foreign style, made his work completely unique. Therefore, its editor had the idea of giving him a pen name that could disguise his origins and make the most out of the foreign charm that his work had. That's how in the August 1967 Lupin III (ルパン三世), written and drawn by Monkey Punch, was born. Katō wasn't a fan of his new pen name, it looked ridicolous to him, but he was still at the beginning of his career and he decided to bite the bullet. After all, it was supposed to be only a temporary job. He didn't have a clue.

Lupin III was an immediate success, the audience was smitten by the charm of the character and its adventures. The target that Monkey Punch addressed were the Young Adults, specifically from the late teens to the early twenties, and it was clear since Lupin III's first adventure, "The Elegant Entrance of Lupin III", set in a wild university party. It was without any doubt an unusual manga for the time, starting with its art style. Characters had slim body, caricatural faces and stylish clothes. Men had beards and sideburns and women had voluptuous body. The 20-year-old readers of the time must have thought that Lupin III's manga was talking directly to them. Disney's influence on manga that Osamu Tezuka made mainstream in the 40s was here completely absent and replace by Monkey Punch's love for Mad Magazine and its artists like Mort Drucker. His storytelling instead was speaking and expanding the language of movies, just like the Gekiga movement was doing in those years. Monkey Punch drew inspiration from western movies for his action scenes, for the style of his characters and for the relationships that occured between them. Even the lead characters were "victims" of his love for western culture: Lupin, with his ability and his gadgets, was a new James Bond, while Fujiko Mine, sometimes an ally and sometimes an enemy, was his Bond Girl; Jigen Daisuke was a cowboy directly stolen from the western movie "The Magnificent Seven"; despite being obviously inspired by the fictional charater Heiji Zenigata, our Inspector Koichi Zenigata was wearing the iconic clothing of Jacques Clouseau from the Pink Panther series. To improve the balance of the cast, Monkey Punch decided to create a character that was purely japanese: Goemon Ishikawa XIII, a samurai inspired by a real thief of the 16th century.

We're far from the reassuring and light-hearted atmosphere introduced by Hayao Miyazaki with his episodes of the TV Series and the movie Castle of Cagliostro (1979), where he created the Gentleman Thief for all ages. Monkey Punch's manga was sexy, violent, transgressive and rock'n'roll. Lupin III was a realy outlaw, a lover of life's pleasures, a man of the world, and above all he was free, free from every oppression generated by society. A dandy where style was everything, a James Bond that didn't have to answer to anyone, a man that could obtain everything he wanted. Even sexually, while in the anime Lupin can't get to score, in the manga he (almost) always finds a way to the bed of the woman of the hour. More sexual fantasy than realistic sexual act, Punch usually drew the sexual scenes without a man but only with the woman left alone to writhe in pleasure, emphasising the erotism of a naked leg or a face in ecstacy. Lupin III staged the social and cultural revolution that the 60s brought to the west and for the students that were stuck in the rigid and obsolete japanese's society it must have had an incredible charm: reading Lupin III was more than entertaining, it was an act of ribellion.

To give more prominence to this aspect there was his enemy, the Inspector Koichi Zenigata. Representing institutions, society and its convention, Zenigata was an employee salaried by the state and that's why he was the perfect counterpart of the protagonist's free spirit. His greatest ambition is to catch Lupin, that means that his greatest ambition is just to excel in his job. Instead Lupin doesn't have a job, being a thief is just his nature and his way of expressing his freedom. In the first Lupin III movie, Mystery of Mamoo (1978), his nature is exposed with an interesting insight. Mamoo, villain of the movie, chains Lupin to a machinery which probes his subconscious mind and finds it empty. Lupin doesn't dream, he doesn't have any ambition. He doesn't need anything because he just instantly takes what he wants. He has no real purpose, he acts only for his entertainment. In summary, Lupin is free, completely free.

Over the years, this version of Lupin III was gradually lost to the one "for all ages" imposed by Miyazaki's (and others) works, but at the moment is more alive than ever. In 2012 to celebrate 40 years since Lupin III Part 1 a new anime aired in Japan: Lupin III - The Woman Called Fujiko Mine. It was the first of a series of projects created to relaunch Lupin III. Direct by Sayo Yamamoto, the series had Fujiko Mine as the leading character and told the stories of her first encounter with each member of the gang. Takeshi Koike's character design brought back the characters to the original and scratchy style of Monkey Punch, while the art direction recreated the noir and erotique atmosphere of the european cinema of the 60s and the 70s that was also in the first series of the manga. In 13 episodes the series redefined the character of Fujiko Mine, prasing her free spirit, and made a commentary on the different expectations the audience has for male characters and female characters. The series was followed by two movies direct by Takeshi Koike, "Jigen Daisuke's Gravestone" and "The Blood Spray of Goemon Ishikawa", with amazing action scenes, charming atmosphere and impressive animation. The plot of these two movies involves two of the most dangerous villains that Jigen and Goemon have ever faced. But the manga has become again an inspiration for the anime even in the more "canonical" Lupin III's works: Lupin III Part 5 was in fact full of reference to the manga. These 4 works represents an amazing way of bringing to modern days the original Lupin III of Monkey Punch's comics which demonstrates that his work hasn't lost any of the charm that 50(+1) years ago made people so crazy about Lupin III.

I'd like to hear your thoughts on Lupin III and my article in the comment section, so feel free to leave one! I'm also open to any suggestion to improve my translation. At this link you can find my Facebook Page about Lupin III, follow me if you want to be updated with my new articles!