Anime Movie Review - Lupin The Third: Goodbye Partner

This January a new and completely original TV Special of Lupin The Third aired in Japan, the first one since 2013's "Princess of the Breeze" (in the middle there is 2016's Italian Game, but it was not completely original). The Annual TV Special tradition occured between 1989 and 2013 and gave us some really fun Lupin the Third movies along with a lot of mediocre or just plain bad ones, confining the whole franchise to a "for fans only" audience. This was especially true with many of the TV Specials made in the 2000s, and their biggest fault was, in my opinion, how they looked. In the past, even when the plot was just silly or awful, Lupin always offered us some really good scenes with entertaining and well crafted animation, beautiful backgrounds and a memorable character design. Then, the "modern look" came and Lupin The Third started to look just boring. So, when they announced a new TV Special called "Goodbye Partner", I wasn't really thrilled by the idea. I'm always happy with new material with my favorite characters, but after over 25 TV Specials I know how bad it can be. Now we're in May, five months after its airing in Japan, and the english subtitles for the movie are finally out (you can find the SUB ENG on Nyaa.si), so we can see ourselves if Lupin The Third: Goodbye Partner is really bad or not. Spoiler: it is.

Just like as first teased by the title and the trailers, in this movie Lupin is betrayed by Jigen and we see the all-time friend becoming the ultimate foe. However, the script seems not to be really interested in this matter and decides to mainly play the old "someone really bad is using Lupin to get something really dangerous" which we've seen countless time both in the series and in the movies. This is a long established franchise with a status quo that can't really change and that's why it was obvious since the first announcement that Jigen's betray wasn't going to be definitive, but it still is a shame that the movie doesn't even try to sell that to the audience or use it to create a good and fun fight between two people who knows each other so well. Instead, the scenes devoted to this subplot are only a few, while most of the first two acts of the movie just revolves around Lupin infiltrating places around the globe in the most boring way. There are some funny scenes in the bunch, but most of those heists are staged without any of the creativity we have come to expect from Lupin The Third.

Then we have a third act which turns the movie from "just another boring TV Special" to "a complete mess". At the beginning of this act there's a false ending that resolves most of the mysteries and the conflicts between characters, from that point the movie starts dealing with some incredibly sophisticated sci-fi themes (AI, Internet of Things, Hacking and Singularity) that feels too complex and too compressed to be just introduced and resolved within a 30-minute-span. Due to the great amount of dialogue needed to explain what's happening, the rhythm slows down excessively and Lupin and his friends become spectators in a moment when all you want to see is some action. I love sci-fi and one of my favorite comic book is about these themes, but this is not the kind of stuff that you can easily throw in a Lupin movie without adapting to the tone of the series. As a result of this, for the whole last 30 minutes it feels like if Lupin and the others are doing nothing but waiting (even if they're doing something!) for the problem to resolve on its own. It also feels like there should have been some more background to explore the past of a character who is only mentioned (I'm talking about the scientist who created the IA). In the end, the technobabbles start making less and less sense and the way they forced the guest-character to play a key role in the resolution makes even less sense.

Speaking of characters, the villain of this movie, Roy Forest, is not any better or worse than the ones appeared in most of the other TV Specials. The damsel in distress, Alisa Kartlight, is instead one of the most monodimensional character ever appeared in the series. She has nothing to say in almost every scene she's in and, as I said before, the way she was involved in the ending is just forced. We can say the exact same thing for Fujiko: on one hand fortunately she doesn't play the damsel in distress in this movie, but that's because she simply hasn't a role in the movie. Her target feels like a joke and she does nothing in the whole movie. Lupin, Goemon and Zenigata have instead some really funny moments enhanced by the always great performance of the japanese voice cast. Jigen, the character who carries the emotional weight of the movie, has a couple of touching scenes (especially the one with one of the most beautiful reference to Castle of Cagliostro I've ever seen since it came out) and the movie gets a lot better when it shifts its focus to his past and his relationship with Alisa. The problem is that the time devoted to this aspect of the movie is really short and it feels a lot like a big missed opportunity. With a lot less technobabbles and more Jigen-Alisa moment we would be here talking of a much better movie.

The overall animation of the movie has the usual standard we have come to expect from a 21st century TV Special of Lupin The Third, meaning that there aren't any ugly scenes but at the same time nothing really shines. Except for the scenes where a piano is played: the hands are animated with a terrible CGI which really feels out of place. The backgrounds are, instead, simply ugly. The character designs and the artstyle chosen for the movie works for some of the characters while it doesn't for others. Lupin is the ugliest one and doesn't fit the look of the movie, while Fujiko fits so much that she doesn't look like Fujiko (but she's still beautiful). The overall look of the movie falls again, but in a different way, in the "ugly modern style" I referred to at the beginning of this article. These characters just doesn't seem to belong to this world and this world doesn't seem to belong to these characters. It's not as bad as it was in some of the previous TV Specials, but still we're a too far away from something that looks good as much as what we've seen in PART 5. Note aside: what isn't really clear to me is the purpose of the change of Lupin and Jigen's jackets: it looks just like a gimmick to intrigue long-time fans.

To conclude, Lupin The Third: Goodbye Partner is a huge disappointment. I know, at the start of this review I said that I wasn't thrilled from the beginning to see the return of the TV Special's formula, but this movie still feels like a huge disappointment because it's a big step backwards in relation of what we've seen happening in this franchise in the last 10 years. As I explained in this other article, since 2009 Lupin The Third started to surprise its audience going in unexpected new directions with things like Green vs Red or The Woman Called Fujiko Mine and that's why I was still hoping to be surprised by this new TV Special.

However, it's always nice to see new adventures of Lupin The Third and this movie still has some nice moments and a really great soundtrack by Yuji Ohno, as always. For us long time fans it's still a nice way to kill some time while waiting for the next big installments in the series (We have Lupin The IIIrd: Mine Fujiko's Lie directed by Takeshi Koike coming out on 05/31 in japanese theaters and a still unnamed new theatrical release coming out at the end of the year).

So, this is it! If you want you can leave me a comment to let me know which are your thoughts on this movie and on my review, share the article if you enjoyed and leave a like on my Lupin The Third Facebook Page and on my Illustrated Lands Facebook Page.