24th of November, 2018
This piece was first left as a review on the website RateYourMusic.com. I was reviewing Lupin the Third: Castle of Cagliostro, the Hayao Miyazaki film.
Recent reading has convinced me that film does not usually suit being treated like a 'mechanical' or 'immediate medium', in the way music and painting are or can immediate because of their independence from representation. Film, because the camera most capture the images it finds in nature, does not have this freedom, so the best films treat the content of the frame as a kind of poetry which requires the audience to place it within the context of their experience to make it beautiful. Animation doesn't really work the same way though; it can be truly a mechanical art because rather than showing us life in motion it can just show only motion instead, the way a dance also can. The life is often incidental, and takes a back seat to pure visceral catharsis of motion. The reason this film is interesting to me is that it jumps in between this meaningless immediate style of artistry and the more traditional film style, which is subservient to our understanding of the images.
Two animation cuts are sublime. The first: a car, which is entirely too small to properly contain the men within, rides up an almost vertical hill and is filled with leaves and birds which creates a furious maelstrom of green and red, within which the drivers thrash around. The second: Lupin, dressed in scuba gear and swimming stealthily through a pipe, is spat out into a chamber and to avoid falling he frantically tries to swim breast stroke up the stream, and does so in total silence, before eventually succumbing to the pull of gravity and dropping like a rock.
Both of these cuts rest on the imagery within, otherwise they wouldn't function as visual comedy, and both also only work based on their utilisation of the free movement of animation. They are both small miracles within the wider context of the film, which is certainly very good even for me who doesn't usually care much about silly adventure movies.