Hayao Miyazaki’s first feature takes the gentleman thief Lupin III to a tiny European duchy built on forged banknotes, and stages a car chase most live-action films would envy. It is fast, funny and warm, and it does not think about anything for long.
Hayao Miyazaki directed his first feature on a licensed character he did not create, and he treated the job as a chance to see how much movement one film could hold. Arsène Lupin III is the gentleman thief of Monkey Punch’s manga, a lecher on the page; Miyazaki turns him into a man who steals for the pleasure of the trick and gives the money away when it bores him. The Castle of Cagliostro is a caper, a rescue and a chase, in that order and then again, and it is a delight. It is also, at 102 minutes, a film with almost nothing on its mind, and we will not pretend otherwise.
The chase on the cliff road is the scene everyone remembers, and it earns the memory. Lupin’s yellow Fiat 500 and a car full of the Count’s men swap paint along a mountain road, the road runs out, and the Fiat keeps going, straight up the cliff face, tyres chewing at rock. We laughed out loud, and then noticed we had been gripping the arm of the sofa. Miyazaki draws weight into everything: the little car sags on its springs when Jigen climbs in, henchmen tumble like sacks of coal, and when Lupin leaps a gap between rooftops he misjudges the second one and slams into the wall. The joke is that a cartoon hero has been given a body that can hurt.
Hirokata Takahashi’s camera lingers on painted backgrounds that could stand as postcards: the castle on its island in a lake under morning mist, an aqueduct striding across a valley, a dungeon far below the waterline where earlier visitors have been left to their bones. Masatoshi Tsurubuchi cuts the action clean, so that a fall from a height is followed by exactly the shot you need to understand where the body went. Yūji Ōno’s score is big-band jazz, brass and walking bass, and it gives the film a swagger the drawing sometimes cannot afford. Because the budget shows. Dialogue scenes hold on a still background while a mouth flaps, the crowd scenes are a smear, and the Count’s guards have two faces between them.
Yasuo Yamada voices Lupin with a nasal, delighted whine that makes him sound like a schoolboy who has found the staffroom key, and it suits this version of the character far better than a suave one would. Kiyoshi Kobayashi’s Jigen is a low growl under a hat brim; the two of them fighting over one pot of spaghetti with a pair of forks is the funniest scene in the film. Gorō Naya’s Inspector Koichi Zenigata has chased Lupin across the world and would be lost without him, and the film knows he is the real romance. Sumi Shimamoto gives Lady Clarisse de Cagliostro a small, clear voice and an air of never having been asked what she wanted, which is the point of her, and also the problem.
The Count, voiced by Taro Ishida, is a moustache-twirler with a printing press, and Haruya Yamazaki and Miyazaki’s script never gives him a second dimension; he wants the girl, the ring and the treasure, and he says so, often. Fujiko Mine (Eiko Masuyama) turns up inside the castle in disguise, is useful for ten minutes, and vanishes whenever the plot has no chair for her. Goemon Ishikawa XIII (Makio Inoue) arrives, cuts something in half, and regrets it. Clarisse is rescued, locked up and rescued again. Most critics forgive all this because the film moves too fast for you to notice, and mostly we do too. But we did notice, in the last half hour, that we were admiring the drawing more than we cared about anyone in it.
Anyone who knows the later films will spot the furniture being moved in. The girl in the tower, the castle above the water, the old gardener (Kōhei Miyauchi) who remembers better days, the hero who can climb anything: Laputa: Castle in the Sky is seven years off and half-built here. What is missing is the weight. Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and Princess Mononoke have arguments in them; this has a rescue. What is fully formed on the first attempt is the pleasure of a body falling correctly through space, and that is not a small thing.
See it with a child who is old enough to follow a plot and young enough to believe a car can climb a wall. They will laugh at the spaghetti. You will laugh at the spaghetti. Nobody will remember what the Count wanted by breakfast, and that is roughly the film’s own attitude.
