Lupin - Ice, Robot Part 1

Some episodes of Lupin are better than others-- While most are light-hearted adventure/comedy stories, some tend to be more dramatic, and some are pure comedy. "Ice, Robot" is a particularly crazy comedy-oriented episode, from 1978. It has a very bizarre premise, and it brings in a whole bunch of one-shot characters without really introducing them. The plot twists and turns with no sense of logic. I love it.

But the best thing about the episode is the art. The posing and staging are really cool, and better than most episodes. I don't know the details of how Japanese shows are produced, other than that it's somewhat different from Western ones, but it seems like there was this one particular Lupin director or animator or layout artist or something, who had a really unique visual style. He seems to have been the one who did the designs for the 1978 "Secret of Mamo" Lupin movie, although the poses in the movie aren't consistently great like this episode, so I don't know if he actually did the keys for it. If anybody reading this knows who's responsible for the designs in Mamo, let me know! It may have been the director, or the animation director, layout artist... I don't know what exactly he did, but he's good.


Anyway, back to the episode at hand. This guy seems to have done this whole episode, as almost every shot is great...

Right away it starts with a neat visual idea-- the phone ringing with the establishing shot inside of it.





Something I find funny about this episode is the idea that Lupin, Jigen and Goemon all live in same house together.


I like this composition. The characters in the room frame the doorway, which is itself a frame for the guy coming in, which is what we're supposed to be looking at.


These are a couple of nice 'establishing shot' pan backgrounds. I guess they're really more for mood than exposition.



I'll post stills from the rest of the episode later today.

Lupin the Third 1

Lupin the Third is a really cool series, with a great premise and cast. The most well-known iteration is the second TV show, which ran from 1977-1980. It had a fairly unique art style that was different from most anime, although I'm not sure any animated iteration of it ever really captures the insanity of the comics. Monkey Punch's original art is fantastic. It's got more energy than any other comics I've ever seen. I'll probably post more about it in the future. Here are some images from it.

Space Goose - Banquet Bust-Up

The third episode of Space Goose is finished!

What's going on

I'm going to probably be having more content on this blog in the future, starting now. Anyway, just to update whoever's reading this (re: nobody) about what's going on with me, I've just started attending Max the Mutt Animation School. It's pretty good so far, although honestly there's not a lot of actual animation-related stuff in the first year, so I'm not that interested in some of the classes. Life drawing is obviously very important for an animator, but I'm not so keen on the painting classes. I want to learn how to draw well, but not necessarily how to paint.

I'm working on a couple of animation projects right now, but both are going really slowly because of the amount of schoolwork I have. I'm about 2/3 done the third episode of Space Goose, and I'm also about halfway done a parody of some old anime.