Lupin III: The First

Ambitious animation film of Lupin III. Of similar mold as The Adventures of Tintin (2011) in my eyes. While I'm not too familiar with this thief, my wife grew up with the series when she was young and she was enthusiastic, something which was contagious on me and the daughter. Cool and full of mischievous action. A very good time!

It's like they tried very hard to play it safe with the plot, the bad guys, the allies, and the action scenes. Not special on new on these fronts, if not run of the mill for the tv show episodes. Slightly less exciting than previous movies. The CGI was borderline uncanny valley and made the motions less fluid than traditional animation, which is contrasting with the usual comedic exaggeration. Anything not alive looked pretty though, and some characters were well translated to CGI

nazis are bad, cool animation

This CGI film visually depicts these well-known characters with a surprising accuracy (their design, facial animations and body language, that is). Unfortunately, this Indiana Jones-inspired tale lacks some "punch" (bad pun intended).

As a Lupin story, it seemed pretty decent, almost bordering on uncharacteristically Indiana Jones like. Purists will be put off by the relatively faithful, but undeniably jarring CG renditions of their beloved characters, and while I'm not much of a fan of the stuff that came before, I still got hung up on it. Just admit it, Lupin looks like a chimp.

The 3D animation is great at making character expressions pop and just looks nice overall. But the film is extremely tepid in terms of how it handles action and setpieces. Lupin is usually great at bending physics to justify crazy action scenes, but this movie is withdrawn in a way that's boring. Not to mention the characterization of the villains are somehow more moronic than conventional Lupin fare, especially with a really dumb attempt to make the viewer sympathize with one of the villains.

Hits a number of familiar beats—naïve avatar, bumbling cop, any number of adventure-archaeology tropes—but hits them solidly along a well-paced path of fun hijinks and enjoyable action. The party's constant tableaux, the highway prison-car-break, and the eclipse effects were the highlights for me in a generally quite fun affair.

With its first 3D-CGI entry into the franchise, Lupin III: The First pulls no punches with stellar animation, one of the best Lupin stories in recent years and just all around a lot of fun. I didn't mind the jump to 3D in my anime movie, because the characters now look like the figurines on my shelf.