please allow yourself to be stolen away by this thief
the castle of cagliostro (hayao miyazaki, 1979)
The Castle of Cagliostro might be the film of Hayao Miyazaki’s that I’ve actually watched the most. It’s just such a good time.1 I love this movie. It is one of my feel-good favorites; it’s a perfect adventure story that does everything right. There are no false notes. The tinge of romance sweetens the story but never takes over and the action stays in that specific thrilling fictional register where somehow it’s all very dangerous but you’re never really scared someone you like will get seriously hurt. And if somebody does get hurt, it can be fixed by eating a bunch of food.
We meet Lupin III, gentleman thief, and Jigen, his friend, as they pull off a heist at a casino. But the money is counterfeit, so they settle on a new heist target—the source of all this counterfeit money. They travel to the tiny country of Cagliostro (population 3500), which is the rumored source of the money. Scarcely have they arrived before they see a runaway bride being chased by a bunch of goons. Of course they are going to get involved. Naturally, on the bride’s side. What, are you going to side with goons?
The opening of this movie—where Lupin and Jigen do their feats of master thievery, realize the bills they got are fakes, and just start tossing the bad money out the car windows and doors—is crucial to setting the tone. Why does Lupin even want to break into a big vault of counterfeit money, given that he has no use for it? Because it’s an insult to his criminal pride that he could have done all this work just to end up on the wrong end of somebody else’s crime. Also, because Lupin is kind of in it for the love of the game. He doesn’t even think about trying to spend the counterfeit money. That’s no fun. There’s no skill involved.
Our runaway bride is named Clarisse de Cagliostro; she’s fresh out of convent school and she’s going to be married to the Count of Cagliostro, the regent who has ruled the country since the death of her parents. Lupin fails to rescue her in the car chase, but she slips him a ring. This ring is what the Count really wants—or, at least, Clarisse isn’t much good to him without it. He has a matching ring, and together, they do something, but what, he doesn’t know.
Lupin falls back, schemes, and tricks Zenigata, the inspector who is always on his heels, into investigating his presence in the castle. (He also calls in an ally, Goemon, and turns out to have an ally in the castle already, Fujiko.) He uses Zenigata’s presence to find Clarisse again.… But he fails again, and this time the Count drops Lupin into a hell from which there is no escape. He escapes. A third attempt to rescue Clarisse also fails. This time he almost dies.
Clarisse is drugged and her wedding to the Count seems inevitable, but at the last moment Lupin once again reveals himself to be disguised as the Archbishop. The Count pursues him and Clarisse through a clockwork tower. Lupin explains that he’s figured out the secret behind the rings: they both have to be put into the eyes of a goat at the top of the clock tower. The Count throws Lupin off the clock tower and Clarisse follows him; however, when the Count puts the rings into the eyes of the goat, he is killed by the hands of the clock. The big treasure of the Cagliostros turns out to be a Roman ruin hidden under a lake. Clarisse tells Lupin she wants to run away with him, but he says no, and runs off, Zenigata in hot pursuit. Clarisse tells Zenigata that Lupin didn’t steal anything and Zenigata is like… no… he stole the most precious thing of all… your heart.
The Castle of Cagliostro is interesting in the context of Miyazaki’s career because you can see dynamics of later movies present here. The girl who is both powerful and threatened shows up in later movies, as does the guy who doesn’t know what’s going on but feels powerfully drawn to help her. The Ghibli movie that The Castle of Cagliostro most resembles in Castle in the Sky, another adventure movie (and another favorite of mine). The heroine of that movie is also a mysterious girl with a blue gem that unlocks the secret of a ruined past. As in The Castle of Cagliostro, she is aided by a group of people who operate outside the law (in that movie, sky pirates). The key difference between the two movies, though, is that Castle in the Sky, like many of Miyazaki’s movies, is about children. The Castle of Cagliostro is about adults.2
Even though we’re told he’s a womanizer, Lupin’s basically the perfect man in this movie. Still, there are aspects to his character that have to be preserved (his devil-may-care cool, his flirtatiousness) and he has to be free for the next installment of the story. He walks away from Clarisse because he knows he has to do what’s best for her but it’s also true there’s no way that this movie could suggest he stays. He is a gentleman thief and he must roam.
So one of the things that I find so interesting about this movie in the context of Miyazaki’s career is that it’s undeniably his movie, full of his interests and his visual touches, but there are things in this movie we will not get from his independent work.3 Still, it’s also just a great movie. If there were zero other Miyazaki movies, I’d still love it.
An observation that has stuck with me over the years is Henri Bergson’s comment that we laugh when we see a living thing acting like a machine. I’m not sure that this is really true about laughter but it came to mind watching this movie4 because the Count is depicted as closely allied with machines: his infinite trap doors, his lasers, his plane, his clockwork gears, his counterfeit plates. Even the shadowy guards, with their claw-like hands, look mechanical. They are resistant to initial attempts to fight them off because they are totally covered with a machine-like armor. Clarisse calls the Count a monster and by the end of the movie, something about that statement feels literally true. The Count feels as if he’s gone past some line and he’s no longer exactly human. He cannot understand Lupin, or even really anticipate his moves, because he doesn’t understand living things. And in the end, the Count is killed by machines, because whatever he’s done to his soul, his body remains squishily organic.
Lupin, on the other hand, is flexible and alive. He jokes, he plays tricks. He infiltrates the castle multiple times, not because he has better machines, but because he isn’t a machine and can adapt to his circumstances. (In fact, machines are constantly failing Lupin one way or another throughout this story.) So this movie is about laughter triumphing over the machine—breaking it apart. He breaks the Count’s mental hold over Clarisse: her feeling that her situation is utterly hopeless and that she’s condemned by the evils of her family. He breaks the Count’s physical hold over Clarisse, too, by getting through to her even when she’s drugged into submission.
The Count’s speech to Clarisse about her family and his family sets him up as a kind of evil force for order, opposed to Lupin’s good force of chaos. Not all forces of order in this movie are evil: Zenigata is also a good guy, if opposed to Lupin, but he’s unable to interfere in a situation where he has to follow the rules if those rules are enforced by somebody bad. His attempts to play this investigation by the book are stymied and he ultimately has to borrow some tricks from Lupin’s world to accomplish his goals. (His little wink at Clarisse at the end, before he sets off in pursuit of Lupin once more, may indicate he’s become a little more rogueish over the course of the story.)
And it’s not that the evil history of the Cagliostro family is irrelevant, but that it doesn’t bind Clarisse’s future. She’s inherited a dark legacy, but Lupin shows her how to operate outside of it. The big reveal of the movie is that submerged under the Cagliostro darkness is yet another past, one which belongs, as Lupin comments, to all mankind. The past is not just one thing and even things you think you know can reveal something unexpected.
The scene where Lupin does his magic tricks for Clarisse, invoking the fairy tale language of an evil sorcerer and a noble thief, is, for me, the heart of this movie. Love and play and imagination will always win, because they are alive. Because they are alive, they are free to choose and to act. The path to victory may encounter many setbacks, but no matter how strong it is, nothing mechanical can overcome something that is alive. Even if you’re play acting over a gate to a hell from which no one has escaped, the mere fact that you can do so means you can fall into that hell a thousand times and escape every time. What is alive will always win.
One thing I find very characteristic of Miyazaki’s movies is a strong sense of “weight”—I think this is part of what people are reacting to when they talk about how good the food looks. However, it’s particularly impressive here because this movie is full of ridiculous cartoon physics—like the part where Lupin swims through the air—and yet everything still feels that way.
Where there are relevant installments of Animation Obsessive, the greatest newsletter ever, I will mention them down here. Some will be paywalled, but if you are at all into this sort of thing, it’s such a good newsletter! Here’s one about Miyazaki’s work on the Lupin TV show, which is free to read:
And here’s another one that discusses Cagliostro, which is paywalled:
For the curious, the Lupin TV release from Discotek still seems to be in print. It’s also on Crunchyroll.
The part where Lupin desperately tries to swim up the waterfall and almost succeeds and then goes down but flailing all the way… so good.
I love how Lupin sees Clarisse gunning it and just instantly involves himself on her side. Gentlemen thieves who do things for the love of the game and have a chivalrous weakness for the ladies may not “really” exist… but they do… in my heart.
While this is not a scary movie, the part at the wedding with the creepy black-hooded guards and drugged Clarisse is very, very creepy.
Also, that is not a canonically valid marriage ceremony… you have a slamdunk case for an annulment Clarisse.
It’s amazing how well this movie works if you know nothing about Lupin in general. I say this because I know nothing about Lupin in general. Actually, my impression is that this movie kind of works better if you don’t care that much about the Lupin franchise because his character is much softer than it is in other installments. (However, I haven’t watched them.) Every time I watch this with somebody else I feel compelled to say “so that person’s a character from the larger story” but I don’t know why because it doesn’t matter and the movie stands fine on its own.5
That said Fujiko rules and my sole complaint is that she should get more sequences where she shoots people.
I forgot Lupin just calls the Count a pedophile. He tells it like it is.
The Count’s death is so over-the-top gruesome it’s almost funny. And it’s also in keeping with what we’ve been told over and over—the Cagliostros are an evil family. Naturally, they designed this puzzle to kill the person who solved it.
Another thing The Castle of Cagliostro and Castle in the Sky have in common—both were early “omg Disney totally ripped this off” nerd causes (along with Kimba the White Lion). I would say the big clockwork battle in The Great Mouse Detective feels more like “inspired by” to me than “ripping off.”
I love Clarisse’s North Tower bedroom, I know it’s supposed to be terrible or whatever but I want it.
The part where there are so many secret passages and snooping mechanisms in the castle that the fire in the basement means smoke is pouring out of all sorts of places… it’s a great bit.
Many thanks to
for suggesting the proper title for this section.
How are we gonna do this?
First of all, here is a spreadsheet with all the movies and such under consideration.
After thinking about it, I think the best thing to do is to combine the entries of the franchises that are included, using the later installment as the place in the schedule. The Urusei Yatsura movies will be together, and then the Patlabor movies will be together. However, those installments present some specific problems, as does Angel’s Egg. So straightforward chronological order is not going to work.6 There are a bunch of things that I feel pretty sure were on streaming but now suddenly are not:
Urusei Yatsura: Beautiful Dreamer is nowhere to be found, and used copies go for a big chunk of change. If I can’t get Beautiful Dreamer, we will skip the two Urusei Yatsura movies for now and get back to them once I have a copy I can use.
Angel’s Egg has got a theatrical release coming in November, but no word as of yet on a streaming or physical release.7 I’m going to be in Oregon again for most of November, so if I can’t catch it theaters or stream it, we’ll get back to it later.
Looking further afield, the Patlabor entries also seem to have disappeared from streaming, unless I hallucinated them being there in the first place. Is Dallos going to disappear the next time I blink? We’ll see.… As with Urusei Yatsura, there are some very $$$ physical copies floating around out there, but that won’t be very useful while I’m on the go.
So I’ll put up the November itinerary in the next post, but for now, the next movie is Nausicäa, which either be October 18 or 25, depending on how long it takes me to get through the manga. In general, these posts will be like the Evangelion posts, in that they will be responding to the movie but not reliant on research or further reading… but I am making an exception for Nausicäa because I’ve never really liked the movie much. (I’ve only seen it once.) I also have this book, but haven’t looked at it yet.
I may have watched Totoro more times, but it’s close.
Or, in Clarisse’s case, somebody who is not a child.
I’m not sure Lupin is a character type we get in his Ghibli movies, really. (Am I overlooking something really obvious here? I feel like I am.…)
Some synchronicity here from the first essay in Miyazaki’s Starting Point: 1979–1996, which I picked up after writing that:
Let me next comment on gags. Most gags make fun of human stupidity. But I think laughing at other people’s foibles actually represents something far more base and vicious than a “gag.” So what do I consider a real gag? Well, it’s when someone tries his or her absolute best to do something, and for some unexpected reason loses focus and does something totally out of character or outside the normal routine. It might be, for example, when a beautiful, gentle, proper princess attempts to save her lover from falling into the hands of bandits by kicking them. This doesn’t ruin our impression of the princess, but it makes her suddenly come alive, makes her seem truly human.
There are many explanations for why Americans, specifically, like anime. I would like to offer two. First, anime is something you can experience without context. It clearly has a context, but, as in the case of this movie, which is an installment of a very successful franchise that never really hit in America, you will mostly be flying blind. (I limit this observation to Americans because many big Japanese franchises did make it in Europe and so on.) Later, if you want, you can get on the forums, try to learn Japanese, read the various annotations that explain references to you that might not even have been legible as references.
But, particularly before this era of online simulcasts, your initial experience would generally have been: what the hell is this? And even if you became a somewhat more knowledgeable fan, you’d probably remain at a certain level of what the hell is this. Maybe these statements are less true for the youth of today than of the youth of my day, but I think they are still somewhat true. Part of the appeal of anime is that it stands on its own terms, even if (as in the case of this movie) it’s literally not supposed to.
Americans also have, to speak generally, a very loose grasp on the politics of other countries if they are not viewed in terms of America. So where American pop culture is subject to internal partisan scrutiny from all sides, Japanese pop culture usually is not. There are exceptions. (Like Darling in the Franxx and its Shinzo Abe memes, or Attack on Titan and… well, kind of everything about Attack on Titan.) I haven’t really involved myself in anime fandom in an extremely long time or watch many new shows so I could be wrong… but I think this is still basically true. Anime feels innocent of politics while remaining capable of being challenging, artistically ambitious, intellectually sophisticated, etc., because to Americans “politics” means “are you a Democrat or a Republican.” So that is another attraction, because the party politics way of slicing up art is both exhausting and stupid, but here, you don’t have to think about it.
Why go into all this…? A couple reasons. One is that some of these filmmakers’ early career works are installments of huge franchises that basically do not exist in America, and I am not watching all of Urusei Yatsura for this project, so we are going to encounter this experience a few times. I do think this lack of context is a unique aspect of American anime fandom and it is part of why I both enjoy anime and why I have been hesitant to write about it “professionally” (i.e., for a newspaper or a magazine, as opposed to an email newsletter).
The other reason, though, is that I also think that Hayao Miyazaki, specifically, might be received as a much more complicated filmmaker over here if he were not somebody whose politics are received as, basically, “I like trees :).”
Originally this footnote was the opening of this post and then I was like “why is this the opening? this is so annoying” so now it lives down here, in the sewer, where it belongs.
What I have not yet figured out how to handle is Paranoia Agent—which I think has to be included as there is so little Satoshi Kon. However, it is quite a ways off.
Since I am making money off of this (in theory), we shall not be sailing the high seas. Also I don’t know how. Once I asked somebody to show me how to torrent and he just texted me the poster for the movie Entrapment.
Clips from The Castle of Cagliostro were used as the basis of the 80s arcade video game called Cliffhanger, which is how I was first introduced to it. Your interactions with the joystick and buttons had to be timed to the events in the animation. I was unable to master it but it was a singular video game — animation when everything else was pixelated. Years later, I started working through Miyazaki’s back catalog and discovered that was the video game. So my experience with this movie was a bit warped.