Today's screenshots come from Hayao Miyazaki's 1979 feature film Lupin the 3rd: The Castle of Cagliostro. This beautiful collection of pan shots comes from the excellent website Ghibli Collector. This site mostly features photos and short animated clips and is perfect for social media users.
Miyazaki uses many vertical shots in order to heighten a sense of vertigo and scale, and it works wonderfully. I am thinking of that great sequence where Lupin scales to the rooftops of the forbidden castle, replete with cartoonish riffs on the 1969 Toei Doga Puss in Boots (examples are shown here and here), on which Miyazaki was a key animator.
The art direction in Cagliostro is restrained, a bit austere, but highly detailed and packed with color. It's definitely an example of 1970s anime and it holds up very well. Not bad for a movie with a famously short (four months) production schedule. Critics would probably say that it looks like a lavish TV episode, and that's probably true to an extent. Whatever. It still looks great, and I wish modern anime would remember what real colors look like. I'm tired of everything being so bleached out.
Castle of Cagliostro just screams "1970s Cool". You probably had to be around in those days to appreciate it. I suppose you could find yourself a leather couch, add wood paneling, shag carpeting and a Marantz stereo receiver to your den, then sit down in front of the 19-inch television to watch Charlie's Angels. You would have to feel the era of modernism and disco and punk rock, feel the final days of the post-war boom before it all began to slowly descend. You would have to feel the sense of fading nobility and lost youth that this movie embodies. It's wistful and nostalgic, the Last Great Caper.
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