天下制覇

How nipply is it? Very.

Impressions:

You can almost hear the echoes of the animation room going "Hyuk, hyuk… nipples" with this one. The intro segment in particular is so overstuffed with them that it transforms it from assumably a kind of James Bond-sexy motif to just… well… Nippolita, Queen of Nipplonia having sex with herself. The whole show and tone has been redone to be a lot grittier, both Fujiko and Lupin losing a lot of the playful energy that they normally have and it’s hard to really handwave it away as a prequel. Some of it is still there on occasion, like Lupin pretending to be an executed zombie to mess with Fujiko and their banter, but it’s far more dulled and subdued than Lupin usually is.

That said, the darker characters and ton do match the visual style that they decided to go with. Very artsy and noir with long, ill-defined shadows and rough artwork. Unfortunately, the animation is about as uneven as the art, which is better than being universally bad, but it jumps between quite decently animated bits to choppy mouth bounces to really awkward CGI with a disturbing regularity, damaging the film noir presentation that they’re clearly aiming for. It’s at least definitely better than the last horrible Lupin TV special or two, even if Fujiko and Lupin feel a little bit off from their usual selves.