Anime: Lupin Sansei: Kutabare! Nostradamus

Competent![br][br]After much hemming and hawing, Lupin has occurred at me once again, and this time it was Not(!) a waste of time.[br][br]Not that its perfect mind.[br][br]The Animation Is Alright. that is to say, its consistent, not unpleasant and has a few flashes of nice work in there. On the downside, its not all that great in that theres no moments of genius to spruce things up a bit. In addition; the dvd rip what I has had frequent image burns, to the point of almost being distracting.[br][br]Sound is hit and miss; for whatever reason, Lupin sounds less wibbly than he usually is, and his moments of seriousness are betrayed by this considerably. The bulk of villains and peripheral characters get treated to stock voices, and even the core five are not particularly enthusiastic. The exception to this fairly mediocre sound effort is the young lass and her accompanying actor. Unfortunately this competence was underused as she got (with a few shining exceptions) some fairly dull lines.[br][br]Music effort is pretty forgettable, in that I have forgotten it, and this is ten minutes after watching the thing.[br][br]Now, the story reaches waaaaay too far at times, but it is actually coherent, if a bit ... recklessly irreverent to situational development. The upside is that this is a sustained fast paced story, even if it has to do a few somersaults to keep going after it jumps over plotholes.[br][br]Character development is there to a degree, even if it is done largely with shadow puppets. The sad part is that again, great big swathes of solid Tar MacAdam simply aren't there, and the leaps made over these are almost funny to watch happen. That said, the effort is entirely peripheral to the gags (for a better word) and the fairly hellbent story, and as such its not particularly worth following.[br][br]And thus is not worth following again, but for sadly the second time in five films, I can say this one was worth following the first time. The reason is that it actually tries. It manages to be entertaining simply because of the evident effort involved, and the handful of clever bits which accomplish entertainment improve things mightily.[br][br]So aye, A decent Lupin Film, have a go if you have bugger all else to do.[br]