English Dub Review: Lupin III Part VI “The Killers in the Diner”
Overview
A pair of twins walk into a restaurant, and this isn’t the start of a joke or even a story by Ernest Hemingway…
Our Take
This time around we have an episode directed by an anime legend by the name of Mamoru Oshii who has an extensive track record of Anime Classics under his belt. (most notably, the Patlabor franchise, wrote “Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade” and directed the first two animated “Ghost in the Shell” films.)
Given how short the proceedings were, I think it worked mostly in its movie and movie director references as well as visual references to anime itself. Most notably, one of the hit-men resembled the iconic “Golgo 13” while another one could’ve been a reference to Robert Rodriguez’s “Mexico Trilogy” and even one that resembled Chow Yun Fat’s character Jong from “The Killer”. On the plus side, The gunfight was shockingly well animated with no CGI to be found here. Most of the episode had lots of build-up and tension and left me wondering if was going to lead anywhere only for the twist to be something I wasn’t expecting Lupin to say about Fujiko’s cooking which gave me a good laugh.
Overall, this was a decent filler episode and something that we haven’t quite seen in Lupin before. It felt like a Tarantino movie but I mean that in a good way of course. I think the story would’ve worked better if Lupin and his crew came in the aftermath and pieced together what happened. Then you get a bit more mystery. But that’s just me. Now I’m interested to see what’s in store in the next one…
Hi Ashley, thank you so much for reading and we love the feedback. Note that on that day we had 14th posts go up and only ten posts show on the front page, so it's possible the preview had already been archived by the time you got to it. One recommendation would be to add our RSS feed to your favorite news aggregator service like Feedly, this way you get all of the latest posts!