Ah, Lupin the Third... that gentleman thief show with the intrigue of James Bond and the comedy of Inspector Gadget. Lupin's enjoyed several iterations in television and film over the last few decades, supposedly varying in quality (sadly, most of these are hard to come by with an English dub here in North America, partially because there's just so much of it, and licensing it all is no doubt a pain). After years without a proper television series, "The Woman Called Fujiko Mine" is a 2012 work is a 13 episode series that focuses mainly on Fujiko, and it's easily the most different of the iterations, and by far the most interesting, making it somewhat the sleeper hit of its year, based on how few people actually talked about it. The show is mostly episodic, and can be seen as a prequel of sorts to the rest of the franchise. We see how Lupin (the wise-cracking inventive thief), Goemon (the silent wandering samurai), Jigen (the magnum-weilding sharpshooter), and Fujiko meet for the first time. They don't really meet and become friends right away: all of them being criminals, they often try to kill each other for the prize at hand. They don't meet at the same time, either: the show suggests Fujiko is the thread that ties them all, meeting each one by one by chance on numerous occasions until they happen to collide all at once. It's a great way to see each of the characters for the first time, and despite each of them being a standard archetype for your average adventure, they each seem genuinely interesting and human (at least more so than in past shows). Oh yes, this does focus on Fujiko a bit more than the others. And it plays to her strengths as a femme fatal, and we get to see a lot of her. Not just as in being in every episode, but she also undresses in every episode. Never before has there been quite as much nudity in a show (at least none I've seen). Even the opening has her buck-naked throughout. But that doesn't make this pure masturbation material, like some other fan service anime. Because she is nude so often, and in the way it is portrayed in the style of the show, it feels much more mature, sexy without being embarrassing. She's also more badass and darker (using her charms in the first episode to basically trick a man in being executed in her place). Although, one can't help but think about how she got this way, flaunting her body whenever appropriate to snag some priceless object. And the ending animation after each episode, with images of her as a child in questionable poses, adds to the uneasy.Sure enough, the already dark show gets darker in the last few episodes, ditching the episodic format to tell a greater tale of Fujiko's childhood past and memories she had blocked out. I won't go into details for spoilers, but I'll say I was a little disappointed in how it ends. It kinda just said that the entire mystery unraveling was meaningless to Fujiko's actual character. I like the moral it tries to portray, but it had the same effect as a spinoff movie: enjoyable, but completely meaningless and unnecessary to the main stuff. Which was strange, considering how much it goes into introducing the other characters and giving them so much backstory, as well as completely changing some characterizations to well-established characters (I'm looking at you, Zenigata).
Visually, the show is almost a knockout. The artists mimicked the original work by Monkey Punch (yes, that's the name he uses) in his original manga, and you get this incredible sketchy style that looks like a graphic novel come to life. The character designs are also a little bit more exaggerated to match the style, and looks great. The animation itself is a hit or miss: almost like the writing, the show is strongest in the first three episodes, but drops in quality in the middle, before picking up a little at the end. If you look too closely at the actual animation during some of the middle episodes, you'll laugh at how limited and minimal it is, almost comparable to anime from the 1980's. The great visual style is mostly maintained (although details are dropped a little), so you might not notice or care. The music at least is strong throughout, playing cool jazz that seems to portray the time period and characters perfectly, and further enhancing the maturity of the show. The English dub is iffy... so many different dubs of Lupin have ensured that maintaining any level of quality is nearly impossible. Fujiko herself sounds fine here, although I wasn't quite sure about Lupin himself. Overall, they are all acceptable, but one might want to switch to the Japanese dub to add a foreign element to the audio, which may make it sexier still, depending on your taste. Yes, sexy is the word here. It has flaws, but with all the sex, drugs, nudity, passion, despair, pain and pleasure, you can't take your eyes off of it. It's just so different and mature, and it stands as an example of what anime can strive for, making one realize that the anime art-style can do a lot more than you thought possible.