The Bad Guys

Pierre Perifel studied Hayao Miyazaki's The Castle of Cagliostro—the 1979 Lupin III film—to understand how to animate a gentleman thief with kinetic grace. Miyazaki's use of movement to convey character, the stylized chases where the camera follows impossible motion, the way Lupin's elusiveness is expressed through animation itself—these became Perifel's template for Mr. Wolf. Perifel cited this in a 2022 Animation Magazine feature. Castle of Cagliostro is available on Criterion Channel.