I just learned who did the outstanding artwork on the Lupin movie Castle of Cagliostro, and directed it... Miyazaki! And he was persuaded by Yasuo Otsuka!

Otsuka was the Animation Director, on the film, as well as Character Designer, and was a supervisor on the 1987 Lupin film The Fuma Conspiracy.

Otsuka teamed with Miyazaki for the 1969 Puss In Boots, involving the cast running around the castle battlements, which was the model for much of the action in Castle of Cagliostro.

 After Puss, Miyazaki and Takahata thought otherwise, joining their mentor Otsuka at A Production. Soon they were working together on the studio’s Lupin (the first TV version in 1971). 

Otsuka could draw shoot-outs and car chases to his heart’s content; he was also the show’s Animation Director. At first, he worked with Lupin’s creator Monkey Punch to adapt the manga to the screen. “But partway through, he quit,” Otsuka said. “He said it was too much for him.”

As a child, Otsuka hadn’t been inspired by cartoons, but rather by trains; the steam locomotives transporting Japanese soldiers near the town where he lived. “I had no idea such wonderful things existed… I walked all the way to the station on holidays.” This was trainspotting as a fabulous adventure and a creative dynamo for a boy artist. Otsuka remembered the engineers even letting him ride in the locomotives.

In 1945, his family moved to Yamaguchi. For Otsuka, the Occupation had a bonus – he could extend his sketching to army trucks at a nearby American base, and scavenged the soldiers’ discarded comics like Dick Tracy. His sketching was a welcome distraction from his first day job, at Yamaguchi’s Bureau of Statistics. He passed an exam for the Japan’s Health and Welfare Ministry – not because he saw a career there, but he needed a pretext to move to Tokyo and (he hoped) become a political cartoonist.

Miyazaki was mentored by Otsuka after he joined Toei in 1963 straight after college. “Otsuka taught me all about motion,” Miyazaki says in the Joy documentary. 

Otsuka wasn’t just teaching new recruits. Between Hakujaden and Hols, he burnished his reputation as an animator on several other Toei films. The Joy documentary highlights his experience on 1959’s Magic Boy, where he animated a duel between the hero and a skeleton warrior. The effect was unintentionally comical, said Takahata, who was assistant director on the film. “The scene was so real, people laughed… We didn’t mean to make it humorous. It’s funny because it’s so serious… The more serious you play it, the funnier it gets.”

One need only visualise Zenigata in Lupin to see how this principle works in anime. In the years after Hols, Otsuka would be increasingly associated with comedy, and with animating funny adversaries like Zenigata. 

Miyazaki built up this association by writing a piece called “A Slanderous Portrait” (included in Starting Point), about his early acquaintance with Otsuka. According to Miyazaki, a “completely drunk” Otsuka roared off one night in his Fiat 500. He appeared mud-spattered the next morning, having buried the car in a road under construction. It’s easy to think that incident could have informed Lupin’s comedy too.

https://blog.alltheanime.com/yasuo-otsuka-1931-2021/

"The 2003 book Lupin III Perfect Book is a celebration of the show’s 30th anniversary. The interview goes over Yasuo Otsuka’s involvement in the license, the conditions of the show’s production and his relationship to other staff members, among others Hayao Miyazaki. 

I often put a Fiat 500 (Cinquecento) into the show, but that was for no better reason than because I had driven it in the past and understood its mechanisms and depicted them enticingly on-screen."

https://fullfrontal.moe/yasuo-otsuka-special-interview

Studio Ghibli never forgot the animator that helped its two core co-founders kickstart their careers. In 2004, Ghibli released a documentary Yasuo Otsuka's Joy of Motion (2004) celebrating his career, while an exhibition of his art was held in Tokyo in 2002. Miyazaki has spoken frequently about his gratitude for Otsuka. "For me he is an excellent mentor," he wrote in his 1982 essay "A 'Slanderous' Portrait." "We did some foolish things together, but we've also talked passionately about the future of animation. It was Otsuka-san who taught me the fun of working." 

 https://www.slashfilm.com/579990/yasuo-otsuka-dead/

As animation director on Lupin III, Ōtsuka was apparently encouraged by Miyazaki (who’d just taken over as director) to include the iconic Fiat 500 in the show — largely because Ōtsuka himself owned one at the time. Later, Ōtsuka drove the same car in a circuit around Kyushu, Japan’s third-largest island, as part of an extended road trip.

In the late ‘90s, Ōtsuka teamed up with Gainax to release a multimedia CD-ROM called Yasuo Ōtsuka Military 4×4 Graffiti. Utilizing Ōtsuka’s extensive knowledge on the subject (he’d been publishing doujinshi and authoring professional books on the subject for years) and personal collection of photos, the CD-ROM was an extended slideshow celebrating military vehicles

https://www.zimmerit.moe/the-cars-of-yasuo-otsuka/

https://halcyonrealms.com/books/yasuo-ohtsuka-mechanical-artworks-book-review/