Gallery Fake 01

Kabitzin on February 16, 2005 · in Other Series

Reiji Fujita starts out by totally punking some goon using his mad art-analyzing skillz. The man thinks that the Van Gogh painting he has is worth $20 million, but Fujita tells him that the yellow is too vivid because it is mixed with silver-white paint. Fujita tells the goon that because Van Gogh never mixed paints, the painting is obviously fake. The goon is mad, but Fujita pulls a gun (which is later revealed to be just a lighter that he probably got from Spencer Gifts) and leaves with the painting after paying only $2,000 for the painting. Fujita and his young assistant Sara Halifa are in NY to take part in an auction at Sotheby’s. The piece that Fujita is most interested in is a Monet painting of haystacks. While he’s browsing, Sayoko Mitamura comes over and accuses him of running a gallery known as Gallery Fake where he sells fake art as a front for his black market of real masterpieces (sold for outrageous prices). Fujita blows her off, and then runs into Max Watson. Max used to work with Fujita at the Met, but Max had Fujita fired when Fujita discovered Max’s dastardly reattribution scheme. Max was in charge of sorting out fake paintings and would claim real masterpieces were fake in order to sell them for uber-cheap prices to famous collector, Bill Travers. The Monet painting was on the list to be reattributed, and now Fujita is back for revenge.

Max (who is running the auction) is really worried, but Bill believes that he can easily win the bid for the Monet painting. Meanwhile, Fujita pays a visit to an old collector named Mr. Aubrey who is famous for always coming up short at auctions (an “underbidder”). Fujita offers Mr. Aubrey a chance to hire him as a broker, and after some convincing, Mr. Aubrey agrees, but only as long as Fujita adheres to a miserly $10 million bid limit. Unfortunately, Mr. Aubrey is known as an underbidder, and Bill correctly guesses that Fujita’s limit is $10 million. At the auction, Fujita has Sara do the bidding and instructs her to bid aggressively, in spite of their low budget. In a surprising turn of events, Sara and Fujita raise the price of the painting up to $30 million and beat out Bill for the painting. Then they go and taunt Bill, and Fujita is pleased to have gotten revenge. Mr. Aubrey appears on TV and rats out Bill and Max, and then mentions that he will turn the painting over to the Met after he dies. Fujita is happy because he swiped that painting (which was actually real) in the beginning and so was able to get revenge with only a $2,000 out of pocket expenditure. And Sara is happy that Fujita has to take her to the Empire State Building’s lookout because she has mad bidding skillz.

Sorry for the long summary, but as you may have guessed, this anime is rather complicated. In spite of that, if you want a more challenging anime, this may be a good choice. I don’t know diddly about art, but I’m guessing I would have been snorting in derision if I did. Fujita is an interesting character, because even though he’s all smirks and cool poses, Sara mentions that he is acting rather out of character in his quest for revenge. When you think about it, the revenge plot was just downright petty and silly. So maybe the cool exterior is just an act. I was afraid this anime might be really boring, but it held my interest through the entire first episode. The pace was pretty reasonable, and if you like mysteries it’s fun to try to follow along with all the twists and turns in the plot. I understand that this series is based on a 30+ volume manga series, so there shouldn’t be any weak storytelling. The music was ok, and the production values were reasonable. The art kinda reminded me of Noir, and was bland and dark.