SIGKILL: How to Kill a Computer
That Dirty Pair would eventually make the leap to animation is a total no-brainer.
Although clearly indebted to Golden Age science fiction, this is a series that has always placed deliberately over-the-top, staged action sequences high on its list of priorities. Haruka Takachiho may be a master at prosaic imagery, but the fact is Dirty Pair has always been an intensely visual series. After all, Yoshikazu Yasuhiko’s illustrations are just as iconic to the look and feel of the novels as Takachicho’s own writing is, and you can’t inherit as much from professional wrestling as Dirty Pair does and not end up tackling visual media in some form. The question was not if there would be a Dirty Pair anime, but precisely how the series would bring its unique spin to the medium because, perhaps counterintuitively, there are also some things about it that make it somewhat hard to adapt.
Chief among these is the fact the the novels are told in the first person from Kei’s perspective (or rather, what she wants us to think her perspective is), and this ties into their use of extremely clever postmodern and self-aware literary techniques. Kei being an unreliable narrator and an oral storyteller firmly working within the conventions of serialized sci-fi, light novels and fanfiction means that a great deal of Dirty Pair’s uniqueness comes from being a book series in the first place. For the anime to succeed on any level other than a purely superficial one, it’s going to have to translate this sense of knowing and pointed structural playfulness into some equivalent visual media form.
Which, thankfully for everyone, it does. But to get an understanding of how, we once again have to take an extremely fine-toothed comb to the proceedings here, as this is another case where a lot of meaning is deliberately left to be conveyed through subtext and subconscious association. First of all, fans of the novels will likely immediately notice that everything looks a lot different in “How to Kill a Computer” than it did in The Dirty Pair Strike Again, which was, if you’re playing along at home, just last year. Kei and Yuri now look quite a bit more cartoony (as does Mughi), though not in a bad way, and their outfits have been slightly tweaked to make them brighter so they stand out on 1980s TV sets. The girls’ starship, the namesake Lovely Angel, is a completely different vehicle. In the novels, Kei describes something that sounds like a cross between a rocketship, a flying saucer and a fighter jet, but the anime’s Lovely Angel looks like a pink, superdeformed Star Trek Phase II USS Enterprise (Andy Probert and Matt Jeffries version, not James Cawley version).
(This was by no means unintentional. The show’s director was a massive, massive Star Trek fan and would slip in references at every opportunity. Trekkers may also want to take note of the readout on the computer monitor Yuri is looking at during the episode’s opening moments.)…
