“May there always be an Angel by your side”: Dirty Pair: Flight 005 Conspiracy

No goodbyes, just good memories.

This is the final Dirty Pair movie. The final Classic Anime. The final performance of Kyōko Tongū and Saeko Shimazu as Kei and Yuri. And it's time for us to take stock of just how far we've come and where we might be going from here. Because while Dirty Pair does not end with Flight 005 Conspiracy, a very important part of it does, and this is where the Lovely Angels bid Vaka Rangi farewell: Transcending our narrative one last time in search of their next adventure together.

The existence alone of Dirty Pair: Flight 005 Conspiracy is something of an oddity. In the years since the release of Dirty Pair: The Motion Picture in 1987, the franchise had been slipping into more and more of a decline popularly, falling ever more out of the public eye as audiences and tastes began to change. There's a marked dropoff in, say, promotional material and tie-in merchandise from the release of The Motion Picture, through the OVA series to this movie that tracks alongside Dirty Pair's inescapable slide into obscurity. In fact, there was next to no promotion for Flight 005 Conspiracy at all, with no significant ad spots in magazines I could find and nothing except a soundtrack CD and a small calendar to go along it. Even the LaserDisc cover is the most unassuming and humble of things: While even Original Dirty Pair got unique, elabourate and colourful sleeve art for each volume, here we only have a simple illustration of the girls set against a solid colour background and the title printed in basic, no-frills font in a tiny corner at the top of the sleeve.

Of course this is not at all to insinuate the series' quality had been declining in parallel, the contrary, in fact: I'd argue the run from the premier of Original Dirty Pair to now is a strong contender for the single greatest run of stories in all of Dirty Pair. Yet it seems like even as animated Dirty Pair came into its own, gradually leaving its own indelible mark on the series as a whole, viewers started to grow less and less enamoured of it. It's not like this is anything of a surprise, considering the TV series, debatably the most well-known and well-loved version of the franchise, was canceled before all its episodes could be produced. I suppose you could point the finger at Dirty Pair being science fiction that trends more or less to the traditional side of things as the culprit behind its fall from favour, but I don't think that really explains it: Plenty of other sci-fi shows that had just as traditional roots went on to be far more successful. For an especially poignant contrast, look at Star Trek: The Next Generation, the popularity of which only continued to steadily climb during this exact same period.

No, I'm far more inclined to blame shifting demographics. I think viewers overlooked Dirty Pair and left it behind in favour of newer and more exciting series as the popularity of shōnen anime and manga exploded in the late-1980s and early-1990s owing to the increasing dominance of the so-called “otaku” subculture in the discourse. There's a whole essay that's not this one on how and why self-professed otaku naturally gravitated towards media that is strictly speaking intended for children and why those particular tastes became synonymous with anime and manga in the Long 1990s, but the long and short of it for our purposes is that Dirty Pair isn't a children's show-It's a science fiction show for adults (primarily, arguably, adult women) that just happens to be a cartoon, and that's what had gone very out of vogue by 1990. Dirty Pair will always have fans in adult sci-fi enthusiast communities, just like the one Rick Sternbach and Mike Okuda were a part of, but those people were no longer the target audience for anime. And so the series retreats further back into its OVA sanctuary for its final screen outing of note.

One wonders if the Sunrise animators were aware of all this on some level. While I'm not sure Dirty Pair: Flight 005 Conspiracy was intended to be the last Dirty Pair as it doesn't have a particularly funereal tone about it, it does very much feel like a series looking within itself and doubling down on its strengths. That's not to say the film plays it safe either, actually this might be the most brazen and envelope-pushing effort of the lot, at least in some respects. But Dirty Pair: Flight 005 Conspiracy is definitely a film that knows what it is, knows what it's good at and knows who really cares. It's a veritable Dirty Pair Greatest Hits of thematic elements and plot beats executed absolutely flawlessly: It's once again a dense espionage thriller, there are mentions of Planet Lionesse, Yuri gets to wield her signature Bloody Card for the first and last time on TV and even Lucifer plays an important role. Yet Chief Gooley still makes a cameo, the Lovely Angel herself is the model from the OVA Series and Kei and Yuri's uniforms resemble their outfits from Dirty Pair: The Motion Picture. The story even involves a mystery surrounding a plane that's tearing a family apart, just like in “No Way! 463 People Disappeared?!”/“We Did It! 463 People Found!”. The film reaches across the entire span of the Classic Series and the light novels to bring together all the quintessential little signifiers that make Dirty Pair Dirty Pair for one last show.

And that's even before you get to the writing and direction.

I'm not even going to bother talking about the plot: It's a complex tale of twists, turns and fake-outs and relies on world-building to such an extent I'd be spending the whole essay just summarising it, and that's not what I want to talk about. I hasten to add this is not in any way a complaint or a criticism: Dirty Pair: Flight 005 Conspiracy is sprawling tale of political intrigue and human drama that spans the entire galaxy and beats within each and every human heart, even that of the smallest child, and I've never before seen a story like this conveyed this effectively. If you're looking for a recommendation or endorsement, that's it: If you haven't seen it before and care at all about Dirty Pair, go watch it. Now, preferably. It is “harder” and less openly metaphysical than, say, Affair of Nolandia, to use the obvious point of comparison and it also has something of a reputation for “darkness”: Flight 005 Conspiracy is a somewhat somber and melancholy film and is definitely the darkest of the Classic Anime series, but it must be said (and without spoiling too much) there's nothing here that would seem out of place in, for example, The Dirty Pair Strike Again.

But just as was the case with Affair of Nolandia, the keyword here isn't “dark”, but “adult” and “mature”. This is a Dirty Pair that plays itself straight for a change (well, not *too* straight: This is still Dirty Pair with all the requisite puroresu performativity that goes along with it, of course). There's no more Blade Runner-influenced Elenore City; there are no more clueless and strangled shout-outs to James Bond. This is a Dirty Pair movie with unfaltering confidence in just being a Dirty Pair movie and the knowledge it doesn't need to be anything else to blow us away. Star Trek, however, thankfully does still remain: We get to see a lot more of the Lovely Angel then we ever have before, including quite a few going-to-warp sequences that are obviously a hat-tip to similar effects shots from the film series. The animation and art direction, by the way, are both top-notch, here and in every other scene: This movie is as vivid, colourful, imaginative and evocative as the series has ever been.

But having Star Trek stick around is both touching and also quite fitting because, with Flight 005 Conspiracy, Dirty Pair is once more and for one last time a space-based science fiction show about a voyaging starship. And appropriately, this is the most mature and nuanced depiction of Kei and Yuri's relationship we've seen in a very long time. The girls go through hell in this movie and, under the strain of their charge, come perilously close on quite a number of occasions to explicitly confessing their obvious feelings for each other. But they always stop short, because that wouldn't be appropriate in this setting: That's not what this film is about. The mission must come first. The mission must always come first. There will be time for that after the credits roll. But we can read it plain as day in the way they talk and act around each other, like we never could before. Two hearts beating as one, the entire universe before them. 

Dirty Pair: Flight 005 Conspiracy show a Kei and Yuri with the weight of the world on their shoulders and well aware of it. And it's not just them: This is the most crazed and obsessive Chief Gooley of all, apparently driven completely to the brink of sanity due to the combined stresses of his job and working with the Lovely Angels, and not entirely in a comedic way. And in a way this is quite fitting, because as much as Flight 005 Conspiracy reaches across the span of Dirty Pair's collected history, it also serves as a kind of limit case for it: Frankly, this movie can make a strong case for being the absolute pinnacle of Sunrise's animated Dirty Pair franchise, but in order to be that it must push every single thing about the series as it exists right now as far as it can possibly go. There's a brilliant scene where the girls use the trappings of fluffy pulp sci-fi and detective fiction against itself (and us), reappropriating it for themselves. The movie even ends with the Angels squaring off against the leader of Lucifer himself in a life-or-death stakes battle the likes of which they've never seen before. There can never be another detective mystery as simultaneously sweepingly grandiose and heartrendingly personal as this. There can never be another Golden Age-influenced sci-fi story this powerful and effective that doesn't also bring something else to the table.

This is Dirty Pair's Loser Retires match.

And yet at the same time, the film knows this, because of course it does. Kei and Yuri are here, aren't they? Who knows their story or the fabric of narrative magick with which it's woven better than them? And Kei and Yuri know better than anyone just where their path will take them next. Music once more plays a very integral role here, and it's overwhelmingly more effective and memorable than any other time the series has tried this. The OVA Series themes were perfect, but music was not worked into the basic structure and body of that show except for the familiar leitmotifs that played during the action scenes. Dirty Pair: The Motion Picture wanted to be a feature-length abstract music video, but it had trouble syncing up its musical symbolism with its linear narrative. Dirty Pair: Flight 005 Conspiracy, however, works just like Miami Vice, delicately weaving music into key wordless moments throughout the movie. Unlike the dissonance of The Motion Picture's score, here the story's animation and its soundtrack (very, very appropriately called Love Songs) at last truly compliment each other, working in perfect tandem to elevate the entire production.

(And of course the theme song is a work of genius. Why wouldn't it be? In fact, to me it anticipates, uncannily, some of Dennis McCarthy's scores for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Enterprise.)

It's a refreshing reiteration, here in the year that Miami Vice itself went off the air, of the timeless beauty and power of Long 1980s visual logic and cinematography and a metaphor for the lasting legacy of Dirty Pair itself. The true gift of Kei and Yuri's magick is its ability to settle in our hearts, remind us of our greater selves and our more cosmic purpose, and to inspire us to reach for them. They're always within our sight should we take the time to remember them and reflect on them. Because the biggest secret of all is, for all of its alleged “darkness”, Dirty Pair: Flight 005 Conspiracy may just be the most hopeful Dirty Pair yet. Utopianism does not mean a perfect world free of strife and conflicts, but it does mean a world where we can deal with such things in a positive and constructive way. It's a commitment to improve ourselves and to strive for an ideal that is not necessarily a tangible thing for us to reach, at least not in this life, but that allows us to sublimate the life we have now. Kei and Yuri know this better than anyone, and in order to prove it they once again break the God Canon. But this time they too are caught in the blast.

Kei and Yuri have always stood in for the concept of the Glorified Body, and it's always been their charge to help prepare humanity for the next phase of their spiritual development, oftentimes by bringing forth traumatic, yet necessary, transformative change. And now it's time to do that for each other, and for Dirty Pair itself: Summon all the franchise is and has ever been, and explode it outward spectacularly in every direction. Blow it up so that it may be sublimated. With Flight 005 Conspiracy, Dirty Pair as a viable franchise is effectively over, but as an idea, as a dream, it's become infinite, immortal, and unending. Just like our Glorified Lovely Goddesses. There will be more official Dirty Pair here and there, certainly, but there will be even more homages, reiterations, reincarnations and evocations in all but name. Dirty Pair belongs to the collective unconscious and the realm of symbolic magick now, and that's where its greatest work can be done. Dirty Pair has reached its own point of singularity. The Lovely Angels have transfigured into higher states of being. Kei and Yuri have grown up.

What more can I say about Dirty Pair? About Kei and Yuri? As much as they have changed at the end of this movie, so they have changed me. They've certainly changed the course of this project permanently, that much is self-evident. But the effect on me personally will be even more lasting and resonant. As I was writing this book, my world slowly became a more and more uncanny, and unmistakable, example of life imitating art. This isn't a true autobiography, in spite of what it looks like and the influences it draws from the genre, so I won't go into too much more detail here. But this show...This series...Those girls...Those ideas, have changed my life forever. If a goddess is the idea of a goddess, then Kei and Yuri are mine. Like Kira Nerys once said, “That's the thing about faith: If you don't have it, you can't understand it and if you do, no explanation is necessary”. There's a landscape of memory and emotion Dirty Pair evokes for me, and the amount of truth I can convey about it through pseudo-academic prose is rapidly running thin, so I too, must depart, alongside my Lovely Holy Guardian Angels. All I can do is invite you to take your own journey and discover your own truths for yourself...And to hope your journey is even a fraction as rewarding, fulfilling and affirmational as mine has been.

So, after all of that what have we learned? We've travelled across the universe and traversed the future-scapes of our most vivid memories and imaginations to discover the universe that exists in all of us; in each and every living thing. We've touched the soul of world and seen the paths that lie before us, and that lead us to each other. It's been an amazing ride, and I can only dream of where we're going next. We've barely only scratched the surface. What does the future hold for Kei and Yuri? Only the stars can know. But they do assuredly have a future, because their future is now, and it is them. They live it, and every day the tide turns over once more, they live it again.

And now, I really can't say anymore. Take it by yourself. And let it always be summertime.

See you next volume...!? Again, bye bye...

“...and You're Not James Bond Either”: Dirty Pair: The Motion Picture (Dirty Pair: Project E.D.E.N.)

Stories are retold across different times, places and culture. While the forme of their symbolic power may change and morph to adapt to each new context, the underlying power remains whenever they are invoked. Stories can split off from each other and be shaped by the forces of mythopoeia, and can become as different from each other as they are similar.

It's fitting that Dirty Pair: The Motion Picture be named after the first Star Trek movie as it's existence is every bit as much of an inexplicable puzzle as that of Gene Roddenberry's abortive magnum opus. The last Dirty Pair outing had been the OVA Affair of Nolandia two years ago, an open acknowledgment of the franchise's by this point niche audience and a direct attempt to court them. Affair of Nolandia, despite being unambiguously brilliant, was not (and still isn't) terribly well received by fans who had long since fallen in love with the first Dirty Pair series, with which it was explicitly and manifestly made to contrast with. The same month, that very show had been canceled with two episodes left to air for reasons that remain uncertain, but are widely believed to have something to do with poor ratings. One might speculate then that with the sort of property the animated Dirty Pair franchise seemed to be turning out to be, the next logical step would *not* be a lavish, big-budget feature film released to theatres.

Indeed, Dirty Pair: The Motion Picture seems like the complete opposite of Affair of Nolandia in every conceivable way: While Affair of Nolandia was a conservatively-budgeted OVA aimed at a niche group of science fiction fans (even, *gasp* using limited animation!) that bent over backward to differentiate itself from the TV series, this is a glitzy, grand-scale motion picture extravaganza self-consciously trying to ape the look-and-feel of the TV show in order to attract the broadest possible audience while also constantly trying to one-up and build upon it and somehow still trying to function as a standalone work. It really does feel like Sunrise's MO was “whatever we did on Affair of Nolandia, do the complete and total opposite this time”. Where Affair of Nolandia felt organic, Dirty Pair: The Motion Picture is all bright lights and neon strobes. Where Affair of Nolandia was atmospheric, contemplative and intimate, Dirty Pair: The Motion Picture is sprawling, flashy and spectacular. Where Affair of Nolandia felt psychedelic and spiritual, Dirty Pair: The Motion Picture is a digital, computerized, high-tech sensory overload.

This has both positive and negative consequences. The first major plus is that, anticipating all this, the editing and cinematography here is beyond amazing and as a result Dirty Pair: The Motion Picture is a movie that understands the power of imagery, mood and emotion like nothing else. This is, in all honesty, the most visually astounding and mesmerizing science fiction movie I have ever seen. The first twenty minutes alone are worth watching all by themselves: The film throws us Dirty Pair, Star Trek, Miami Vice, Dune, 2001: A Space Odyssey, James Bond, Cold War thrillers, MTV, late-80s house jazz influenced synthpop and every piece of Golden Age science fiction cover art you've ever seen crushed and blended together and served up as a hyper-concentrated tropical drink that's like a sledgehammer to your senses. It's the Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster of visual media. Words really do not describe how unbelievably captivating and fresh this movie looks: While the first act is without question the most memorable, the art design and direction simply do not ever let up, taking the audience from mind-blowing vision to mind-blowing vision.

But this is telling, and I didn't mention MTV for no reason. What this movie does is try to take the “images and emotions” approach to visual media we last talked about in the context of Michael Mann and Miami Vice to the logical limit, and it's retroactively bleeding obvious this would be something Dirty Pair would try to do. The series has an understanding of spectacle that's completely unmatched, and it what it's touching on here is one potential way forward for the entire genre of science fiction. We know of course that sci-fi likes to let its worlds and its ideas speak for itself, and Dirty Pair: The Motion Picture tries to *literally do that*, featuring a great deal of extended sequences, including all the action scenes and the climax, that are utterly silent save for music that exist only to establish a setting and mood. They are, in fact, feature length music videos, and the movie is brazenly confidant that it can rely entirely on visual symbolism and the breathtaking artistry of its editing and art design. It's a revelation, a triumph and a masterpiece: The plot, frankly, is such an afterthought it's practically vestigial by this point.

And then the other show has to drop.

The other thing that happens when you toss the plot out as an afterthought is that whenever the movie does something that's not part of one of its groundbreaking, genre-defining paradigm-shift music videos it grinds to an absolute halt. There's some interesting stuff surrounding Professor Wattsman for sure: He's a charmingly obvious mad scientist who is obsessed with beating evolution, thinking the Sadingas discovered a way to circumvent natural selection by placing themselves in some kind of species-wide biological stasis once they reached the apex of development so they would never go extinct. It's clearly a backwards conception of how evolution works and Wattsman is interested in both eugenics and stagnation alike: There's a reason the bottle of wine that's so important to him came from Charles de Gaulle and his campaign against Nazi Germany's occupation of France. And this is why he's opposed by Kei and Yuri who, of course, would not approve of any attempt to strongarm nature and split humankind off from it. But the problem is this all comes way too late to be compelling in any way and is really the only remotely interesting idea this movie has, the art design and editing aside.

Structurally, this film's narrative is a mess. The dialog and characterization is frankly awful: Haruka Takachiho had a major hand in this one, more so than he did in any of the other Dirty Pair anime works, because he wanted to make absolutely sure that it was what he considers “proper science fiction”. And, well, it shows. Takachiho is resoundingly terrible at exposition, feeling he has to force everything else to stop so he can infodump at length about his world-building concepts. While evident in the novels, this isn't as big of a deal in them because Kei (like me) is a very rambling narrator who likes to go off on lengthy tangents. But this is in no way appropriate for a film like this, and it feels like whenever somebody opens their mouth (most egregiously Wattsman and Carson) the whole film just digs its heels in and refuses to move for like fifteen minutes at a time (though there is one admittedly funny moment where Wattsman declares, right at the camera, that “this is a secret known only to myself!” before going on about his mutated alien spice dudes or whatever).

Another consequence of Takachiho's increased involvement is that Dirty Pair: The Motion Picture leans much harder on the series' spy-fi trappings than previous Dirty Pair animes did. Although the original novels were detective stories, they weren't straightforward spy fiction, and this is a distinction that seems to have been lost in the evolution of science fiction between 1979 and 1987. So, the director for this movie is obviously drawing more from 1960s spy thrillers than traditional Japanese Golden Age science fiction, and as a result we get a preponderance of outer space bachelor pads and martinis, credits sequences straight out of James Bond movies and the Angels themselves get filmed like Bond girls. Personally, I don't think this was a good idea: True, Dirty Pair has done genre pastiches before (including a few of James Bond), but this was the highest profile thing the franchise ever did, being a large majority of people's first and only exposure to Kei and Yuri, and what this does is mislead a segment of the audience as to what the series actually is. Dirty Pair is Dirty Pair, not Charlie's Angels In Space.

(The upside of all this is the aforementioned design: This really is a special movie in terms of art direction. Rick Sternbach seems to agree, this being the version of Dirty Pair he seemed the most taken by as a designer, as he kept a copy of the art book and model sheets as a source of inspiration and one of his most treasured possessions. I can understand: The concept art alone really is enough to turbocharge your imagination.)

But the worst part of this movie by far is Carson D. Carson, who is utterly detestable. A handsome rogue of a thief who steals Kei's heart, he's a completely insufferable combination of Sydney from “Go Ahead, Fall in Love! Love is Russian Roulette” and Huey from “Come Out, Come Out, Assassin”, somehow managing to distill all of their negative characteristics into one overwhelmingly reprehensible Frankenstein monster of intolerable masculinity. From the moment he shows up, he commandeers the whole damn movie, which would be one thing if it actually acknowledged this was a problem and tried to use it to make some metacommentary about narrative and how Dirty Pair works, which it naturally doesn't. He throws his weight around and infantilizes Kei and Yuri at every opportunity-The joint worst scenes for me are when he lectures the girls in the hovercar for not being “pros”, basically calling them children, and when he rubs Kei's feelings in her face and uses them as an excuse to call her weak. It's absolutely excruciating to watch.

Furthermore, this reduces Kei to full-on tsundere, and there is just about nothing I hate more in anime than tsundere characters, because every single story I've seen them in is about showing how childlike women fall apart in the presence of the romantic male lead. Kei actually gets demoted to love interest here (Yuri, in case you're curious, is basically comic relief), which is just about the most jaw-dropping conceptual failure I have ever seen in Dirty Pair. Not only does it totally misread both the Angels and their metatextual aspects (I mean for one thing, Kei is supposed to be chronically unlucky in love), it allows a man to come in and push them out of their own story and neither understands why this is a problem nor attempts to say anything about it. This isn't metacommentary, it's a Mary Sue thrown in to reassert the “proper” patriarchal order in Dirty Pair because Sunrise obviously saw the returns for Affair of Nolandia and suddenly got cold feet about the prospects for their female led action sci-fi series aimed at females. It's completely inexcusable, and frankly ruins the whole movie for me.

(Oh yeah, I suppose I could mention how Kei and Yuri spend the overwhelming majority of the movie *literally* running around in their underwear. I would complain about this, except it's clear it's meant to be completely ridiculous and gratuitous and *everyone else* loses their clothes at some point too, including both Carson and the wizened Doctor Wattsman.)

Another thing about this movie that's not as effective as we perhaps might have hoped is the soundtrack. I had pretty big expectations for this, as the soundtrack to Dirty Pair: The Motion Picture is widely considered by many fans to be the absolute best in the series. Already, I'm going to come out and say that it isn't, even just judging from what I've heard so far. I mean it's not terrible: There are a couple bits that sound like pastiches and updates of James Bond themes, which makes sense, and the rest of its is serviceable, inoffensive late-1980s pop music. Which I found to be...Not bad, but largely forgettable. There's certainly nothing here on the level of “Ru-ru-ru-russian Roulette”, “Space Fantasy”, “Love Everlasting” or, looking ahead to the second series, “By Yourself” or “Aki kara no Summertime”. The one song here I did quite like is called “Matters to Me”: Yuri dances to it while she and Kei are flying their hovercar through the skies above Agerna, and it's probably my favourite sequence in the whole movie.

Part of the reason I gather the soundtrack is as beloved as it is comes from the fact composer Kenzou Shiguma considered his music to be a marquee draw of the movie. Seeing the plot for what it was, Shiguma decided he'd score a concept album about his conception of who Kei and Yuri are and treat the movie as a musical or, well, a feature-length music video. This is frankly an abjectly brilliant idea, and I would have loved to see it fully realised because it certainly isn't here. One problem is that as stunning as the experimental editing is in places, its effectiveness is uneven across the movie as a whole. There are numerous points where we'll have just finished watching a groundbreaking, revolutionary science fiction film done as a music video and suddenly, as if somebody pulled a giant power switch, the action will cut back to people trying to painfully obviously fill space and kill time by robotically expositing the plot. It feels like the film would have been a lot better and a lot more effective if it really was just one big music video.

The other problem is, well, Shiguma's interpretation of Kei and Yuri is pretty flimsy and unclear. The basic idea, as I understand it, is that if Kei and Yuri are supposed to be 19, then this means they exist at some kind of midpoint between young girl and adult woman. Supposedly, Shiguma's score is meant to explore and convey this, though I confess I didn't pick up any of that myself. There is a germ of a good idea here, in that this could have been used as a commentary on the tension between the childlike simplicity that pervades so much idealism and the seasoned cynicism that so often comes with adulthood. Or perhaps, as people like Hayao Miyazaki and Shigeru Miyamoto often stress, the importance of holding onto a childlike sense of wonder and hope even as you grow throughout life and begin to have more tempered adult experiences. Kei and Yuri could then be read as the harmonious synthesis of these two ways of being. But again, I have to confess, I didn't pick up on anything of that nature: From what I can discern of the lyrics, they're pretty much all bog-standard pop stuff or trying to hearken back to the vibe of decades-old spy-fi, and neither the instrumentation nor the arrangement appear to be doing anything particularly special. Though, I freely admit I could be missing something.

All of this adds up to the sad conclusion that I honestly can't recommend Dirty Pair: The Motion Picture terribly highly, certainly not over something like the allegedly “cheap” and “dark” Affair of Nolandia. I can see why this is the most popular and beloved incarnation of Dirty Pair...But that statement can have two different truth conditions. There really is a lot this movie pioneers and does incredibly, incredibly well: It's a sci-fi landmark for its opening act and concept art alone. And, if you want a big-budget blockbuster version of the first TV series, I can see why you would really like this (Carson aside, that doesn't work as well for me because the film defaults to characterizations of the girls derived from With Love from the Lovely Angels). This movie does seem to be an attempt to take everything from the TV show and do it bigger, better and more spectacular. Unfortunately, this is equally as true for the show's problems as it is for its virtues, and it paints a dangerously inaccurate picture of what Dirty Pair is about on a very grand scale. If it's a masterpiece, it's a badly, badly flawed one.

My advice, go watch the first twenty minutes pronto-They're life-changing. If you can, track down the art book as well. But, you can comfortably drop the whole film as soon as the girls land in the abandoned experimental research lab; while the cinematography remains at that same mind-blowing level throughout the whole movie, it's really not worth it after that. Symbols have power and meaning and it turns out Dirty Pair: The Motion Picture is just like its namesake: A beautiful failure. At this point, Dirty Pair can do one of two things: Either double down on plot and linear narrative in an attempt to return to the postmodern science fiction of its early days, or drop them altogether and blast off into the realm of images, feelings, music and cosmic splendour, never to return.

Actually hang on a minute-Come to think of it, Dirty Pair would make a hell of a video game...

“...and in this our love is everlasting.” Dirty Pair: Affair of Nolandia

“Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.”

-Carl Jung

Though historians and completionist fans of the TV series were undoubtedly happy to have them, the episodes released as With Love from the Lovely Angels were not what paved the way for Dirty Pair's future on Original Video Animation, nor were they even the first Dirty Pair OVA stories to be made. For that, we must travel back to December, 1985 and Sunrise Animation's experiment-within-an-experiment: Dirty Pair: Affair of Nolandia, the first proper Dirty Pair movie.

In the history of the series, Affair of Nolandia is frankly every bit as important as “How to Kill a Computer” and The Great Adventure of the Dirty Pair, and yet for some reason it tends to go frustratingly overlooked by fans. In spite of what its release date and medium of choice might have you believe, this is not an epilogue to the recently-concluded TV show, this is something consciously and manifestly different. Affair of Nolandia can trace its roots back to the same place as the very beginnings of the first series, but walked a markedly separate path to the screen. The story of how it came to be and what it helped bring about is just as interesting as the story it actually tells, and it reveals a lot about how prescient this franchise has always been.

During preproduction of the first series, it was decided very early on, for better or for worse depending on your perspective, to take it in a noticeably lighter and more irreverent direction then its source material. Though Haruka Takachiho's novels are definitely humourous, they're also quite explicitly science fiction with an emphasis on world building and ideas. For whatever reason, though I strongly suspect it had something to do with Sunrise in a sense always knowing how niche science fiction (at least this kind of science fiction) tends to be, the TV show was designed from the beginning to focus quite heavily on slapstick, anarchic parody and self deprecation.

That's not to say it wasn't intelligent, it obviously was, it's just that as a consequence it traded in things like lengthy exposition and cohesive constructed worlds for heavy subtext, symbolism and a structure so unabashedly episodic that the one time it wasn't was a big clue things had gotten serious. Sunrise knew that while this tonal shift would give the show more broad-strokes and mainstream appeal, it was also going to very probably alienate a huge portion of people coming to it from the novels. So, all while the first series was being produced by one team, Sunrise gave a second team the assignment to make an OVA movie completely unrelated to the TV show that would overtly cater to the novels' hardcore science fiction fans. That film became Dirty Pair: Affair of Nolandia.

The first consequence of this is that although it trends far, far closer in tone and style to the novels then anything in the TV series, just like “How to Kill a Computer” before it, Affair of Nolandia is quite clearly establishing an alternate continuity of its own entirely distinct from that of either them or the TV show: A pattern that would hold for every subsequent Dirty Pair anime release. With the exception of the second series produced exclusively for OVA in 1987 and 1988 and the failed reboot of 1994's Dirty Pair Flash, (neither of which were in continuity with each other or with anything else), there would never again be a single, cohesive continuity for Kei and Yuri's stories.

Sunrise goes out of its way here to make this movie stand on its own, and this leaves an immediate and lasting impression. Even the girls have undergone subtle, yet noticeable, personality shifts; feeling far more adult, worldly and competent then Sunrise has shown them before while still being affable, quick-witted and jokey. They occupy a perfect midpoint between their novel and TV show depictions, and combine the best elements of both. But with the partial exception of the Angels themselves, absolutely nothing here is recognisable to someone who might only know Dirty Pair from the TV show. There's no Gooley or Elenore City, and the girls' home base is once again the Lovely Angel itself, which looks much closer to how it does in the novels. On that note I have to say I prefer the ship this way: As much as I love the Chibi Enterprise, this just looks sleeker and cooler. In fact, this particular interpretation looks a bit like the Naboo Starfighters from Star Wars Episode I, but, you know, in a good way. Also, while Nanmo is still here, Mughi's fur is black instead of brown, a nod to his novel counterpart, and he's furthermore considerably less of a cute animal sidekick, which is, again, appropriate.

Getting back to Kei and Yuri themselves, they get an altogether more realistic and mature design to go along with their more multifaceted and complex personalities, another sharp contrast with the deliberate cartoonishness of the TV show. And though their costumes look superficially similar to what they wear on TV, they too are slightly different and imbued with blink-and-you'll-miss-it symbolism: This time, the girls are clad in their own birth signs-Though Piscean Yuri retains her familiar Yellow, her lucky colour in Japanese astrology, Kei gets a striking Violet Blue, which symbolizes her Sagittarian heritage. It's details like this, combined with the lovely way the girls are portrayed here, which I'll talk a bit more about later on, that make this depiction of Kei and Yuri really memorable for me, and an honest-to-goodness contender for the definitive one. When I go back and re-read The Great Adventure of the Dirty Pair and The Dirty Pair Strike Again today, it's this version of the Lovely Angels I picture in my mind, not Yoshikazu Yasuhiko's actual illustrations.

And it's not just our leading ladies; Affair of Nolandia is a truly inspiring and evocative work all around. This film is utterly fantastic in every sense of the word. It looks every bit as much of its time as the TV series, but it does so in altogether different ways. Now, when I say this, I don't at all mean it looks dated or passe: I think there's a unique...feeling is the only way to describe it...about science fiction from this period, especially Japanese science fiction, and it's something I have a genuine fondness for. It's hard to explain, and there's really only one other work I can think of off the top of my head that evokes something similar to what this movie does for me: The Star Trek movies don't count and don't have it. Star Trek: The Next Generation might have it very early on, but I need to rewatch it and I'm inclined to categorize it as something else...something running parallel with the divide between the mid-1980s and late-1980s.

But both this movie and the first Dirty Pair series have it, though Affair of Nolandia has it in spades owing to they way it so completely captures the imagination. Everything here feels vast and hauntingly beautiful, from the opening gaze deep into a starfield that seems to go on forever to Nolandia itself and even the Lovely Angel, which feels equally expansive and lonely at different points in the story. There's a sense of melancholy, nocturnal elegance and quiet introspection about the entire world, which is a perfect fit for the story Affair of Nolandia is telling us. And it's all summed up magnificently by the unforgettably bittersweet yearning of the theme song “Love Everlasting”, which takes the motorik of “Space Fantasy” to the logical limit by doubling down on the electronic percussion and pairing it with atmospheric touches of synthesizer backing reminiscent of twinkling starlight and Yasuko Maki's gentle, contemplative vocals. This is proper late night space trucker music, as is only befitting of the first real time Kei and Yuri are overtly set adrift in the intergalactic void.

If it seems odd I've made it this far without addressing the plot or the symbolic associations in its subtext, its because Affair of Nolandia also marks a turning point for the franchise in terms of narrative. This is an incredibly visual film, and it relies on imagery to an extent no previous Dirty Pair work (including the novels) has. Aside from the production value just being on the whole better given this is an OVA release, art design, though it's always been important in Sunrise's Dirty Pair, is definitely elevated to a higher stature here then it perhaps has been elsewhere. Affair of Nolandia wants you to look at the stories that its world is telling you, and in that regard the editing is something to behold. It's incredibly artistic and imaginative, and there are times it's borderline psychedelic in the actual consciousness-expanding sense of the word.

On top of everything else, there's a real sense of wonder and imagination here that sci-fi constantly tells us is its specialty as a genre and that it very rarely actually delivers on. The images of the creatures living in Nolandia forest still stick with me as I write this, and that part of the movie alone conveys more imagination then the overwhelming majority of Star Trek ever did. This doesn't mean, however, that the actual mystery plot is banal and uninteresting: Affair of Nolandia isn't Blade Runner and doesn't phone that part of the narrative in. But what this does mean is that it that standard plot structures are no longer as central to Dirty Pair as they might have once been, which also means, ironically enough, that in spite of its fealty to them, Affair of Nolandia also casts off one of the last remaining aspects of the franchise it inherits from Takachiho's novels that keep it beholden to pulp sci-fi storytelling. We can now tell stories about and through images and ideas without always having to link that all back to either some murder mystery or bit of comic showboating.

As for the plot itself, Affair of Nolandia is most commonly read as being extremely cynical and much “darker” and more “somber” then the other Dirty Pair animes, save arguably Flight 005 Conspiracy. But I don't think that's really the case. Except for maybe one admittedly pretty unsettling scene, I don't think this film is dark and moody at all. In fact, there's a great deal of comedy here that wouldn't feel out of place on the first series, except it's tighter, more refined and woven better into the fabric of the larger piece then was always the case on TV. Rather, what I think Affair of Nolandia actually manages to be is a more adult Dirty Pair story (On multiple levels-I should probably warn people watching it for the first time on my blog that there are more then a couple moments here that are definitely NSFW): This is a story that is unabashedly musing on notions of love, power, responsibility, dreams, visions and the fundamental nature of reality. Kei and Yuri set the tone from the very beginning, as they open the movie with an honest-to-goodness philosophical discussion about that which exists, that which doesn't and that which comes from someplace else, with Kei even explicitly stating people can make things real by transmuting dreams into physical form.

This turns out to be particularly telling foreshadowing, as the girls' mission is to protect a mysterious young girl named Missinie, an ESPer like themselves, who has gone missing in the impenetrable forest of Nolandia, the only habitable area on the surface of the gas giant Ookbar. Missinie has the power to create intense and disorienting psychic illusions, and there's a price on her head as there are several parties in positions of extreme power who have an interest in her abilities. Beat for beat, this feels like a distilled, condensed version of Takachiho's first two Dirty Pair novels: Kei and Yuri show up for what seems like a mundane mission, they get the cold shoulder from local authorities who clearly have something to hide, it's slowly revealed there's a lot more going on then it seemed at first glance, Kei and Yuri gain the upper hand by making contact with a higher and more enlightened form of consciousness that recognises them as its equals and everything ends in a spectacular action scene. That's not to say Affair of Nolandia feels derivative, however: The contrary, what's so special here is how it manages to do all this while still feeling fresh and new, demonstrating the malleability (and ultimate superfluousness) of this type of plot.

In terms of heady symbolism, Affair of Nolandia is as out-there and metaphysical as Dirty Pair has ever been: While Missinie is on the one hand creating illusions, its through them that she can fully express herself, speaking most fluently through images and memory. As Yuri says, this is how she “opens her heart”. Missinie, like the Angels, is a performer and an artist, and her psychic abilities represent the power to create worlds out of visions and emotion. We also get to see the other side of this in the film's one genuinely dark scene, where Missinie projects her fear into the horrific illusions she makes Kei suffer through before she comes to understand her and Yuri and their peaceful intentions.

The movie is unquestionably relentless about showing us Kei's nightmares (and it should be noted how many of them revolve around losing, or losing touch with, Yuri), and I could see this putting off people accustomed to the more lighthearted tone of the TV show. It's properly close to Commander Riker's psychic torture scenes in “Frame of Mind”, to the point I wonder if Brannon Braga or director James L. Conway had seen this, and I think this may actually be worse. It's also crucial that this happen to Kei, as Yuri, being Yuri, lacks a certain level of interiority it's easier to see in Kei. It's also possible to read this as another example of the girls' metafictional reality as to Kei, Yuri is not only a real person who is her soulmate, but someone that she, through her writings, projects a set of ideals onto. The scene is so creepy and effective that it actually brilliantly subverts the film's narrative coherence: Like Kei, we're left never quite knowing what's real and what isn't after that, but, in a world that actually is literally a mindscape, does it really matter? Do descriptors like that even hold any meaning anymore?

With a name like “Ookbar” I can't help but draw parallels with Jorge Louis Borges' short story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”, about a diegetically fictional country called Uqbar manifesting itself in the diegetic “real world” and how this is the first indication that a group of scholars and thinkers has pooled their thought-power to transform Earth into a new world of their own, known as Tlön. There really are a striking number of similarities between Uqbar and Ookbar: While Missinie has the power to create illusions and alter people's perceptions of reality, she herself is a product of Orun's genetic engineering experiments to forcibly impose his will on the universe. Nolandia, a verdant forest in the middle of a gas giant, is referred to many times as an impossibility, and ties into Kei and Yuri's opening discussion about how things are not real until we make them real. Even Ookbar's capital city on the plateau really shouldn't be there, and this proves crucial to the climax. In the words of the estimable Angry Video Game Nerd, Ookbar is *literally* a “planet where everything that never existed got thrown away”.

And just like Borges' story, Affair of Nolandia is about how different people give their dreams and ideas material form. But where Borges seemed at times concerned more directly with a kind of totalitarianism that could rewrite fact, Dirty Pair looks more frankly at the role of the Ideaspace in our everyday lives. Missinie seems malicious at first, but she's in truth a scared child projecting her own fear outward and giving it form. Orun at first seems like a straightforward capitalist obsessed with consolidating power, and he is, but he's much more than that as well. There's no real money to be made in the experiments he's doing, certainly not when compared to the potential prospects of the phony Uranium mine he's using as a cover story. No, what Orun wants to do is will the universe into perpetual war and conflict as proof of the power he thinks he wields: He's a psychopath consumed by dark magick. There's a very firm feminist critique here too, as Orun's attitudes are shown to be catastrophically destructive on a grand scale and implicitly part of patriarchy and male supremacy: Look at how his right-hand man is a hyper-masculine cyborg programmed for nothing more then sheer violence and how it's Samara who is ultimately redeemed as she comes to recognise the reclaimed divine femininity of Kei and Yuri.

And it's once again Kei and Yuri, women-become-goddesses and goddesses-become-women, who stand in contrast to the other characters, at first quietly, and then defiantly. Their love for each other and for the world governs their every action here, from Kei's adorable flirtatious tease in the opening scene to the absolutely heartwarming act they spend living alone together in Nolandia forest when the Lovely Angel crashes, which is what convinces Missinie they're of a kind and only want to help. Because while Nolandia may have had artificial origins, it's now part of the shared natural consciousness and must be treated with the same respect and care as the rest of nature. Unlike the manipulative Orun and the scared, confused Missinie, Kei and Yuri know how to communicate their love through images: The way this movie realises their psychic link, one of the extremely rare times this is explicitly shown in Sunrise's animes, is a genuine work of art that speaks volumes about who Kei and Yuri are and what they mean to each other. Through this level of understanding, Kei and Yuri birth worlds and tell stories in the mindscapes they share with one another.

And it's this same attitude of complete understanding and sublime self-actualization that leads to the dazzling back half of the movie, an absolute roller coaster of masterful action sci-fi full of compelling chases and dynamic fight scenes expertly blended with comedic interludes and dramatic pathos that never once feels inappropriate or misplaced as the Angels roar back into town on the winds of change. With Orun by this point firmly established as a truly despicable character, he makes a terrific heel and I really did find myself rooting for the Lovely Angels like this was some futuristic wrestling match. Yuri's unwavering dedication to chase down and punish Orun for his evil deeds is one of the single greatest sequences in the franchise and, because Affair of Nolandia saves its moments of large-scale property damage for just when they're the most important and appropriate, it's triumphantly satisfying and cathartic when the bad guys finally do go up in flames in properly spectacular fashion. Though the Angels may be guided by the larger universe and they don't force change through will as Orun tried to do (because that would be patriarchal), they still very much act on what they feel to be right in the moment. For “agents” of the cosmic oversoul (did anyone else notice that wordplay before?), that's the surest path to material progress as is possible to find.

(Kei and Yuri are frankly perfect here across the board: I might point out that Yuri seems to get a lot more exposition and dramatic speeches then Kei, but Kei isn't ever demeaned for this and it seems fitting considering Yuri has always been a more aloof and bookish person and this isn't actually out of character for her given her depiction in the books. And anyway, I feel I've been unfairly down on Yuri a lot recently and she truly does get some *amazing*, and entirely deserved, moments in this film. For this reason, on top of everything else it does so beautifully, if you're looking for one single work that best summarises the entirety of the franchise to serve as an introduction, I have no hesitation in recommending Affair of Nolandia as a terrific starting point.)

So perhaps then one way to read the final scene where Ookbar's capital city collapses into its atmosphere as the Lovely Angel warps away is as a commentary on how trying to weaponize ideas is ultimately self-destructive. The final shot serves as a more than fitting capstone for Affair of Nolandia on the whole: It's a defense not only of the redemptive reappropriation that Dirty Pair has always tacitly engaged with and that keeps it a relevant beacon of hope almost thirty-five years later as of this writing, it's an earnest and heartfelt statement about the role love and understanding play in enlightenment. And while Kei and Yuri are left alone with themselves and their thoughts, as it must always be, their act of love remains with us long after they drift off together into the night. Kei and Yuri dreamed the world together, and decided to share it with us. And we found it full of love, hope and starlight.