Robot romances are a kind of interesting little genre, aren’t they? At least to me, it’s somewhat fascinating that there’s this very specific cluster of tropes surrounding a very particular relationship between humans and technology, yet somehow still a lot of good variation.
In different ways, to different degrees, I’ve covered this kind of material in Planetarian, Time of Eve, Dusk Beyond the End of the World, Armitage III, the classic Chobits, and – my personal favorite of the selection I’ve reviewed – Beatless. Haruhi as my witness, that’s not even a comprehensive list of all the ones I’ve reviewed that could count. There’s just something about boy meets mechanical girl that seems to have struck enough of a chord for repetition, iteration, and frankly a few pretty good shows.
Make a Girl, however, might be the most straightforward execution of the topic. Or, at least, that’s the pitch.
This show stars Akira, an ambiguously something young researcher/student who is frustrated that all his attempts at miracles with robotic and/or generic science seem to be flopping. However, an encounter with a classmate high on new relationship endorphins gives Akira a brilliant idea
Rather than trying to date an ordinary human (such as the redhead from his class he seems to be close to), Akira decides to quite literally make a girlfriend, fabricating her from an unspecified mix of scientific disciplines and awakening her as No. 0, his new SO.
The world takes this staggeringly in stride. In a setting where we don’t really see robots at a level beyond “passable housekeeping”, Akira has somehow produced a complete artificial human, brought into the world with a young adult body and enough knowledge of the world to function, if on the level of someone badly socialized. The enormity of this achievement never seems to hit Akira, who remains frustrated at his lack of success in other scientific endeavors despite acquiring a girlfriend to “power him up”, and it washes off his friends pretty quickly as they decide that No. 0 needs some real life experience rather than just whatever our junior mad scientest uploaded onto her.
This results in No. 0 getting a part time job at a restaurant (where the friends both work. What is her legal status, anyway?) and through interacting, gradually learning what it means to have feelings, or even to love.
Eating together is one thing but handholding must be censored
However, not all is well – No. 0 can be a little overbearing once the feeling of affection really reaches her, and Akira is an asocial twit who just wants to research. Faced with the fact that having a girlfriend isn’t a magic power-up and that anything of the sort is instead based on how he feels (which needs to be told to him by the friend who incidentally gave him the idea in the first place… Akira dumps No. 0.
He tries to soften the blow at first, getting her an apartment of her own where her needs will be taking care of and saying they’ll still be friends and classmates, but No. 0 has none of it and tries to fight through his insistence that her feelings are programmed and not real. She even tries to fight back against her own code despite the fact that such could do real damage. Akira flees, however, leaving her dumped all the same.
Akira himself isn’t in a good state after the break-up, causing him to throw a tantrum in his lab and have a nightmare about his dead mom (and No. 0). Before Akira can reckon with No 0., though, she gets kidnapped by some mysterious folk previously seen stealing robots.
While this is going on, Akira is led to a conversation with the data ghost of his mother who reveals that No. 0 (and not a burden to carry on her research) was her true last bequest, and that No. 0 is basically the key to everything and the family mom wanted Akira to have. Awkward.
Akira, realizing he’s been an idiot, goes to find No. 0 and make up with her. He discovers the kidnapping and we get our one cool action-ish scene where he uses all the mad science left to him to head off the kidnapping and confront the malefactor.
That turns out to be a nice woman (I think his cousin? It’s not totally clear) we’d met earlier who was jealous of Akira and mom. She is forced to surrender fairly easily.
No. 0, however, having an existential crisis, does not take being saved so simply.
Instead, she fights it out with Akira. First, verbally, and then physically. The reason being, she wants to prove her feelings are true by breaking through her ingrained programming, and the only way she can see to do that is violating the injunctions against things like beating the tar out of Akira.
Honestly, this goes farther than beating the tar out of him. She bashes off his prosthetic arm and then starts stabbing him gouging him over and over even as she starts to short out and choke herself. Ghost of mom panicks since none of this was intended, but the “battle” goes to the bitter end, with Akira on death’s door and No. 0 mournfully shutting down as her safeguards seem to do her in, lamenting that her feelings weren’t real as Akira tries to reassure her of the opposite.
Some time later, Akira now has a second prosthetic arm, thanks to how thoroughly stabbed his flesh one got, and No. 0 remains inert until finally, after a long while, she just sort of gets up and takes her role as Mom’s successor and the new research boss, I guess. She also seems to not have a murderous obsession with Akira, so I guess she worked that out in her comatose state. The credits show us more of life going on, including hints that while No. 0 is Akira’s new sister-mother, that redhead I mentioned earlier may be the romantic future, and generally we get played out by just little glimpses of the characters going about their business.
And that was Make a Girl. It’s pretty light, but I would be remiss if I didn’t do at least some analysis before grading it.
First of all… why do we like these robot romances so much?
And let me say, despite it not ending romantically and No. 0 only questionably being a robot (she seems to bleed oil but it’s hard to know how much of her is flesh and how much is metal, given that mom’s research included both AI and immortal jellyfish), I do consider Make a Girl to be part of the cluster. Planetarian didn’t end with a romantic happily ever after and Time of Eve didn’t really make anything romantic explicit, so I don’t think that’s required. And while I shorthand to robot, I think the tropes apply to romances with any sort of synthetic being. No. 0 is artificial, whatever she’s made of.
Especially seeing as every example I can easily think of is gendered male human x female robot, it would be easy to write this sort of material off as some sort of incel wish fulfillment (and I hate using that term), and I’m sure commentators approaching from different schools of criticism have done just that, and lambasted these stories as providing a socially awkward male with a custom-tailored loving female sans the baggage of a “real” relationship.
But, that ignores that in none of the shows I’ve mentioned, not Make a Girl or any other member of the robot romance cluster, is the robot girl actually an uncomplicated freebie partner. The closest to that would probably be Chi, and Chobits is the one that would usually get a pass from such accusations given the history of CLAMP.
Instead, these tend to be actually fairly psychological. This is the note that Make a Girl hits dead on – the question of what it means to have “real” feelings and if one’s experiences are authentic regardless of their cause or origin. I suppose it should be no surprise, given the kind of setting that tends to be implied by these shows, that it sort of dovetails with the cyberpunk genre’s questions about the nature and limit of humanity, just viewed through a lens that’s afforded the opportunity to be lighter and softer if it wants to be.
This, not the matter of gender and grievances, is what I think is the core attraction of the robot romance cluster: studying and exploring the leading bot and addressing, rather than taking for granted like most mass-market romances, what it actually means to love, feel, or be human. Some do this subtly, some do it more aggressively, but they’re all tapping into this space.
The femininity of the machine, I think is to soften the edges of what we’d see out of a robot. Men and machines both are expected to be strong, cold, and often unemotional; there’s better contrast between the human side and the mechanical side when you don’t have that overlap. Plus, when the robot is fairly super (as applies in Dusk or Beatless; less so here in Make a Girl), it also helps make the machine partner less threatening than they could otherwise be. I don’t think this is necessary for the genre to work, it’s just the most popular and repeated setup for the theme so I feel obliged to theorize as to why.
Now, more specifically, regarding Make a Girl… it is really focused on its main plot. The whole robot thief/kidnapping plot is very minor, and otherwise there’s nothing to distract from the tangled relationship of Akira and No. 0. Sweeping the kidnapper off the board pretty trivially before having the final confrontation between the two leads is emblematic of what the film wants to – and does – focus on.
For its running time, the film also does a pretty good job with its characters. Akira and No. 0 are both decently studied. We see why Akira makes his bone-headed decisions that lead to disaster, and while we don’t exactly get her inner world we do see how No. 0 discovers her love, becomes swept away in it, and how her thoughts turn pitch black in order to get their confrontation at the climax. There’s also the redhead and the male friend of Akira, who despite being accessory characters are decently understandable and fun enough. The uncle and the kidnapper I think are the only other speaking roles with multiple scenes, and they’re a little thinner. But, that keeps the focus where it needs to be.
The CGI animation is pretty decent throughout this. We have here a fully, reasonably produced movie, that’s of a largely uniform quality throughout. Some people hate CGI no matter what, but while I do think it’s a little unnecessary to use 3d rigs rather than traditional animation given what mostly goes on in this film isn’t playing to the strengths of 3d, it looks good enough.
The story can be a little thin at times, and takes a very “as the plot demands” view of science and research, but on the whole it can be forgiven.
In the end, Make a Girl isn’t a program that’s aiming particularly high. It does what it set out to do, and it does it well, but it knows it doesn’t have enough space for more than a surface address of the philosophical depths of the robot romance and just settles for getting us a few solid emotional scenes, including the climax.
In my book, that’s enough for a B+. Make a Girl makes the grade.