Boy meets girl. Man meets machine. Sixteen years before Beatless there was another show about a boy pretty much stumbling across a robot girl, falling in love with her, and discovering that even among robots she’s something special. That show is Chobits, and it’s based on a manga by CLAMP, a group with several notorious winners including (that I’ve reviewed) Cardcaptor Sakura and Angelic Layer.
While there might be some value in tackling the sum output of CLAMP, that’s for another time as right now I’d like to keep tightly focused on Chobits and more or less get through with it. Because while Chobits is a product from talented creators that includes some pretty wonderful ideas, it’s also an early 2000s romantic comedy with just about everything you’d expect out of the genre and time period, which I’m just going to come out and say is not my typical cup of tea.
Case in point, our male lead is Hideki Motosuwa. Hideki is a shouting idiot and kind of a perv, but at least with something of a good heart. And, to be fair, he’s got reason for some of his idiocy: He’s been raised out in the sticks, where he’s had basically no contact with modern technology or the facts of urban life. Freshly graduated from High School, it was Hideki’s dream to go to a good college, but his academic incapacity means that before he can go to college in the big city, he needs to go to cram school in the big city to hopefully pass his exams next time.
Thus, Hideki moves to the city and encounters brand new things. Chief among them are Persocoms, humanoid robots that serve the roles you’d expect from personal computers, smartphones, and so on. They come in many sizes (from full human down to “fits in your pocket”) and shapes (mostly cute girls), and Hideki is naturally enamored of their wonder and capabilities. Unfortunately, he’s pretty much flat broke, so legitimately acquiring high-end consumer electronics is beyond his means. Luckily for Hideki, he finds a beautiful if seemingly inoperable Persocom in the garbage and does what any down-on-his-luck fellow staring at something clearly unwanted and valuable would do and brings her home. Seriously, I won’t judge him for this; I got a pretty cool bookshelf the same way once upon a time. And it’s not like there’s not plenty else to judge Hideki for.
Though Hideki can get his new rig turned on, it’s clear she’s still… a project, since at first all she can do is act vaguely weird and say “Chii”, which of course becomes her name.
Hideki ends up getting the assistance of his neighbor in the low-rent apartments (the good-looking landlady of which is a minor character and occasional distraction for Hideki) and classmate in cram school (the good-looking teacher of which is a minor character and occasional distraction for Hideki), Shinbo. Shinbo (attended by his pint-sized Persocom Sumomo, who acts as the one frequent reminder that most Persocoms are automatons and not thinking or feeling beings) also introduces Hideki to the age-not-announced-lives-alone-in-a-mansion-but-looks-like-a-kid (canon: he’s twelve) computer genius Minoru, along with Minoru’s squad of “Sexy Maid” Persocoms and less-fanservicey but more human-seeming head maid custom-built Persocom, Yuzuki.
The squad together manage to diagnose Chii. She’s clearly a custom rig, and a powerful one at that, but she has no OS and seemingly no memory, so she’s going to have to be taught even the extremely basic stuff. She also might or might not be related to an urban legend regarding mysterious super-Persocoms known as “Chobits”.
In further early establishing facts of note, Hideki kind of needs a part time job. He gets one working at a bar (Where the good-looking coworker who kind of recruited him and seems to like him is a fair also-ran character and frequent distraction for Hideki). This largely means he’s poor but not too destitute to make rent for the rest of the show.
And, by one thing and another, not much happens for most of said rest of the show.
This is, to an extent, par for the course for a RomCom, and when I review a show like this I always have to choose if I’m going to go into unusual detail, or if I’ll instead just try to hit the high notes. For Chobits, I’m going to do the latter. To the show’s credit, while the particular incidents of each individual episode rarely matter, they usually do serve the purpose of building up the characters in a comfortable and natural way, as well as being… generally entertaining on their own.
The biggest issues, and I’ll just go ahead and address them here, are Hideki and Chii. Personal bias alert, they are kind of playing my least-favorite archetypes for their roles in the story: the shouty moron and the infantile naive girl.
This hits Hideki harder than Chii, honestly. I get it, he’s from the sticks so there are a lot of things he doesn’t know. His scenes work best when he’s having technical difficulties and reacting like an ignorant older person when faced with modern technology. You know, the kind of person who worries that the cops are on their way if they see 403: Forbidden, thinking they’ve gone and trespassed. And, given that Persocoms aren’t exactly modern consumer tech, Hideki’s flagrant ignorance and hair trigger on going to big reactions provide a good vector for somebody to explain to the audience how this world normally works, both in terms of the actual tech and in terms of how social issues have emerged around the Persocoms. I’ll also largely forgive his pervy moments, even if they do lead to a few too many awkward scenes, because at least Chobits acknowledges that a teenage boy is going to notice when there is a good-looking member of his preferred sex in his vicinity, and is also probably going to have… needs. We could do to have maybe not quite so many exchanges centered around “Hideki’s Yummies” (as Chii learns to call the dirty magazines) but having some is at least no more of a sin than going with the standard milquetoast modern protag who doesn’t have the same awkward moments but doesn’t really have anything to replace them.
That’s the good. The bad is that they really sell how much of a moron Hideki is. I know that sounds like a positive, but there are some tasks at which you do not want to succeed with flying colors this way. If it’s somewhat endearing to watch him deal with a “crisis” on which he has no knowledge and it makes sense for him to have no knowledge, it’s equally grating when he comes up against a problem that would require the application of any of his basic senses and his answer is just to yell, panic, or charge off in the wrong direction like that’s somehow going to help.
For Chii, the bad is in the pitch: She knows nothing and can only make a cute little squeaking sound at first, and never really reaches the point where she comes off as someone mentally well or with the capacity for adult-human-type thought that other “Advanced” Persocoms like Yuzuki display. However, the good is that unlike other examples of this sort of setup who will remain nameless, Chii does actually grow. Chobits takes its time with her and builds her up layer by layer. Even if I still think she comes off as a kind of dumb and childish individual by the end (to be as harsh as I can be), she’s clearly both learned technical data and gradually created a better holistic view of the world around her. This is something that can only really be done because of the fact that Chobits is a 24(ish, there are recaps) episode series that spends most of its time in an unstable equilibrium where that almost but not quite resets to status quo by the end of each episode. It doesn’t make her early scenes any easier to watch, but I can at least appreciate that there was a reason why this had to be the way it is.
Really saving the show are the side characters: Shinbo, the landlady, the teacher, Yumi (the girl who works with Hideki at the bar), Minoru, Yuzuki, and even Sumomo really help to make each episode more fun and watchable. They usually have the right reactions to Hideki and his nonsense, and they provide some vehicles to move the plot forward that don’t rely entirely on our dolt of a lead and his lobotomized robot girl.
So, in the other reason why I’m not summarizing this show in a purely chronological fashion, let’s look at their various slow-burn plots.
Shinbo mostly plays the long-suffering friend of Hideki, and is the one who most has to put up with Hideki’s nonsense. In the latter parts of the show, it’s revealed that he struck up a romance with their teacher, and in fact he goes ahead and elopes with her, writing him out of much of the back end of the show. He leaves Sumomo with Hideki for this, so we can at least get her brand of humor (enthusiastic yet mechanical non-comprehension of all around her) for the duration. On the Teacher’s end, she has a tragic past where her (ex-)husband became obsessed with persocoms, to the point where he outright forgot his real flesh-and-blood wife existed and basically abandoned her.
To follow up on that thread, we have Yumi. Yumi has a clear crush on Hideki. She acts primarily as a junior to him and is a good girl with perhaps a flirty edge to her. Hideki has trouble noticing (or believing what he’s noticed is real and not another of his fantasies) but they do go on a couple of dates later on in the show. Yumi, however, has a serious complex about Persocoms, even more so than the teacher, since her first crush (a local pastry chef) was so into his Persocom that he outright “married” her… a relationship that ended in tragedy when the facts of being an older model basically caused her to become senile until she was finally destroyed in an accident.
Sadly, this tangled web around Yumi and honestly heartwrenching backstory from the pastry chef when we see it isn’t utilized very well in the show. Perhaps the manga had more time for them, but here by the time the show has it’s climax things clearly aren’t resolved. We just sort of… forget about Yumi in the ending arc, even though her scenes up until then gave her a pretty solid claim to the title of “Hideki’s Girlfriend”. I guess she was tacitly passed over, but she could have used a better resolve on screen.
Minoru is pretty tied into the main plot, which I will get to, but he has his own arc involving the personhood of Persocoms when addressing that fancy Persocom of his, Yuzuki. Yuzuki, you see, was made in the image of Minoru’s deceased big sister. He tried his best to recreate his sister, giving Yuzuki both her appearance and a great deal of data on her life and personality. This means that even though Minoru is pretty fast to remind Hideki that Persocoms aren’t human and one shouldn’t really get attached to them, he’s got his own hangups regarding Yuzuki. And Yuzuki… seems to have her hangups as well. She even goes against orders to try to be useful to Minoru, acting out and getting hurt in places and situations where dead big sis probably would have done something foolishly kind as well, if she were around and capable of doing it. The two of them end up having a strong bond despite Minoru’s better judgment, and despite my thought that their relationship is much more interesting and dynamic and a better address of what it means for a mechanical being to have feelings or “a heart” than what’s done with Chii, they only get the screen time for this they strictly need.
And then we can blur the lines of subplot and main plot as we talk about the landlady… and Chii. The landlady has quite a few secrets. First, it turns out she’s the author of a series of strange picture books. We first encounter these books through Chii – Chii gets a part-time job herself (working for that pastry chef) and since Hideki doesn’t really see Chii as his property he tells her to use at least some of the money she brings home for herself. Her incomprehension of what it means to “want” other than to make her master happy (a good note) is solved when she discovers this strange and eerily relevant-to-her-experience picture book. Over the show, several more in the series appear, usually getting us some of the strangest scenes in Chobits as Chii processes them.
It turns out that this might be something more than a case of kismet, since the landlady also has a secret room with a giant computer rig worthy of Lain Iwakura, and that her late husband was pretty much the father of Persocom technology, creator of the Chobits series, and the original owner of Chii. Most of this stuff comes out very late in the show, even up to the last episode.
Which brings us to the main plot. As much as there is one outside the slow and steady growth of Chii, that main plot would be the initially mysterious “Chobits”. At first, all we have is a picture of a Persocom that looks rather similar to Chii, considered to be one of the Chobits, and the fact that Chii fits no known make and model of Persocom down to her most basic level. In addition to the fact that she displays emotional reasoning and introspection, especially in relation to the picture book, however, it’s not a lot to go on until the halfway point of the show.
At this point, we have a sequence where Chii and Hideki end up apart, and Chii taps in to some sort of alternate personality… one that has the capability of reaching through to every Persocom in the city, if not the world, causing them to act up. Chii returns to her normal self at the conclusion of the arc, but this is sure to stick with the audience, and her alternate persona shows up in internal scenes thereafter, either directly or aliased through the picture book.
Towards the end of the show, Chii is kidnapped. Her kidnapper is a Persocom enthusiast known by his online handle to Minoru, and who used his connections with Minoru to find out more about Chii and target her. This guy believes that Chii is, in fact, one of the legendary Chobits, and intends to crack her secrets by any means necessary. As Hideki and company rush to the rescue, doing a surprisingly good bit of detective work for this show (even if Hideki’s only real contribution is running blindly), the kidnapper tries to mess with Chii in a way that neither Chii nor her other self appreciate. Since he’s not “the one only for her” he gets a very rude tell-off, Chii once again briefly displays some super-computer abilities, and then calms down when Hideki arrives.
The show doesn’t really reset after rescuing Chii, and moves us to our climax. In it, Chii goes rogue, and by the time she’s found tries to trigger some sort of super-program to once again tag all the Persocoms. Some very random rogues try to stop her, but ultimately she ends up stopping herself, fearing she doesn’t know what love is or what it means to have “someone only for me”. Seeing this, the landlady intervenes, both giving us our final slice of backstory (Chii and a sister unit were made for and by her and her husband. The sister unit died, but Chii carried on her data as that alternate personality) and deploying Chii’s master password, to >format Chii:/
Hideki is absolutely distraught at Chii basically being killed here (fair enough) and manages his best speech about love, including an outright confession. This, possibly through that alternate persona, reaches Chii, she reasserts herself, and she completes that global edit program, seemingly sharing her ability to have human emotions with all Persocoms everywhere (as indicated by the eyes of ones we know going from blank to human), and the show cuts very quickly. Honestly, the ending is rushed enough that I feel like the production hit an issue where either the story didn’t fit comfortably or something else was up, because you have to intuit a lot more here than you do elsewhere… but it’s functional enough.
So, how does Chobits hold up?
Well, it’s awkward. Some parts haven’t aged particularly well, others were always going to be annoying, and still others remain as they were quite well-done. It’s an uneven show that hangs around in this sort of low-energy state, but that clearly has more to it that it can deploy more or less on command.
One thing I’m fairly sure of is that Chobits is trying to actually work with its material; it’s not just blowing smoke. There aren’t easy answers… but there aren’t easy answers. The teacher, the pastry chef, and Minoru all provide interesting windows into the emotional relationship between humans and these very human-like yet ultimately inhuman beings. In some senses it’s a bit of a pity that this takes up a tiny portion of the show’s run time compared to puttering around with Hideki doing dummy things and Chii doing cute things (that can also be kind of dumb). But I get it; Chobits is a romantic comedy first and a bit of exploratory social science fiction a distant second. I can’t knock it down just because it isn’t, say, Beatless (which was more evenly balanced between romance and sci-fi).
I can say that it does drag a little, and I’ve given the characters enough grief. For all that it has these high ambitions and sometimes realizes them, it lives in some serious doldrums. For this reason, I’m going to give Chobits a C+. From a historical perspective, it’s an interesting show, both because it’s a 2002 window into human-computer relations (when computer ownership had become common and was taking off further) and because it’s a CLAMP show and their output is this tangled web of landmarks. But does it really hold up on its own? Only somewhat. I think most of the other shows I’ve seen that have played the “Romance with a robot girl” card (or even approach it, like Time of Eve), even if they owe a lot to Chobits, are ultimately more watchable.