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Chobits review by The Wolf
# A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
CLAMP has been one of the leading producers of manga for years, including manga that are adapted into anime. One of their most notable pieces of work is the popular Chobits.
Chobits tells the story of a young man, Hideki, who lives in the countryside. When he fails to enter a university in Tokyo, he has to travel there to attend special university preparation classes. On his first day in the big city, he stumbles across a persocom, a type of android, left lying on the street. He takes the persocom home, to discover that she does not have an OS. And so, with the help of his workmates, his teacher, his next-door neighbour and a super-genius, he uncovers the mystery behind the persocom, aptly named Chii.
I know that there are many fans of Chobits, and rightly so. This anime is hilarious, with crystal clear animation. Chobits is everything anime-lovers could ask for. Chobits does sound like a regular story where a boy meets a girl and they eventually fall in love, but there are some finer qualities to this anime than first meets the eye. Throughout the anime they use sub-plots to tell us about human-machine relationships. There's the teacher, who has been replaced by a persocom, a waitress who thinks that she can't measure up to a persocom, and a persocom that doesn't think that it can fill the shoes of a person. These sub-plots are good, but sometimes they drag on for a while and draw too much attention away from the real plot.
Something that really bugs me about this anime is its use of characters. Most of the characters are stereotypes, such as: the nice-loser guy who ends up with the girl, the girl who lost the memories of her past, the landlady who knows more than she seems, and the young, rich super-genius. On the plus side, there are some really fantastic characters present, such as the admirable Yuzuki, the truth-telling Kotoko and the adorable Sumomo, which are all, by the way, persocoms. There are some prominent character developments, particularly in Yuzuki's case, that gives a human edge to these amazing persocoms.
For fans of the manga, like me, you may be a little disappointed that the anime tries to make these characters seem as real as possible by sucking away all the perkiness that they had in the manga. They make up for this, however, by making the scenes where Chii reads the books more captivating.
Each day, our society becomes more technologically advanced and now with the production of robots becoming increasingly likely, you can see how this anime is becoming more and more relevant.
~ The Wolf
