Chobits

2002. TV series. (24 X 30 min.) Science fiction/fantasy/romance. org CLAMP (manga). dir Morio Asaka. scr Nanase Ohkawa, others. des Hisashi Abe. -jd

A young man and his humanoid computer fall in love in a modern-day fairy tale with a sci-fi edge, based on the manga by CLAMP, the creators of X and Cardcaptor Sakura.

In a not-so-far-off future, the ultimate electronic device to own is an android called a “persocom,” a combination of voice-activated personal computer and cell phone, all wrapped up in a human-shaped package. In large cities, such machines are a common sight, walking the streets with their owners or standing in showrooms like high-tech mannequins. Country bumpkin Hideki Motosuwa, having recently moved to Tokyo from his family’s farm in Hokkaido to attend cram school, covets these pricey contraptions, but as a starving student, he can’t afford one. As luck would have it, though, he comes across a discarded persocom tossed in a trash heap one day. His new windfall looks like a lovely young blond woman, naked except for a wrapping of bandages, and with the telltale catlike ears of a persocom on her head. Unfortunately, Hideki leaves behind a vital system disc when he carts her home, and without an operating system or software, all the machine can do is say “chi.” Hideki decides to keep it anyway, even though it can’t do anything a persocom normally does, such as connect to the Internet, make phone calls, or even carry on a conversation. He names it “Chi.”

Since Chi’s memory banks are empty, Hideki has to teach her everything, from how to speak and wash to how put on underwear. He borrows clothes from his apartment building’s manager to replace the rags she was wrapped in, and gets advice from his computer-savvy next-door neighbor on how to keep her running. Eventually Chi’s vocabulary grows to full sentences and she even gets a job greeting customers and passing out flyers at a local bakery to help Hideki pay his bills. Her origins, though, remain a mystery. Who abandoned her, and why? How can she learn with no software? Could Chi be a “Chobits,” a legendary persocom rumored to have free will and to be capable of human emotions? The evidence certainly seems to point in that direction: a message board post about her discovery attracts the interest of an obsessive collector, and a mysterious photograph of Chi, or what appears to be Chi, surfaces online. Even the children’s picture books Chi reads seem to contain hidden messages aimed specifically at her. When Chi begins to display strange abilities, emitting a glowing light and levitating, the “Chobits” legend begins to seem a lot less like an urban myth.

But even more crucial than Chi’s mysterious past is her future, and her feelings. She has begun to fall in love with Hideki, and by the time the story of Chi’s erased past is finally revealed, Hideki has fallen in love with her too. But can their love survive the terrible tragedy foretold in Chi’s recovered memories? And will Chi’s newfound feelings trigger a devastating program that could alter all persocoms forever?

Chobits has a very beautiful, feminine style. The character designs are unmistakably anime—this is a world where everyone has a slim figure, heart-shaped face, and round, liquid eyes. Persocoms are only really distinguishable from human girls in the series by their slightly blanker stares and the addition of catlike ears—the ears open up, flower-like, to reveal jacks and ports for cords to connect to game consoles, or the Internet. (Male persocoms apparently exist, but only appear in the background—all major persocom characters that we “meet” are female.) An extra-playful approach is taken with the pocket-sized miniature persocoms, such as Sumomo and Kotoko, who have overlarge heads in the style of “superdeformed” characters, and end up looking somewhat like Blythe or Bratz dolls. Chi, though, is especially distinctive: with her long blond hair, catlike ears, and ruffled dresses based on the popular Japanese “Gothic Lolita” fashions, Chi has the look of a storybook character, an android Alice in Wonderland. The children’s picture books Chi reads only emphasize this impression, showing a very simplified version of Chi, accompanied by a melancholy voiceover, wandering through a literal storybook. The bright, blocky graphics of these storybook sequences have a heartbreaking quality compared to the relative realism of the rest of the animation.

Despite the sci-fi premise of the persocoms, the Tokyo of Chobits is a completely recognizable modern-day city—there are no other wonder gadgets or futuristic technology. Most of the story is set in Hideki’s apartment, a tatami-mat boarding-house room nearly bare of furniture, or the ornately furnished mansion of Minoru Kokubunji, a computer expert that Hideki consults. Tokyo’s shopping arcades, night skylines, and neon-lit streets are effectively re-created, and then simplified even further for the storybook sequences of “A City With No People” and its sequels.

Chobits (aka “Chobits Episode 27,” 2002, OAV)

Chibits (2004, OAV)

Chobits was actually a twenty-six-episode series as aired in Japan. Two story-thus-far clip episodes (9 and 18) were removed from the series’ lineup for Geneon’s North American video release, and presented together in the final DVD volume for the series (volume 7), as episodes 8.5 and 16.5, respectively. The OAV episode, checking in on the lives of Chi and Hideki after the series’ end, was also included on the final disc, numbered as episode 24.5, along with the Chibits OAV special, a six-minute comedy short featuring the mini-persocoms Sumomo and Kotoko trying to deliver a pair of underpants to Chi.

Right from the opening credits, Chobits is clearly signposted as a romance, and the ultimate goal of the story is a love match between Hideki and Chi. However, as a romantic comedy, it’s unusually self-aware, and much of its humor arises from poking fun at the very male fantasy it caters to: a love story between an average human male and an extraordinary female with special powers. Created by women for a young men’s audience (the manga was serialized in Young Magazine, a Kodansha publication that launched Akira and Ghost in the Shell), Chobits often borders on outright parody of the magical-girlfriend genre. Hideki is a sympathetic but somewhat bumbling character who is equally naïve about computers and women. He has a sizeable collection of softcore porn magazines but the idea of walking into a lingerie shop to buy underwear for Chi causes him intense embarrassment. Chi, on the other hand, is little more than a dress-up doll when first introduced; with her huge blank eyes, babyish round face, and constant birdlike chirp of “chi,” she might as well be a human-shaped Pokémon in a dress. But the overall sense of gentle mockery doesn’t detract from the sincerity of the love story.

There are a number of fascinating sci-fi questions posed in Chobits. Hideki is warned early on that persocoms are, after all, just machines, replacements for Internet routers, video game consoles, computers, and cell phones. Multiple cautionary tales show us the kind of tragedies that can result when people take their relationships with persocoms too seriously or too far: Hideki’s cram school teacher lost her husband because he preferred persocoms to her, and Chi’s boss at the Tirol bakery once married a persocom, only to later lose her when her system began to break down. The question of fetishism is also raised—Chi’s main power switches are located in what would be her vagina if she were a human female (Hideki is the only character in the series to find this surprising or even embarrassing). The idea that men would want computers that look like beautiful women is treated as obvious. Persocom expert Minoru has an entire stable of persocoms he designed himself, all dressed in revealing French maid’s costumes, even though, as a preteen, he’s presumably too young to get any kind of sexual charge out of looking at them. Some of this qualifies as just typical CLAMP humor: Chi’s role as greeter at the Tirol bakery serves as a reminder that such jobs in the real world are already robotic, requiring women to look decorative while performing repetitive tasks. But then, once you’ve started replacing humans with machines, Chobits asks, where do you stop?

Ultimately, of course, the answer is love. If Chi and Hideki can love, then their love is as valid as any other. There may be hardships in their future, but just as Chi has to be taught about happiness and love like a computer must be loaded with software, Hideki too has to decide whether to accept or reject his own “programming” about romance.

Upon Hideki’s initial discovery of Chi, he realizes that his life is turning out just like an anime: “A beautiful girl barges into your life out of nowhere, who happens to have special powers and can do almost anything. Suddenly, she falls in love with the guy she lives with . . . I am so lucky!” he enthuses.

The animated segments representing the children’s picture books that Chi is inexplicably drawn to, featuring a character that looks just like a simplified version of herself, wandering through a “city of no people” searching for “the one just for me, and only me,” are some of the series’ most lyrical and poetic moments.

Chi’s parrot-like qualities, before she learns to fully express herself, are mined for several episodes’ worth of quality comedy. An episode revolving around underwear shopping has Chi repeating the words “underpants” over and over like a marching tune as she searches for the lingerie shop where she’s meant to buy a pair of panties. Ultimately, Hideki has to buy them for her and as he moans that the employees must have thought he was a pervert, Chi promptly points a finger at him and repeats his own words: “Pervert! Hideki is a pervert!”

The popular four-woman studio CLAMP created the original Chobits manga, and many other titles which were adapted for anime, including: X, Tokyo Babylon, Angelic Layer, Magic Knight Rayearth, Cardcaptor Sakura, Miyuki-chan in Wonderland, RG Veda, Tsubasa Chronicle, CLAMP School, and XXXHolic. CLAMP member Nanase Ohkawa (aka Ageha Ohkawa) was also one of the scriptwriters for the Chobits animated series as well as Cardcaptor Sakura, Magic Knight Rayearth, RG Veda, and X: The Movie.

The term “persocom” is a real Japanese abbreviation for personal computers.

An anime in-joke: Hideki’s adventures in Tokyo as a student studying for his college entrance exams parallel those of Godai, the hero of the Rumiko Takahashi story Maison Ikkoku. Like Godai, Hideki rents a tatami-mat room in a ramshackle boarding house run by an attractive female manager, who we first see with a broom in hand, sweeping the walk outside, an iconic image from Maison Ikkoku.

violence One episode features a bloody murder. nudity Chi is naked on more than one occasion, and sexual situations abound. Chi is groped between the legs on multiple occasions.