What will Chi get up to next?
A heavy case of split personality
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Only a *tiny* spoiler there Al, good work
With that, on to my review of "Chobits".
We meet our hero, Hideki, in the very first episode.
It appears that Hideki is a talking cow!
BUT! No, in fact Hideki is the hard working son of a farmer and his wife, who is currently 'helping out' on that very same farm, while waiting to find out if he got into college in Tokyo or not.
The answer is.....no.
Hideki decides to go to Tokyo anyway and enroll in a 'prep school' so he can get into college.
Once he gets to Tokyo, he finds out about 'Persocoms', which are literally mobile computers that look exactly like humans, except for their 'ears'.
While he would like to have one, they are very expensive, far beyond the reach of a poor student in need of work.
Somehow, within days of finding the place where he will live while attending prep school, he finds a job, completely by accident and then he finds a persocom of all things thrown out in the trash.
This is how Chobits starts out and we get to follow the adventures of Hideki, Chi and their friends.
Each episode has a name along the line of "Chi <insert various words>" which basically tells you what Chi gets up to in that episode.
However, what Chi does is very occasionally not the main focus of the episode in question.
Most of the episodes are 'easy watching', you need to pay attention sometimes but not often, at least not until you get further into the series.
Early in the anime, Hideki and Chi go to a book shop and Hideki buys a book with a blue cover for Chi. Keep an eye out for these books!
Hideki finds out that owning a Persocom is a little more work than it seems and some funny scenes result from his efforts to maintain Chi in the proper fashion.
Hideki's building manager, Hibiya, comes to his rescue in his attempts to teach Chi things a number of times.
Hideki's next door neighbor, Shinbo and his persocom, Sumomo, who is a 16cm high female persocom, also spend a bit of time helping Hideki understand how persocoms work.
There are many things that happen in this anime and it's not just about Hideki and Chi.
Situations happen that involve all of Hideki's friends and people he knows from work and school.
Hideki and Chi often help to resolve these problems.
There is also a surplus of cute females around, his building manager, Hibiya = cute, his teacher, Shimizu = cute, his female co-worker, Yumi = cute, not to mention Chi herself, who is probably the cutest of the lot.
Chobits is a nice easy watch, but it felt like a lot of it was 'filler' for some reason, I think it would have made a much better movie, even though it would be a fairly long one.
The ending was, while not perfect, quite good, with all of the loose ends tied up, which is rare for most anime.
While there could be a second season, I doubt that there will be.
I think 'A-Channel' is up next.
Edit: added a quote from a previous post about the number of cute females in the anime.
After a quick look at the first episode, it looks like the artwork in A-channel is similar to the artwork 'TMoHS', which can't be all bad.
