Ok, I’ll admit it, I like romance anime, especially with drama and comedy. So I should love Chobits, right? Let me step back for a moment and say above all else I like anime with good stories and interesting characters. Chobits fails for me due to weak characters, in particular Hideki and Chii.
Hideki is way too flat and lack sufficient depth. In addition, he is a joke character, we don’t laugh with him, we laugh at him. Because of this it makes it hard to empathize/engage with a character like Hideki. This is why we have token male side characters who take the joke character role. Shinbo, Hideki’s male friend clearly doesn’t take this role, in fact they should have made him the main character as his story is far more interesting than Hideki and Chii’s. In addition, to Hideki, Chii’s character is no better. There is nothing to her, memory erased and the mentality of a child. She is the default love interest for Hideki and its beyond me as to how Hideki falls in love with Chii. Maybe because she cute? maybe for most, but I dislike the character design for Chii. The blank eyes are what killed it for me. Male designs were fine as well as the rest of the cast.
Much of the praise for Chobits is in the comedy, well at least that’s what I hear. For me the jokes were way too repetitive, in particular the jokes at the expense at Hideki. For example, Hideki is a pervert with too much porn/gravure that Chii finds. Hideki thinks perverted thoughts again and is an idiot that over reacts to everything. This extreme lightheartedness and extremely repetitive comedy was made it hard for me to finish the first half of the series.
As for the story itself, I didn’t think there was sufficient foreshadowing. So when the story starts going in the second half it feels a bit tacked on. In addition, they failed to keep up the momentum by jumping from thread to thread. Simply put the plot structure was a bit messy and Hideki and Chii aren’t strong enough characters. I guess if Chobits were to be considered a slice-of-life anime the structures would had worked, however that would require more complex characters.
There were parts I did like, in particular, Shinbo/Shimizu’s and Ueda’s stories. Both showed the sadder side of the theme of the show “love for a robot.” The relationship between Yuzuki and Minoru was touching, albeit not as interesting as the above characters. However, there is something seriously wrong when the side character are far more interesting that the main characters.
Chobits had quite a bit of potential, dealing with interesting and complex themes. Sadly they didn’t use these ideas enough and the Hideki and Chii characters were too weak to carry the show. Its quite hard to get engaged in an anime when you can’t empathize with the characters.