Prima Doll is a very pretty show set in a post war, steam punk, European inspired city about a group of former weaponised, autonomous mechanical dolls serving new roles as waitresses in a café.
We follow the exploits of the pink-haired, moé blob of a robot Haizakura. After she’s rebooted she gets to know her new autonomous friends who’ll she be working with at the café whilst she causes adorable havoc everywhere she goes. It’s your basic slice of life story with sci-fi elements and a twist of bittersweetness as the world and it’s war-torn people recover and adapt to peace.
You’ll note that this show is very pretty. Although not always well animated the background art, background cgi and lighting it always on point. The dolls personalities maybe very cliché, but their actual character designs are very appealing and it helps make them feel like original characters instead of the same copy-pasted moé blob personality we’ve seen in similar all girls anime every season.
I also like some of the world building. We see through flashbacks that the dolls are not only used as weapons, but are designed the way they are so the human troops can rally behind their kawaii-ness as moral boost or as spy doll that can more easily infiltrate enemy territory by looking as unthreatening and harmless as possible. Most anime that tell stories of war androids don’t try to give any explanation as to why they’re designed like anime waifu’s and I really appreciated this little attention to detail.
Unfortunately, where I think the show really slips up is with the script. Not only is the actual story very mediocre, but through it’s cast of robotic moé blobs it tries to tell a story of former soldiers getting over war trauma and readjusting into a normal life. If you’ve ever heard or talked to a veteran soldier who has experienced real, actual, literal war about their experiences they can tell how mentally challenging it can be to readjust back into society.
Using moé robots as a stand in for those people not only makes the narrative framework feel disingenuous, but also makes it hard to care for the plight of the girl of the week because she is a literal robot simulating emotions and none of it feels real. It’s similar to one of “Detroit Become Human’s” many, many, many problems as a story. You can’t really get away with using robots as a stand-in for those real, human experiences because they’re simply not human. They’re cold, calculating, moé code which can be reprogrammed or deleted so it feels uncanny valley like when theres a robot chief who can’t talk because of ptsd or an androids literal tears from crying over trauma described as “leaking”. I found that I just couldn’t connect to any of them because these thoughts were always in the back of my mind and it really ruins the show.
The one episode I actually really enjoyed with the episode introducing Reztel. I won’t spoil it if you’re planning on watching it, but it does manage to bland it’s themes of ‘suffering because of an inability to move on' with it’s robot narrative.
There’s a few other narrative dissonances that really stops the show from excelling, but I’ll admit I am an over thinker when it comes to these kind of stories, and there might be some of you who’ll enjoy a diet ‘what if “Violet Evergarden" but moé robots though?’
As literal manufactured moé blobs I can’t deny that the cast is adorable, but for the kind of story the show wants to tell, for me it just doesn’t work. I don’t hate Prima Doll, but if you’re going to write a story about soldiers getting over and moving on from war make sure your main characters are actually human because the human experience is the most important part.
5/10 Mediocre.
