Streaming: HIDIVE
Episodes: 12
Source: Mixed Media Project
Episode Summary: Automata or “dolls” are human-shaped tools used by the military to help command large platoons of mechanical soldiers. Unfortunately doing this can be such a strain on the dolls that they can sometimes end up broken. When a pink-haired doll awakens in a basement, she doesn’t remember her name or her purpose. This place happens to be the workshop of Nagi Tooma, a mechanic who repairs dolls and puts them to work in his café. He gives her the name Haizakura and informs her that her memory has been reset, which is why she awakened so disoriented.
Haizakura doesn’t seem to have a talent for being a server or a cook, but she does happen to have a strange knack for singing. This comes in handy when she has to defend her new friend Chiyo from an errant military robot, and also seems to be the key to waking Yugiri, a doll whose circuits were so overloaded that it didn’t seem possible to repair her. It so happens that Chiyo and Yugiri were once like sisters, so being able to spend time with Yugiri again is like a miracle for Chiyo. Yet, though Yugiri seems to be repaired, looks can be deceiving.
Impressions: I became interested in Japan from a young age, and once I discovered anime and had the means to purposely seek it out, one thing I grasped pretty quickly is that a not-insignificant amount of Japanese animated fiction involves robots in some form or fashion. From giant robots and mecha, to androids of various flavors, it’s a constant bit of speculative subject matter in anime. I’m not sure how many people reading watched Obsolete on the Bandai Namco channel a while back, but that series speculates on what might happen if aliens provided Earthlings with mecha technology regardless of national borders. Of course the series ends with a final episode in which the mecha exoskeletons have been personified as cute girls who fight one-another in space – mostly divorced from their actual mechanical origins.
Prima Doll is ostensibly about humanoid robots but chooses to eschew some trappings of “hard” sci-fi in favor of focusing on the emotions of the characters as a consequence of that state of being. It’s a choice that likely has some detractors – I know there’s a not-insignificant contingent of anime fans who got into the fandom through hard(er) sci-fi, mecha, etc. That said, in a world where technology is already moving forward at quite a clip, for better or for worse, I think we’ve not had much time to wrestle with the emotional complications of our forward progress as much.
Of course, in this case that means that the named automata characters are all cute girls who are nigh-indistinguishable from actual humans aside from a power pack or some similar mechanism attached to their backs. One could dive deep into a rabbit hole of trying to analyze just why entities created by humans for the purpose of servitude (and servitude in a manner that in this example often seems to leave them mentally broken down) are so often given the appearance of cute, juvenile girls, but I should probably save that for another time. Needless to say it was something I found weirdly obvious in its use and a bit off-putting.
I think there’s an interesting story to be told here – a world that allows itself to get emotionally attached to its creations is certainly ripe for different takes on the subject. I don’t, however, have a ton of confidence after watching this episode that this isn’t just another assembly of moé tropes for the purposes of appealing to the robot girl fan market.
Pros: This episode does a decent job of introducing some solid emotional beats. It telegraphs a lot of what eventually happens – it’s obvious early on that Yugiri’s return to consciousness can’t possibly be as cut-and-dry as it appears – but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It makes it clear that these automata were used to accomplish decidedly terrible things, and that those actions had consequences for both the automata themselves, as well as their human handlers.
There’s also an apparent separation between the Dolls and the other humanoid-shaped mechanical individuals that I hope could be explored more. The dolls are nearly human, while these others don’t speak and don’t have the human-like appearance of their brethren. Tooma seems to have rescued both to work in his café (and I’m sure his motivations are more complicated than they appear on the surface) and I find this interesting.
Cons: Haizakura is definitely an example of the “clumsy girl” trope, and while I feel like there’s some message buried in there about how sometimes one’s true talents might just not be obvious (it’s clear that she wields some kind of special power which is left unexplained for the time being) it’s tough to just watch this kind of kawaii incompetence for very long.
Content Warnings: Scenes of large-scale military battles. Intense scenes involving physical threats from mechanical entities. Memory loss.
Would I Watch More? – Probably not. While I’m all-in on science fiction that focuses more on the humanity as it relates to the science, I also feel like this show is more a vehicle to show off cute characters where the story is secondary.