Takuma Kosugi is your typical hard-working young salaryman; putting in long hours at work leaves him with very little time to prepare his meals. However, Takuma has one thing going for him: he can always count on a homemade meal cooked up by his second-hand robot named Mina. One night, while she is cooking his dinner, Takuma playfully asks if she would be his wife. While Mina doesn’t directly reply, she does begin to exhibit some strange behaviors, like putting a cute heart on Takuma’s omurice and expressing what can only be described as concern at his excessive drinking. While drunk, Takuma asks what Mina thinks of him, and she coolly replies that he is her husband, as he had asked Mina to be his wife earlier. Of course, this is right up Takuma’s alley. CUE THE SHENANAGINS!
You know, there are days when I’m thankful that I became an anime fan when I did. Being an old-school anime fan (“Oldtaku”), I find I have the ability, for better or worse, to compare some of the new shows that come out to shows of the past. Upon seeing this one, I IMMEDIATELY found myself comparing this to 2002’s Chobits—a young, hard-working guy living on his own in an old one-room apartment, develops feelings for a second-hand female robot that may have some underlying programming to make her more than the sum of her parts. But while that show used its premiere episode to establish our male lead and the world he lives in, even before introducing us to Chi, My Wife Has No Emotion says, “Yeah, here’s our guy, here’s his robot, let’s go.” We don’t get to know about what this world is about. Are robot maids prevalent? Where did Takuma get Mina from? How advanced is the technology in this world? What happened in Takuma’s past? And most curious of all—how can you afford a housekeeping robot…but only live in a one-room apartment? Priorities? What are those?
Speaking of Takuma, our male lead is not a very interesting fellow. “But Samurai-San,” I hear you yelling from the void, “That’s the whole idea! He’s supposed to be a boring everyman!” To which I say… “Come on, we’ve known each other for years now. You can call me Josh.” Even though Takuma is supposed to be a boring guy, you can still be an interesting character. Junta Shiraishi from Kubo Won’t Let Me Be Invisible is a boring guy, but he’s still INTERESTING. Hideaki from Chobits is an unassuming guy, but he has certain personality traits and a story that makes him INTERESTING. Just from the first episode, we learn loads about Hideaki; we don’t know a lot about our hapless loser character except for the fact that he was in a relationship at one point in his life, and that he seems to have some sort of complex regarding his robot housekeeper. I’m not even going to get into Mina because, aside from the small speckles of “humanity” that she seems to be showing, she’s not very interesting to watch either.
From a production standpoint, My Wife Has No Emotion was created by Tezuka Productions, which has done, among other shows, Girlfriend, Girlfriend, The Quintessential Quintuplets, and My Home Hero. Honestly, when compared to all those shows…this one falls flat. The character designs aren’t anything to really write home over, and the only setting we get is in Takuma’s apartment. The opening theme “Okaerinasai” by Sora Tokino is good, but again, watching this I get very vague Chobits vibes.
So where does that leave us with My Wife Has No Emotion? Well…even when judging this show on its own merits without the knowledge of Chobits, this anime is not that interesting. Our characters as presented in this inaugural episode are boring, we don’t know enough about this world to be invested in it, our male lead has done very little for us to get behind him, and the title emotionless wife is…well…dull. While there is always the potential that this show will improve with the addition of more characters and world-building, based on this first episode, I can’t recommend this one guys. Heck, I would recommend just watching Chobits, if it were legally streaming anywhere. Tezuka Productions, you’ve disappointed me yet again. Please do better.
My Wife Has No Emotion is available for streaming on Crunchyroll.
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Oh, that’s too bad. The premise of this anime certainly has potential. Like you pointed out, it’s very much like Chobits, and look how popular that was. This could have been a more mature version of Chobits with more modern comedy. It’s a shame it fell flat on the first episode. Maybe it just starts out slow and will get better in an episode or two?
[…] went into this one with a very wary eye after the absolute foolishness of last year’s My Wife Has No Emotion. I didn’t know exactly how this one would play out! Thankfully, my fears were allayed, as […]