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The story centers on the life of Hideki Motosuwa, a repeat student (浪人, Rōnin?) attempting to qualify for university by studying at the Seki prep school in Tokyo. Besides a girlfriend, the other thing he dreams of having is a Persocom. A Persocom is an android used as a personal computer; however, they are expensive, and Hideki has no money.
On his way home one evening, he stumbles across a Persocom in the form of a beautiful girl with long blonde hair lying against a pile of trash bags. He first thinks this to be a murder but, realizing she was a Persocom, he carries her home. Upon turning it on, she instantly regards Hideki with adoration. The only word she seems capable of saying is "chi", and thus he names her Chi. Although Chi does not appear to have any programs installed in her, Hideki's friends surmise that she must have some sort of learning program installed, judging from her behaviour.
A major part of the plot involves Hideki attempting to teach Chi words, concepts, and appropriate behaviours, in between cram school and work. At the same time, Chi seems to be developing feelings for Hideki, at an emotional depth, which Persocoms are not supposed to possess, and Hideki struggles with his feelings for her. The series explores the nature of Persocoms, human interactions with them, and the nature of love. All sorts of characters and their Persocoms are introduced, some of them loving Persocoms, and some of them considering them only as tools, and some of them hating them altogether.
In the later part of the story, the characters start to explore Chi's mysterious past. Chi discovers a series of picture books of mysterious origin, that seem to awaken something deep inside of her. The book inspires her to find the "person just for me", a euphemism used in the series to refer to one's true love. Chi is also a very special Persocom, and towards the end of the story, together with Hideki, discovers her true identity, as well as what lies within her.
Despite the comedic and ecchi moments, Chobits itself deals with several dualities concerning subject matter it shows. The most explored issue throughout the series is relationships shared between humans and persocoms. "Watashi", or "Atashi" (Japanese for I or me), a character drawn by the character "Hibiya", is a comic book used in the series to hint at the definition of reciprocated love to Chi, and is used to highlight issues with human-persocom relationships; drawing upon the fact that because persocoms can be programmed to imitate desirable human behavior, humans would opt-out of human relationships, resulting in obvious problems, such as the inability to further produce offspring.
The series deals with issues and ideals of virginity, and sexual intercourse in that Chi is effectively incapable of sexual intercourse (in the manga) and must therefore only entrust her body to someone who cares for her well-being. The series also hints that Chi's particular placement of her "on switch" is added after Freya's death, since her father gave her "special abilities". Along with his goal to ensure all persocoms found happiness, the placement of Chi's on switch ensures that her personality will thrive only in a relationship in which she is loved without the pressure of sex. Persocoms, like women before the women's liberation, are viewed as objects that meet needs rather than to be loved. This is shown in the series, particularly when several males attempt to "interfere" with Chi. The idea of "love", as a concept is addressed for the denominator of the series, in several installments of "A City with No People"; this deals with issues particularly relating to searching, and subsequently waiting for someone who is what would be referred to as a "soul mate". This is in parallel to the story of Freya, who fell in love with her father and creator, and ultimately wished death due to heartache, and is used as a means of "aiding" Chi in her quest for "A Person Just For Me", or "My One and Only". Both Chi and her sister, Freya; Atashi being linked to Chi, and the companion, linked to Freya.
The name "Chobits" comes from the fact that their father, Ichiro Mihara, used the word "Chobi" to describe anything he thought was "small and hopelessly adorable". Two Chobi become "Chobits". The word "Chobits" is an anagram of "Chitose Hibiya."[4], and is also the password given to Elda, Freya, Plum, and eventually Chi. The spelling of the title uses a mixture of hiragana ちょびっ Chobi[t] and katakana ツ tsu. The mixed letters were chosen because a persocom's password requires a mixture of hiragana, katakana and/or Latin alphanumeric characters for increased security. Similarly, the password チょびっつ Chobittsu for Plum (also known as "Sumomo"; "Sumomo" is Japanese for "plum"), set by Hideki in episode 19 of the TV series (entitled "Chi Helps Out"), mixes katakana (チ, Ch[i]?) and hiragana (ょびっつ, [y]obittsu?), although in TOKYOPOP's English translation of the manga, the password is "Chobits" (with a capital "C").
The word persocom (パソコン, pasocon?) is a Japanese contraction of personal computer (パーソナルコンピュータ, pāsonaru conpyūta?). In Japan, it is used to refer to personal computers in the same way as the initials PC are in English. In Chobits, it is used with no distinction between modern and humanoid computers. In the final chapter of the manga, Chitose Hibiya explains that humanoid computers are not named "robots" because Ichiro Mihara did not include the Three Laws of Robotics in them.
The original Chobits manga was written by Clamp, a famous group of four Japanese mangaka (manga artists) and was serialized in Kodansha's Young Magazine in Japan from February 2001 until the manga's completion in November 2002. Clamp often reuses (or parallels) various characters among their manga. Chobits is one of their first attempts at the seinen genre.
The manga is 88 chapters long and was collected into 8 volumes, which are published in English by TOKYOPOP. TOKYOPOP's translation is imported to Australia by Madman Entertainment. The Traditional Chinese manga is published by COMICSWORLD.COM (天下出版有限公司) under official authorization for Hong Kong only. In Singapore, the Simplified Chinese version is published by Chuangyi.
In 2002 Marvellous Entertainment Inc. released a Chobits game for the Nintendo Game Boy Advance. This game has not been released outside of Japan. The game was available bundled with a clear blue Game Boy Advance with a decal of Chi above the A+B buttons and a Chobits logo above the D-pad. [1] There is also a PlayStation 2 game that was released exclusively in Japan.
The anime consists of 26 episodes and was broadcast across Japan, East Asia and Southeast Asia by the anime satellite television network, Animax and the terrestrial Tokyo Broadcasting System network. Episodes 9, 18, and an extra 27th OVA episode are used as "recap" episodes, looking back on the events that happened previously. The episodes were re-numbered for the DVD release; the original recap episodes were not included in sequence, instead being published together on the final DVD and re-numbered as 8.5, 16.5 and 24.5 making the series itself only 24 episodes.
There is a 6-minute special episode: "Sumomo and Kotoko on a Quest", or "Chibits", concerning Sumomo and Kotoko.
The series was directed by Morio Asaka and animated by Madhouse while Hisashi Abe acted as character designer and chief animation director. The ending to the anime series is different from the manga on many levels; perhaps the most notable being removal of all true allusion to Hideki never having Chi because of her switch location, and of Freya taking over Chi's body and asking her mother Chitose to shut them down, saying the Chobits series is a failure, and the activation of the program after all, although the effect on Persocoms is not the same as described in the manga.
Chi (ちぃ, Chii?) is a fictional character in the manga series Chobits, and its anime adaptation. She is a Chobit, a type of persocom that is far more technologically advanced than regular persocoms, and who are said to possess true machine intelligence rather than relying on the execution of pre-loaded software programs like other persocoms.[1]
Minoru (国分寺 稔 , Kokubunji Minoru?) is a wealthy twelve-year old genius, whose specialty is persocoms. In particular, he has built a custom persocom named Yuzuki, designed to look like his late sister, and has given her self-teaching software, meaning that she can learn things on her own instead of having to have programs loaded into her as if the case with most persocoms.
For the most part, Minoru is a very reserved and soft spoken individual who surrounds himself with persocoms. His curiosity over Chi's origins leads to him becoming one of Hideki Motosuwa's closest friends. Minoru does what he can to help his friends whether it be technological help, such as tracking things down or allowing Hideki to make video phone calls, or advice on relationships with persocoms. Although he is known for being calm and collected most of the time, Minoru's attitude completely changes when Yuzuki is present. Similar to Hideki's behavior toward Chi, Minoru is very protective of Yuzuki and is prone to outbursts whenever she is in trouble. He is also very forgiving, always comforting her on the fact that it is never her fault if something goes wrong.
Minoru is also known as "M" on the bulletin boards, where he is considered one of the leading experts in the field of persocom development. Minoru's late sister is Kaede Saito, a character from Angelic Layer.
Yuzuki is a persocom created by Minoru Kokubunji roughly two years before the start of the series. Yuzuki was created to resemble, physically and mentally, Minoru's late sister, Kaede, who had died from an illness two years earlier. Yuzuki is programmed with all of the data that Minoru could remember about his sister; what she liked, what she disliked, as well as her habits and behaviors. However, Minoru still realizes that no matter how realistic she may be, she is still only a persocom that is following her programming. Yuzuki also possess an awareness of her own limitations.
Toward the end of the anime and manga, Yuzuki loses a large portion of Kaede's personality data as a result of trying to hack into Zima and being counter-hacked by Dita. However, Minoru declines to reenter this data, because he has grown to love Yuzuki for who she is; because she is Yuzuki, rather than because she is a replacement for his sister.
Takako Shimizu (清水多香子, Shimizu Takako?) is Hideki and Shinbo's teacher at the Seki cram school. Like Yumi, Shimizu has had a negative experience with persocoms: Her husband bought a persocom, and eventually she became unimportant to him compared to the persocom. He spent more and more time with it until he forgot about his wife completely, locking her out of the house one night because he was so enamored with it. Because of this, Shimizu is no longer able to trust human men. Later, she elopes with Shinbo. In the end, she returns to the cram school, married to Shinbo.
Yumi Omura (大村裕美, Ōmura Yumi?) is a seventeen year old girl who works at the Japanese pub [My Pleasure] alongside Hideki. In the anime, she is the daughter of the club's owner, but in the manga, she is only an employee. It is initially implied that Yumi is interested in a relationship with Hideki, but as the series progresses it is revealed that she initially approached him because he also worked at Club Pleasure, and that she thinks of him as an older brother. Throughout most of the series Yumi has an inferiority complex toward persocoms, and becomes upset at any mention of a human-sized persocom.
The reason for this is that while Yumi was working at Chiroru she fell in love with the manager, Hiroyasu Ueda. She gathered the courage to tell him, and found out that he reciprocated her feelings. However, Yumi later discovered that Ueda had previously been married to a persocom that he had named Yumi, (See Hiroyasu's entry) and she thought that he would compare her to the persocom Yumi and find her inferior.
However, Hideki eventually manages to persuade Yumi that Hiroyasu wouldn't have started anything if he didn't love Yumi for who she was, and he and Yumi resume their relationship.
Hiroyasu Ueda (植田 弘康, Ueda Hiroyasu?) is the owner of Chiroru, a local bakery which Yumi (and in the manga, Hideki) once worked in and which Chi ends up working at. He is thirty-eight years old, although he looks as though he is only in his mid-20's, at one point noting jokingly that he has a "baby face".
He too has suffered a trauma involving persocoms. When he first opened his bakery, he bought a persocom to help with math and accounting, which he admits he is terrible at. He eventually fell in love with this persocom and then married her, but she developed a hard disk fault which resulted in the gradual degradation of her memory, until she remembered almost nothing at all.
Rarely, she would suddenly recall small fragments of memories from her life with Hiroyasu. He could not bring himself to have her repaired because her memories might be lost completely in the process of transferring them to a new hard drive, and he felt she would not be the same person if this happened. Soon, her memory degraded to the point that she could not remember anything for more than a few seconds at a time, and Hiroyasu had to keep a constant watch on her to prevent her from wandering away. One night while walking with his persocom, Hiroyasu, lost in thought, walked into the middle of the street, unaware of an oncoming car. In a final moment of clarity, his persocom pushed him out of the way and was herself run over. Her last word to Hiroyasu was "Konnichiwa"; the default greeting for newly activated persocom with no memories.
Hiroyasu and Yumi Omura were in love in the past, but broke up when Yumi quit her job at the bakery after discovering that the persocom he was previously married to was named "Yumi" and feared she could never live up to the other Yumi. Through the help of Chi and Hideki, he and Yumi resume their relationship.
Known in online circles as "Dragonfly", Yoshiyuki Kojima (小島 良由起, Kojima Yoshiyuki?) is a man of few scruples and another custom persocom-builder. Unlike Minoru Kokubunji, he is more obsessed with persocoms and even kidnaps Chi at one point. He tries to hack into Chi, using all of his persocoms in a massive parallel processing network. During this time, he makes an ill-advised attempt to inappropriately touch Chi, and Freya takes over, restraining him with all of the cords attached to her. She then attacks him with a concussion blast, blowing out the windows in his house and knocking him unconscious. Afterwards, to make amends for his actions he lends his help to solving the mystery of Chi and the Chobits.
Yoshiyuki is the original owner of Kotoko.
Kotoko (琴子, Kotoko?) is another laptop persocom like Sumomo, but she was custom-built by Yoshiyuki and has much higher specifications than Sumomo. Kotoko originally belonged to Yoshiyuki, but following Chi's kidnapping, Hideki and Shinbo force Yoshiyuki to transfer ownership of Kotoko to Hideki so that her memories of Yoshiyuki kidnapping Chi cannot be erased. Kotoko is far more serious than Sumomo, and thinks that everyone in the Motosuwa household is crazy, Sumomo in particular. Kotoko is programmed to always tell the truth, no matter what, even when it works to her owner's disadvantage.
In the original Japanese version, her seiyuu (Nogami) once worked together with Sumomo's seiyu (Kumai) in Cardcaptor Sakura (another anime adapted from CLAMP's works, as Li Meiling and Li Syaoran respectively). Ironically, in CCS, Syaoran was the more "mature" one of the pair. Incidentally, Kotoko and Li Meiling have similar hairstyles.
Zima (ジーマ, Jima?) is one of two government persocoms who are looking for Chi. They do not want her to execute her final program, which they believe would destroy the person-recognition abilities of every persocom on the planet. It is believed that the program will execute when Chi finds the person just for her. Zima, however, believes that this may not necessarily be true, and genuinely wants Chi to find happiness. He lies to Dita about Chi's whereabouts and stalls as long as possible before finally going to stop her. However, upon arriving Zima physically restrains Dita from attacking Chi. Zima is also the Japanese government's national data bank, and during the course of the series an attempt is made by Yuzuki to hack into him to gain information concerning Chi. In the anime, Zima remarks that he and Dita were created from the same basic system that Chi is, rendering them immune to her ability to immobilize persocoms.
In the anime, Zima is referred to as "The King of Persocoms".
Dita (ディタ, Dita?) is the second of the two persocoms looking for Chi. Her role is to protect Zima both physically and as a pro-active firewall, hacking into any persocom who tries to hack into Zima and shutting it down. Dita appears to love Zima, but tries to deny it, believing the persocoms cannot or should not experience such feelings. In the manga, when Zima asked, "Do you love me?", she replies, "We're persocoms! Be serious!"
Hideki Motosuwa (本須和秀樹 , Motosuwa Hideki?) is a 19-year-old (in the anime, 18) repeat student (ronin) attempting to get into university by studying at Seki cram school, which his parents have sent him to. They have also severed his allowance, which means he has to work at Yorokonde (My Pleasure), an izakaya, to make ends meet. One night, while walking home from work, he finds a persocom lying in a pile of garbage. He takes her home, and upon activating her, finds that the only word she can utter is "Chi". Because of this, he gives her the name "Chi" (in the anime, "Chii") and takes her into his care, doing his best to protect and teach her.
Hideki could best be described as "a fish out of water." Living in the country his entire life, Hideki has trouble adjusting to his new life in Tokyo. Due to this, he is prone to outbursts of confusion and frustration. Also, because of the time spent by himself on his family's farm, Hideki has a habit of thinking out loud and talking to himself. This leads to some very entertaining moments between himself and the women he meets. Like many young men, Hideki has an active libido, possessing many pornographic magazines which he refers to as "okazu" ("side dish"). (In the English manga translation, Chi refers to one of the magazines as a "tasty side dish"; in the anime's American translation, Chi refers to these magazines as "Hideki's yummies"). When he moves to Tokyo, Hideki desires a persocom so that he can finally surf the internet for pornography. It should be stated however that he isn't the only character who thinks this way. In fact Shinbo himself proudly admits that Sumomo is also equipped to perform these tasks when he first meets Hideki.
Despite his shortcomings and occasional moments of awkwardness with the bustling environment of Tokyo, Hideki is a genuinely kind and honest person, whose habit of thinking of others' well-being before his own can cause many problems. When a friend is in trouble, especially Chi, he is always there to help. Many characters in the series turn to him for advice with their problems, knowing he will always hear them out and do his best to assist them.
Chitose Hibiya (日比谷 千歳 , Hibiya Chitose?) is the landlady at the apartment where Hideki is staying. In the manga, she was previously an employee of Piffle Princess Enterprises and participated in the development of Angels and later, persocoms. She was married to the president of the company, the late Ichiro "Icchan" Mihara, who used the data gathered from the Angelic Layer research to create the Chobits to be Chitose's children, because she was unable to have children of her own. She also authors the "A City with No People" series of books to help Chi find the Person Just for Her.
Hiromu Shinbo (新保弘 , Shinbo Hiromu?), also spelled "Shimbo", is Hideki's best friend and is also studying at Seki cram school. In the anime, Shinbo lives in the same apartment complex as Hideki and is his next-door neighbor. Shinbo is usually the first person Hideki turns to for help with persocoms. Shortly after beginning school he becomes romantically involved with his teacher Takako Shimizu, after finding her in a park late at night because she had been unwittingly locked out of her house by her husband, who was too busy with his persocom. He later elopes with her and convinces her to marry him.
Sumomo (すもも, Sumomo?), whose name means "plum" in Japanese, is a miniature "mobile persocom" – the equivalent of a laptop computer. Wearing an outfit that makes her resemble a genie, she is programmed to be cute and tends to be quite hyperactive, for example leading Hideki in wakeup exercises each morning. Shinbo was the original owner of Sumomo, but left her with Hideki after leaving with Takako. He later transfers Sumomo's registration to Hideki, giving him permanent ownership. At the beginning of the series, Shinbo uses Sumomo in an attempt to analyze Chi, and Sumomo is nearly broken in the process, requiring new main memory, and in the manga, a new video card as well. Once Kotoko joined Hideki, she quickly came to the conclusion that Sumomo was mad, with her nonsensical ways.
In the original Japanese version, her seiyuu (Kumai) once worked together with Kotoko's seiyu (Nogami) in Cardcaptor Sakura (another anime adapted from CLAMP's works, as Li Syaoran and Li Meiling respectively). Ironically, in CCS, Syaoran was the more "mature" one of the pair.
Freya was the first Chobit, who was created before Elda by Hibiya's husband, Ichiro Mihara. Freya was created to be Hibiya's daughter, because she was unable to bear children of her own. Freya's development was kept secret from Hibiya; she did not know of Freya's existence until she was called down to the lab one day, without explanation. Upon awakening for the very first time, she was given the name Freya by Hibiya.
Freya lived happily with the Mihara couple for a time, until Hibiya noticed that her attitude was becoming increasingly melancholy, with no explanation as to why. At this point, Hibiya asked her husband to build a little sister for Freya, in an attempt to make her happy again. From this request, Elda was created. Freya was happy to have a little sister, and for a time, seemed to be acting normally, although, as Hibiya would later tell Hideki in the anime, "there were still these odd times when she looked as though she was thinking very deeply about something."
Some time after, Freya suddenly lost consciousness and collapsed to the ground. In the anime, the impetus for this event was witnessing her mother and father flirting with each other in the compound's courtyard. It was only then that Hibiya finally realized the source of Freya's sadness; she had fallen in love with her own father, Mihara. Freya knew that her father still loved his wife, and did not want to disturb their happiness, so she pained her heart with efforts to suppress her feelings. Over time, her pain became so great that she began to malfunction under the strain of her emotional burden. Freya was no longer able to move, and was bedridden from that point on. Toward the end, she could not lift a finger or even shift her focus, and began to suffer from memory malfunctions.
In the anime, Freya never found the courage to tell her father how she truly felt; in the manga, she resigns herself to the fact that because of the damage to her body, all hope is lost regardless of the outcome, and chooses to tell him her true feelings. Eventually Freya's pain became so unbearable, that she chose to self-terminate, rather than continue to exist. Before this could happen, Elda offered to take Freya's heart into her own, so that she would not disappear completely, and so that her memories would be preserved. In the anime, nobody knew that Elda had taken in Freya's heart; conversely, in the manga, both Hibiya and Mihara learned of this only moments after it occurred.
Now that Elda has become Chi, Freya does everything she can to ensure that Chi will find the person just for her. Freya comforts Chi when she is in distress, guides her to understand her feelings for Hideki, and intervenes when she is in danger.
(Note about the spelling "Freya": "Freya" actually appears in the Japanese Chobits merchandise. In Norse mythology, Freya was a goddess of love, sex and attraction.)
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