Chobits

The series centers on the life of Hideki Motosuwa, a held-back student attempting to qualify for university by studying at Seki prep school in Tokyo. Besides a girlfriend, he dreams of having a persocom (パソコン): an android used as a personal computer, which is expensive. On his way home one evening, he stumbles across a persocom in the form of a beautiful girl with floor-length hair lying against a pile of trash bags, and he carries her home, not noticing that a disk fell on the ground. Upon turning her on, she instantly regards Hideki with adoration.

The only word the persocom seems capable of saying is "chi" (ちぃ, Chii), thus he names her that. Hideki assumes that there must be something wrong with her, and so the following morning he has his neighbor Hiromu Shinbo analyze her with his mobile persocom Sumomo. After Sumomo crashes during the attempt they conclude that she must be custom-built.

Clamp—a creative team consisting of Satsuki Igarashi, Ageha Ohkawa, Tsubaki Nekoi and Mokona—wrote and illustrated Chobits, which is the first of their manga to be targeted towards older male readers (seinen manga). The idea for Chobits originated from the group's experiences with computers, which would present indecipherable error messages when experiencing difficulties, to which they added a "sexier spin" to the concept. After completing their previous manga series Cardcaptor Sakura, the group successfully pitched Chobits to the Japanese manga magazine Weekly Young Magazine. Clamp completed fourteen pages per week for Chobits's weekly serialization, totaling fifty-six pages a month. The title of the manga has its origins in "Chobi", the name of a cat at the place of Nekoi's former employment, which the group made into "Chobits", as the characters Elda and Freya were twins.

Ohkawa designed Hideki and Chi first. Chi's design as a personal computer resulted from Ohkawa's wish to increase the sense of "emotional discomfort" around becoming emotionally involved with something considered to be merely a lifeless machine. The characterization of the protagonist Hideki proved to be difficult for her; in the beginning, she considered an "aloof" man who gradually warms up emotionally or a sex-obsessed man. She decided that neither characterization would be a good fit for Chi and settled on one of a penniless and benevolent student.

Reviews have been mixed. Shaenon K. Garrity of Anime News Network criticized the series' description of persocoms as "obedient" and "perfect," writing, "The persocoms are perfect women, stripped clean of everything that makes real women less than perfect servants to men—that is, one might say, everything that makes women human."

The adaptation was criticized for shifting the focus from Hideki to Chi, in particular for having episodes devoted to Chi "doing cute things" and providing fanservice. Helen McCarthy in 500 Essential Anime Movies stated that the OVA's main strength is "its questioning of how we use technology, and whether it can be a substitute, rather than a support, for real life".