Summary: >

Hiroshi Kiragi is a nerdy sort of mad scientist guy attending college. While he's not the most athletic guy, he's a part of the tennis club - mainly because another girl is a member: Marie. So when Hiroshi decides to create an android, he models her after the Marie at school. In fact the robot Marie is almost identical aside from hair color, slightly smaller bust, and voice. Hiroshi ends up calling the android Marie as well (possibly by mistake).

This all looked sort of suspicious however, but Hiroshi explains that this new girl is his sister. Hiroshi's world sort of gets turned upside down when he learns that the Marie he had a crush on actually DOES like him. Robot Marie meanwhile struggles with the fact that she was modeled after another girl. Robot Marie also strives to help Hiroshi to have a good relationship with the human Marie when another problem develops; Marie starts finding herself more attached to Hiroshi.

Thoughts: >

So what is My Dear Marie? It's a comedy, romance with a bit of sci-fi. Now before you write this series off forever keep in mind that My Dear Marie is quite different in its approach, and it's feel. The big difference is that it's 100% pure charm. So many anime series try to obtain the cute charming feel but fail - and My Dear Marie seems to have captured it quite well.

I'd also like to point out that this isn't your typical dumb robot girl type anime... and man, there are more than enough of those out there. First of all robot Marie is modeled after real life Marie whom Hiroshi has a crush on. However he never seems to have any perverted intentions towards his creation. Marie is simply a model he used for his robot girl that he created to keep him company. It also isn't clear if he actually intended on calling her Marie. The situation with calling robot Marie his sister also seems to have been stumbled upon, but everyone just rolls with it. Marie calls him "brother" from then on. And Hiroshi seems to have many roles towards Marie, but not necessarily the first one you'd think of in such a show. He's her inventor, and in some respects like a father towards her. He's also readily adopted the role of being her brother as well. That actually creates a dilemma for robot Marie.

You see robot Marie has emotions as well. She is indeed capable of love and affection, however what exactly happens when she feels that towards her creator? So she's torn between giving her master up, and helping him be happy. There is an added dimension to this, in that Marie is modeled after another girl. As Hibiki says in episode 2, "Why settle for not being the original. Why not take him for yourself?" And even in episode three which was about Marie dreaming, you can see that she's subconsciously struggling with her place at Hiroshi's side.

The real tragedy here is that there's only three episodes. I really wish they had made more because it was on it's way to becoming such a terrific series. With the unfortunate cut-off point after episode three we are left with a sort of lack of fulfillment. And that sucks because there's a whole 10 volumes of manga to pull content from. Grr...

Is it good? Yeah it's good. Go ahead and try to find someone that's seen this title and can says it's bad. You can't find anyone. Okay the tentacle hentai fans don't count. No it's seriously sad that My Dear Marie got sidelined like a speed bump in the road of anime history, because it's quite good. But as I said before, that's most likely because there were only three episodes made. I'd recommend it to pretty much any anime fan, unless that fan requires all anime be violent or involve tentacle hentai. Even though my rating is sort of stretching with the series being incomplete, it gets a full excellent rating for being an under-dog.