A socially awkward teenage scientist takes a friend’s advice too literally and builds himself a girlfriend in Gensho Yasuda’s indie animation, Make a Girl (メイクアガール). The central irony is that Akira (Shun Horie) makes Zero (Atsumi Tanezaki) to improve his productivity, but in fact ends up learning how to interact with people from her. Nevertheless, consciously or otherwise, he’s started off from a questionable position given that his notions of what a girlfriend should be are bound up with his unresolved feelings for his late mother along with outdated sexist attitudes.
Akira’s mother Inaba was a genius scientist who passed away of an illness sometime previously leaving Akira alone with only their huge lab and a drive containing her memories. Fearing he can’t live up to his mother’s legacy, Akira’s inventions are largely useless time-wasting devices which make ordinary tasks take longer than they would if done in the normal way. That’s why he’s so taken with his friend’s story about how getting a girlfriend has improved his productivity at his part-time job. Not really understanding why his friend’s productivity improved, he decides to create a “girlfriend” for himself, but is only doing so in the hope that she will magically allow him to level up. She is then a sentient being that exists solely to support him by being cute and sweet while he otherwise puts nothing at all into the relationship.
Zero’s desire to fit into the stereotypical “girlfriend” role is signalled by her learning to cook so that she and Akira can eat together, while when she tries to go on a stereotypical date with him, she opts to go clothes shopping and says that she’s realised that she likes it when he makes all her choices for her. Akira is really in the awkward position of being both a paternal figure and a boyfriend, branded a “father” to his creation by his mentor while at the same time associating Zero with his late mother even as he tries to “date” her, albeit in a curiously asexual way. It turns out that his mother’s AI coding contained several safeguards which effectively mean that Akira has total control over Zero and if she attempts to defy him, she automatically tries to strangle herself. When he begins to find her annoying because her desire to spend more time with him gets in the way of his research, he simply gets her an apartment and says he just wants to be friends.
Led into a quagmire of existential questioning both by Akira’s indifference and the probing of his friends, Zero begins to wonder who she really is and if she only “likes” Akira because he designed her that way. Though she desperately tries to get Akira back by being an even more perfect girlfriend, which is after all her life’s purpose, she begins trying to claim her identity by overcoming her programming, which is to say escaping his control to be her own self. Akira, meanwhile, finally realises that what he felt for her wasn’t “annoyance” but “love”, if only if still rooted in all the things she can do for him rather than an acceptance that what his friend meant was that falling in love had given him an eagerness for life through the mutual exchange of emotion, care, and support.
In any case, Zero’s actions take on a misogynistic quality as if Akira were, in a way, attacked by a “crazy girlfriend” who was only ever going to mess up his life because women always get in the way. The fact that the antagonist is also a woman who is jealous of his genius and a kind of rival to Zero further rams the idea home that women only cause trouble and are a threat to a man’s autonomy, even as Akira is still clearly overly attached to the memory of his late mother. The voice of reason is his wiser than her years friend Akane (Sora Amamiya), though even she at times seems jealous of Zero and shares many of the same outdated notions about what a woman should be. It’s almost as if Akira too is a construct who was only turned on yesterday which is why he has no idea about human feelings or how to interact with other people and is, in effect, learning them vicariously through Zero, who is mainly picking them up from Akane but getting a double dose of patriarchal programming that proves much harder to break than any of Akira’s code.
Make a Girl screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.
Trailer (no subtitles)
Windows on Worlds 