I Dream of Mimi (Buttobi CPU)

I Dream of Mimi, originally known as Buttobi CPU, is ecchi comedy. But it's not hentai! You can tell because it has a name cast and an OP. Although it was animated by Pink Pineapple, which is some sort of hentai studio. It's like a ninety minute exercise in ambiguousity.

Basically, this anime is about a student who buys a computer - but instead of a hard drive and monitor he gets a naked woman! Naturally, he curses his bad luck. When the computer starts to fellate him in order to register itself, he starts crying. When he discovers that to keep it at optimum performance, the computer must be "serviced" every three days, he's more than a little concerned. So this guy, Akira, is the classic anime character who fears women and has a girl who has secretly loved him for as long as she can remember. It's unclear how he comes to know the computer as "Mimi", but that becomes her name. Go with it.

What would otherwise be fairly standard romance comedy fare is kicked up by the erotically charged nerd atmosphere. Creatively (and perversely) placed expansion slots? Virii that make girls giggly and uninhibited? American computers that store 1000 terabytes of memory in their enormous breasts? It's all here. Each episode is slightly different. The first is the one in which Akira meets Mimi and recoils in horror when he realises that he has to have sex with his computer. The second is the one in which Mimi must register her details as a Columbian exchange student online, dealing with the government protection agencies and fighting off the evil American Nacintosh sisters. The third is about the truly evil of the sisters, the ultra evil Nacintosh Performa who can't even see the use of old computers.
There's apparently some morals in here somewhere. Just because you have to have sex with your computer to keep her working doesn't mean you can abuse her - because after all, computers are people too! Or something. I don't know. The reason that all of the computer women like Akira is because he's not a bastard like so many of their "masters". He's actually fairly well adjusted, because he thinks that sharing bodily fluids with computers is a bit icky, and he doesn't believe in master/slave relationships.

There's not really a lot to be said about this: the character designs are cute most of the time, if a little misshapen, the OP song is by turns catchy and annoying as all get out and the vocal cast is actually quite high profile. Konishi Hiroko turns in another of her tragically cute performances as Shimada and Mitsuishi Kotono speaks hilariously bad Japanese as the Quadra Nacintosh sister. The themes of "ownership" and "individuality" lurk in the background, but this isn't serious enough to really cover the abused computer situation in any depth. Although it's anime about intercourse with computer women, it's not in anyway graphic. Nothing beyond nipples are shown, and overall it's less than you're likely to see from titles such as Aika or Golden Boy.

I Dream of Mimi is light and funny anime about computers built by the crude (as opposed to crudely built). It's fun, but there's always going to be something creepy about pro(gram)creating with computers. This could be conveyed as an alternate lifestyle, and ends with one of the most literal examples of "harem" anime ever produced. Recommended for folks who have great interest in their own CPUs - even boasting laughs for Mac lovers and haters alike.