There’s potential in the concept of Make a Girl. Not only that, the film’s mere existence is exciting, a part of a growing new frontier in anime production that is beginning to bear fruit, setting the industry into an unknown, exciting new frontier. The problem is that Make a Girl is simply not very good.
As we previously discussed, Gensho Yasuda is an interesting person, standing alongside the likes of Hurray! Team with A Few Moments of Cheers as creatives able to make a non-traditional move into the animation industry by building an audience in independent animation. From there, they can gain the trust to work with those in the fields of feature film production to bring their work beyond the internet and the small screen to the largest audience possible.
This is the path taken by Make a Girl, Yasuda's feature debut anime. It started as the short film that put him on the map, setting off a journey that gained him millions in social media followers with unique short-form animations on YouTube and TikTok. With a captive audience and an idea, he could convince Kadokawa to let him make a film of his own.
The problems seep right into the concept driving the film. Akira is a young boy with a genius mind, an inventor after his deceased mother struggling to create something new. Inspired by his friend’s conversation about how having a girlfriend empowers him to move forward, he gets the idea that making one of his own will finally help him pass this barrier. So he does just this. He makes a girl to love him.
Beyond the fact that no one sees the world-altering implications in creating life from nothing, of greater issue are the ways in which Zero, the robot life which Akira spawns, is viewed in the eyes of her creator and the film as a whole.
Subservient is the best way to describe Zero’s place in this world, and of course she is. She was created to be in love with Akira, and her role is to simply act entirely for his sake. After her creation she goes to school with Akira, learns to live with the desire of making him happy, without the free will or independence to go beyond it. Meanwhile he is focused on himself, and without a change to his abilities, simply throws her aside to live on her own. It’s a move that leaves her confused, because she doesn’t know life outside of this.
You could say he has the capacity to learn. The film sure wants to frame it in this light. Yet this only further reveals the issues at the core of this premise.
Akira is a fundamentally dislikable character, unable to empathize with characters and unable to grow. Even if his invention comes from a bad place a journey of self-discovery is one that can allow him to not only see the mistakes but try and correct them in his own efforts to grow both as a person and an inventor. He doesn’t just want to grow as an inventor, he wants to understand his mother and the love she gave and how she was able to create.
There’s no journey of learning and change to be seen here, however. After tossing Zero aside the film’s ‘villain’ reveals itself as an alter to Akira, another inventor unable to move out of Akira’s mother’s shadow and as a result tries to steal the inventions of Akira and his mother to try and understand more. What should be an attempt to understand why pushing Zero away gave the opportunity to see things from a new perspective instead gets lost in a violent action climax that feels disconnected from the more humorous work that came before it.
No lesson is learned here. Indeed, if anything, the way this film defines the love of family and partners and those around us as the dust settles is veneurative of the idea that a woman’s worth is defined by the men around them. For all it is impressive for one man to use his talent to create art, bring on board others to help him, eventually earning the trust of a major studio to bring his work to the finish line, this isn’t it.
Despite clocking in at just 90 minutes the film feels meandering. More notably, scenes appear unusually isolated from one another, ironically appearing less like a complete story and more a collection of individual scenes plucked from the director’s social media catalogue. Yasuda’s TikToks engage because you can at-a-glance understand a character and enjoy a contained skit within a single sequence, but you can’t simply create 90 one-minute shorts and call that a movie.
Cinema is not a TikTok, and in many sequences Make a Girl feels like it’s been ripped from the app’s vertically-scrolling theme without adaptation. If you were to imagine a stereotype using all the cues necessary to portray that scene without context in a minute, it’s here, as though forgetting it exists as part of a larger story. They’re textbook definition of what a sad or happy scene is devoid of context, rather than considering how Akira or Zero or anyone else in this story would feel in that moment.
The end result feels like you asked 20 people to write 20 scenes and just put them together as-is without trying to connect them. The whole film feels shockingly disorganized to the point you can imagine your finger swiping across the screen, projecting what you should feel without actually experiencing it beyond its shallow surface.
At its best, its a series of disconnected shorts lacking the hand of a writer or connective tissue to feel like a story and not a collection of shorts the director is most known at creating presented as one. At its worst, its dogged with sexist views that it not only condones but emboldens, seemingly to the point where the reason Akira doesn’t grow by the end of the film is because those developing the film haven’t yet themselves learned that lesson either.
While the existence of the fim is noteworthy, the result is not. I’m sure this won’t be the last time we see an indie creator jump into directing their own feature, and based on recent efforts and the exciting world of indie animation I’m looking forward to seeing the results. Just maybe give this one a miss.
