Akira is a nerdish young male who's just blown 98,000 yen on his very first PC. Upon returning home, his excitement becomes horror when he discovers that instead of a grey metal box he's bought a naked girl. Tch, the poor lamb. Well, in fairness he'd been saving up for three years and had only been able to afford this one at a knock-down price from a dodgy backstreet dealer. He's even more shocked when the girl proves to be a 2198 AX bio-computer that needs his "active molecules" to register him as a user and then run memory upgrades. That would be his sperm. One blowjob later, poor Akira is bemoaning his lost youth and little realising how complicated his life is about to become.
That's right, it's hentai. Fortunately there's a spectrum of such things and Buttobi CPU is downright classy by the standards of the genre. It's only softcore porn, with the sex scenes being nothing you couldn't see in mainstream anime. You won't see so much as a hint of a penis. It also has good art, interesting characters and a plot, all of which are a pleasant surprise in hentai. You'd think that looking good would be a prerequisite for pornography, but unfortunately when it comes to animation that's expensive. Unusually by hentai standards, Buttobi CPU appears to have had a decent budget.
It's even good enough to have had a 17-certificate R1 DVD release, under the title I Dream of Mimi. I thought it was great! Not as pornography, mind you. As porn it's mostly rubbish. However if you don't mind nudity it's a really good show, with comedy that's actually funny and two sweet lead characters.
Akira is another Japanese nice-guy loser boy, as innocent as the day he was born and horrified by Mimi's unique user requirements. "Insert more active molecules!" insists Mimi. "WAAAAAAAAH!" cries poor Akira. You almost feel sorry for him. Meanwhile Mimi is as cute as a button and endearingly dedicated to her master. She gets so crestfallen when she doesn't have enough memory to complete an operation or access an upgrade disc. Oddly she's sexier when she's not naked.
The show even dabbles in character depth and poignancy! Mimi knows she's just hardware, programmed to imprint on whoever opens her box. Somehow that sounds really dirty. Anyway, she's aware that she struck lucky with Akira. A less considerate master could have exploited her in disturbing ways, which the first episode illustrates in a way I hadn't expected. Admittedly that's just one scene in what's otherwise a light-hearted comedy, but 'twas surprisingly moving.
The actual sex is hilarious. Mimi puts on her chipper-but-determined "This Is Very Important" face, Akira freaks out and has to be browbeaten into it... until, yes, they do it and the audience falls about laughing. We even enter parody territory in the last two episodes with the "Apple Nacintosh" sisters, agents of the evil American computer industry. Can our Japanese heroes foil their wicked schemes?
I'd have to worry about anyone who found the show arousing. There's some lesbian fondling in episode three (Nacintosh girls have strange computer hacking techniques) but nothing else that registers on the porn-o-meter. Lots of naked breasts, but they're cartoon breasts. Big deal. The only difference between these nude scenes and those in more mainstream fare is that here we get more of them. You could probably find more actual perversion in the anime children's section.
I was about to compare this to a Carry On movie, but it's better than that. It's funnier and more charming, though it's not above resorting to Carry On style situation gags. The first episode is actually touching. The other two are sillier, but perhaps even funnier. Great stuff!
