Anime Review: Sono Bisque Doll wa Koi wo Suru

This is one of those times where I’m on the last week of an anime season and I see tons of people talking about a show that I didn’t pick up. So, temptation got the better of me and I picked up Sono Bisque Doll wa Koi wo Suru (My Dress-Up Darling). It even came recommended to me by a fellow Outerhaven member figuring that I would enjoy it since it was a cute romance series. Well, I marathoned the first 11 episodes just in time for the final episode to drop… which happened the same day as this review! Did this show live up to all of the hype?

Let’s go!

DISCLAIMER: THIS REVIEW WILL CONTAIN SPOILERS
–PLEASE WATCH THE SHOW BEFORE READING THIS REVIEW-

The Story

My Dress-Up Darling’s story is one that is easily explained.

Gojo visited his grandfather’s hina doll shop one day and instantly fell in love with what he saw. It was right then and there that he decided to pursue his grandfather’s footsteps and make hina dolls. In fact, he became so infatuated with it, that’s all he ever worked on. Things were going great until this girl sees him working on one and thinks it’s gross that he plays with dolls. This sets the stage for his social awkwardness. He feels that as long as he has the hina dolls, he doesn’t need anything else.

One day, their sewing machine breaks so he uses the home economics room at school since they don’t have a club and it’s completely empty. There, he bumps into Marin, one of the most popular girls in school after she, quite literally, bumped into him earlier in the classroom. Thinking that his hobby got exposed and he’s about to meet social doom, Marin explodes with infatuation over the fact that he knows how to make clothing. She opens up about how she secretly wants to be a cosplayer and asks him for help. After she sees the head of a hina doll and thinks it’s beautiful, he accepts her offer!

The rest is history, as they say. As you can guess, the show is about Gojo being Marin’s personal cosplay clothier, seamster, whatever you want to call it. It goes a little beyond that, though. After seeing how much effort Gojo put into her first outfit, and all of the things that he did for her, Marin begins to realize that she has feelings for Gojo. In fact, she flat out admits that she’s in love with him (to herself, of course). This sets the stage for the big hook of the series until we reach the end which I will get to in Final Thoughts.

The Characters

Wakana Gojo

As outlined above, Gojo is a socially awkward high schooler (who looks like he’s in his 20s, btw) who wishes to dedicate his life to making hina dolls alongside his grandfather. Once he gets involved with Marin, he’s calm when he needs to design outfits for her, but a nervous wreck at every other step of the way. You would think that as the series went on, he would gain some confidence and that twitchy nuance of him would subside or disappear… but it doesn’t. This caused me to find Gojo rather annoying. I get that he didn’t have much of a life in terms of interacting with others but when you have someone as outgoing as Marin leading you every step of the way, there had to be SOME development there and while there is a slow realization that he may like her, it’s mainly about making her happy all while learning to make clothing better.

Gojo was a pretty poor main character in that regard. Sticking to nuances is fine but when nothing changes throughout the series and you run with the same gag over and over and over again of him just sweating nervously and stuttering, it gets old fast. I was begging for him to grow some sort of spine around Marin but it never came. It seemed that all Gojo was good for was making clothes for people and that made him pretty stale about 6 episodes in when others seemingly took advantage of his clothes-making skills, too.

Marin Kitagawa

Many called her the star of the show and she was. Marin is very outgoing and doesn’t really care all that much about embarrassing herself. She had no problem stripping down to her underwear so that Gojo could measure her nor does she press the brakes whenever she decides to tease him. She’s a tomboy to the core but she has her girly moments. You see some of that brashness subside a little after she realizes her feelings for Gojo but at the same time, whenever she thinks about him, she goes into a whole “I WUV HIM! I WUV HIM” mental monologue filled with excitement. This, right here, sets the stage for the payoff at the end of the show and raises your expectations that their feelings for one another will become known.

Marin was a fun character. She was first depicted as Miss Popularity; however, as it is stated in the show, you can’t see it on the outside but everyone has a lot going on inside of themselves. Marin wanting to be a cosplayer and living her dream of becoming her favorite characters, along with her feelings comprised who she really was… something that she kept hidden from her friends (who magically disappeared from the show after the first couple of episodes!). All of her mannerisms accentuated her personality and brought her character to life… even if she stole some facial expressions from Nagatoro-san.

I noticed a few Nagatoro sly-like faces in there; however, they were out of place as some of the dialogue she said while making that face didn’t match the expression. At times, I felt that they just threw it in for the sake of doing it. Be that as it may, she truly was the star of the show and without her, this show would have been nothing. Like… at all.

Shinju Inui

Shinju is another cosplayer that goes by the online name Juju. She has a ton of followers and ended up seeing Marin’s cosplay at the event she went to. She followed Gojo home like a stalker and decided to blackmail him into making her a cosplay outfit after a classic ecchi misunderstanding. Shinju is a generic tsundere character who is sharp with her tongue but ends up being wrong about her assumptions when it comes to Marin and her cosplaying. She begrudgingly accepts Marin and Gojo along on a cosplay shoot figuring that she can save money by splitting the cost of renting a studio three ways.

After the costumes are made, we get introduced to Shinju’s taller, “larger,” yet, younger sister Sajuna who is the person to take all of Shinju’s photos. As you would guess, she wants to cosplay, too, so Gojo helps her out. After the shoot, Sajuna and Shinju just disappear into thin air making me wonder why they were there, to begin with, outside of stretching the content of the series so it could reach 12 episodes.

I didn’t really care for either character. Shinju was just your generic tsundere that didn’t really have many redeeming qualities about her. Sajuna was just your typical soft-spoken, meek, and timid sister that didn’t really add much personality or variety to the show. Needless to say, I felt the show could have been better off without them.

Art, Animation, and Sound

CloverWorks handled the production of the show and this was your typical run-of-the-mill art and animation series until the final episode when the overused trope of fireworks came into play and it became clear where they decided to spend their budget. Marin and Gojo as main characters stood out and while most of the show wasn’t anything to write home about in terms of art, transforming Marin into her different characters was pretty well done. I do like a lot of the attention to detail that the show put into her outfits as well as Gojo’s sketches. In that regard, it was a little odd to see some good detail in certain aspects, and in others, they just seemed to phone it in… such as the minimal animation used depicting Marin bouncing up and down on a bed in Episode 11…

Being a slice-of-life show, the soundtrack also wasn’t much to write home about but it did accentuate the scenes and helped drive the right emotions when it needed to. Outside of that, it was just background music that I don’t think is worthy enough to go out and purchase when the eventual CD drops.

Overall Thoughts

Okay… I’m probably going to get some flak from all of the people who were in love with this show but… I actually disliked My Dress-Up Darling.

Yep. I said it.

The first four episodes were FANTASTIC. They set the stage, made me get invested in the characters, and set up an incredible love story as a girl slowly falls in love with a boy who becomes her personal cosplay tailor. Seeing her happy after working himself to death on her first cosplay and her realizing the hardship he went through to make it was the perfect catalyst to set off their romance.

And then the show introduced Shinju and it all went downhill from there. They pulled away from the core aspect of the show and tried to add more characters to “spice things up.” Normally, I would agree with this approach but that’s when a show blows its load in the first episode and needs something to save itself from mediocrity. In this show’s case, it blew its load over the first four episodes and did so where it created such a strong base to build on that additional characters weren’t needed to save it.

Had this show completely focused on Marin and Gojo growing closer together through cosplay, it would have been a chef’s kiss perfect but, instead, we were given a filler arc in the middle of a 12-episode series where Gojo made some cosplays for characters that disappeared after the arc was over! Once the arc was over, it jumped right back to where the show SHOULD have focused on… Marin and Gojo.

Then… there was the ending. I’m sorry but I am completely sick and tired of non-committal endings in romance anime. I really am.

Muttering, “I love you, Gojo” into a phone after he fell asleep is not conclusive. After the 12th episode is said and done with, they’re not a couple. Gojo doesn’t know her true feelings. By muttering that line, it’s left up to interpretation on whether or not they get together off-camera later on down the line. After everything that was done to build up to that moment… all of Marin’s internal feelings, the fact that she fully realizes that she loves him, the development of Gojo’s feelings, the fact that they ALMOST HAD SEX in episode 11….

All for nothing.

Seriously, why does Japan have such a hard time pulling the trigger in a series like this!? Is it really that hard for Marin or Gojo to just confess to each other? To share a simple kiss?

They even busted out the festival and fireworks trope and completely dropped the ball there. (Actually, I’m happy they did that because it’s so overplayed that it’s cringe at this point). Still… that non-committal ending irks me every single time!

They wasted development time on throwaway characters and couldn’t even officially ship them in the end. What started off with a bang ended in a silent whimper filled with disappointment.

However, let’s not skewer this show too much… there were some bright moments. Mainly, all of the comedy spots throughout the series. From Shinju freaking out and coming unplugged when Gojo held her hands, to Hawk-kun stealing a hamburger and stalking them for French fries, there were plenty of episodes that entertained me and made me laugh. If there is one thing this show did right was that it nailed the com in the rom-com genre label. I just wish it didn’t fail in the rom portion of it. A hot start is one thing but failing to finish it out is a cardinal sin in romance.

The only way this review ages like milk is if there’s a season two that completely proves me wrong… and for as entertaining as this show was… I want it to prove me wrong.