The Fall Anime 2025 Preview Guide - Mechanical Marie

Arthur Zetes is the no-nonsense heir to his corporation-owning father's fortune, a human-hating high school student whose emotional growth has been stunted by the near-constant attempts on his life from assassins hired by other family members. They're jealous of his chosen status, despite his origins as an illegitimate child. Sixteen-year-old Marie Evans is an expressionless, championship-winning martial arts prodigy hired to masquerade as Arthur's new "automaton" maid and bodyguard. While she begins to fall for her master, and he for his supposedly mechanical servant, it's a shame she can't reveal the truth of her humanity, because he harbors a murderous hatred of liars.

Mechanical Marie is on a manga series by Aki Akimoto. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Sundays.

Mechanical Marie is in a sticky situation. How much of the introductory material from the manga should it adapt? The series started out as a one-shot, so surely that changes the approach the anime ought to take, right? So should it go for faithful, panel-by-panel? Or should it just jump right in? The answer they seem to have settled on is a little bit of both, and I'm not fully sold on this decision, mostly because I think it would have been helpful to have the scene where Roy scouts Marie in the first place in terms of grounding the story.

Still, this is a fun episode. The basic conceit is that Arthur Zetes has become a raging misanthrope because he's been treated so badly by other people…mostly his older brother Maynard, who actively resents Arthur's existence. But Arthur needs a good bodyguard (and apparently a trustworthy maid), so Roy enlists the aid of Marie, a sixteen-year-old martial arts champion with a seriously flat affect. Marie is to pretend she's a robomaid so that Arthur will accept her help, but what are they to do when Marie and Arthur begin falling for each other?

It's cute, but it would all work much better if this episode had spent more time showing us Marie and Arthur actually interacting with each other. Instead the moments they spend together feel perfunctory, with very little going to promote any sort of warmer feelings developing. They're just sort of in the same room, talking occasionally, for most of the episode. There are a couple of moments where they save each other, such as when Marie chases down a kidnapper and rescues Arthur from a burning building and when Arthur stands up for Marie at school, but none of them feel anything more than plot points. There's no real emotion behind either scene, although in the case of the fire, it's clear that they're trying. By this point in the manga, I was rooting for them to get together. In this episode, I'm just sort of watching things happen to them.

That's not to say that this is devoid of charm. There are some great moments where Marie inadvertently proves her robot bona fides, cracking the world's creepiest smile or having hard thighs. Roy always looks one step away from freaking out and admitting everything, albeit in a stoic sort of way, and the scene where Arthur and Maynard have an entire conversation in internal monologues is fun. If this can settle down and maybe slow the pace a bit, it could be good. As it is, I'd have to recommend reading the manga over watching the show.

When I first saw the trailer for Mechanical Marie, the only detail that struck me as just a teensy bit corny was the fact that Marie's love interest, Arthur, is such a misanthrope that he only trusts “cold, inanimate objects.” It felt like an over-the-top personality quirk to justify the whole gimmick of Marie needing to pretend to be a robot. This premiere sold me on the bit, though, once I realized that Arthur's personality defects come from the fact that he is constantly dodging assassination attempts left and right, all day, every day. Now that's just funny. Almost as funny as Marie having to shove her face full of delicately sliced sandwich triangles whenever Arthur is in the shower, lest she blow her cover.

From top to bottom, Mechanical Marie is just a very cute and charming show. It radiates personality in every scene, thanks to its amusing characters and genuinely funny jokes. It's not quite as Looney Tunes as something like Kaguya-sama: Love is War, but it definitely shares some of that show's DNA. I loved the gag in the scene where Arthur and his step-brother Maynard are having a war of false pleasantries, and even Arthur's retainer has to marvel at the ferocity of their equally combative inner-monologues. Another great comic touch are the heavily stylized are the genuinely quite gorgeous “postcard memory” freeze-frame shots (one of my favorite running gags for an anime to fall back on).

Of course, being a romantic comedy, Mechanical Marie lives and dies on the chemistry shared by its two leads, and this is where the show most resoundingly succeeds, I think. Arthur is a paranoid rich boy, sure, but he's also an adorably enthusiastic dork when he lets his guard down. Marie also shares the same personality dichotomy; she is forced to act robotic and stoic in order to save her job (and probably her life), but the show is constantly reminding us that she feels a lot of emotions that are constantly threatening to bubble to the surface. Funnily enough, I think the whole product is a generally more successful take on the same exact dynamic shared by the leads of Inexpressive Kashiwada and Expressive Oota. Obviously, the key difference in quality comes from Mechanical Marie being the more imaginative and energetic story, with a pair of leads that I'm seriously happy to root for. I enjoyed every second of Mechanical Marie's first episode, and I can't wait to see more of it.