I may not be the most hardcore otaku out there, but I've seen more than my share of anime. I've seen and enjoyed shows containing boys who transform into girls when splashed with water, jets that transform into robots, jealous half-slime princesses, and even mecha series that are extended psycho-religious allegories.

But I never expected a story about a guy and his foot-tall French maid robot! Either animators in Japan are running out of ideas for shows, or the producers of this series took one too many hits from a crack pipe.

I DEFINITELY didn't expect it to be so damn good!

Hand Maid May is silly, goofy, sweet, entertaining, and just plain fun. Yeah, okay, so the concept of a bevy of unusal babes surrounding and adoring a single nebbishy guy isn't unusual (especially for Pioneer... they've made entire cottage industry out of the Tenchi series), all the freaky and/or unoriginal elements in this series gel remarkably well.

Our erstwhile hero, Kazuya Saotome, is an electrical engineering student at a local college. His hobbies are programming, building robot squid, and blushing madly every time his landlady's daughter (who bears a frightening resemblance to Urara from Sakura Diaries) slips through his room's window to talk to him (and I swear these bits were stolen from Clarissa Explains It All!). He also has a rival, a bizarre hyperactive mental case named Nanbara who's richer, smarter, better looking, and much more clever than Kazuya... at least, according to Nanbara. One day, the jealous Nanbara's plot for revenge results in Kazuya getting a package from Cyberdyne Corporation.

Luckily for Kazuya, THIS Cyberdyne Corporation doesn't make Terminators. They're still in the robotics biz, though, and so Kazuya takes delivery of May, a pint-sized "cyberdoll" with a French maid's outfit, a desire to please, and a recharge port in a very intimate place. This being a sweet-and-funny type of anime, and not the hentai type, the details of May's recharging are left to the imagination of the viewer (though there are plenty of bouncing breasts and panty shots - especially from the aforementioned landlady's daughter, who's apparently allergic to bras - there's little nudity and no sex here).

Instead, Hand Maid May focuses on the travails of both living with a sentient mechanical French maid only twelve inches tall, and BEING the aforementioned sentient mechanical French maid only twelve inches tall. Because while May is adorably sweet and eager to please, she's physically incapable of doing much in the way of cleaning up around her master's apartment. Kazuya spends more time helping her with her tasks than she helps him, doing things like building a little hand pump for the carton of milk to aid her in pouring him a glass. This makes May feel a bit depressed and useless, and it adds a depth to her character that would be totally lacking if this anime had her be a full-sized mindless sex doll or something.

For his part, Kazuya has to contend with keeping May a secret from the public at large, making her feel wanted and useful (because he's your archetypal nice guy), and fending off the Customer Service agents of Cyberdyne Corporation. Customer Service agents? Yes... seems as though little May isn't free. She's got a $1,400,000 price tag attached to her, and naturally the dirt-poor college student Kazuya has a snowball's chance in hell of paying. Cyberdyne's chief agent on the scene is the ramen-addicted Sara, a blockheaded psycho with dark skin, an outrageous figure, a Chinese dress, and the usual comedy-anime-villain's slapstick incompetence. Case in point: she makes the mistake of teaming up with Nanbara, who wants the obviously highly-advanced robot May for his own nefarious, ego-stroking purposes.

And so, the four episodes on this disc are a series of ever more outrageous attempts by Cyberdyne, Sara, and Nanbara to remove May from Kazuya's possession. Their plans usually involve "recall units", other (albeit full-sized) cyberdolls programmed to get May back. Kazuya being an average-nice-guy type cast in the mold of Tenchi Masaki, naturally each of these additional cyberdolls fall prey to his warmhearted charms, abandon their missions, and move in with him. Amusingly, these new robot girls aren't just sex-toy types either: one is a little girl named Rena (who moves in with the landlady's daughter - Kazuya may be in love with a foot-tall French maid android, but even HE draws the line somewhere!), and the other is a shy, smart, bespectacled young woman named Kei (designed to appeal to Kazuya's "sister complex", according to Sara and Nanbara) with an IQ of 50,000 and a desire to understand just what it is about Kazuya that is making everyone from May to herself fall in love with him.

The animation in this series is bright and cheerful, fitting the lightweight bubble-gum tone of the plot (such as it is) perfectly. The characters are all appealingly cute, and even the fanservice moments are more humorous than prurient. The dubbing is fantastic, with the English voices for May and Nanbara especially being dead-on accurate to the original Japanese voice actors. This shouldn't be surprising, since the cast is populated with the likes of Wendee Lee and Lia Sargent, veterans of the brilliant Gundam, Cowboy Bebop, and Big O dubs from Bandai that are currently running on Cartoon Network.

I can't give Hand Maid May a perfect score, however, because of two big flaws. First of all, the plot is as harmless and cutsey as a teddy bear. The self-awareness and acknowledgement of this genre's cliches is nice, but the cliches are still there. I have hope that Hand Maid May will transcend its Tenchi-clone roots, but for right now the "new stuff" vs. "recycled stuff" balance is not in its favor. And second, the DVD itself is annoying. Maybe it's my player (admittedly, a nonstandard model), but I was forced to go through an ostensibly-clever "quiz" about Nanbara before I even got to the main menu. And even there, I kept getting strange memory error messages whenever I tried to view half the extras included on the disc (which were pretty sparse in the first place). Ah, well. At least the sound and video quality are good.

Overall, if you can get past the freaky-deaky concept and the almost-hentai-but-not-quite moments in the actual series, Hand Maid May is an excellent anime. It's the perfect chaser to a heavier series like Evangelion or even Escaflowne. It's nothing but a sugary good time, harmlessly cute and yet spiced with enough auto-subversive elements to appeal to even cynical, seen-it-all anime fans like myself. It's not gonna revolutionize the world of animation, but it ought to put a smile on your face.