I’m sure I could find Miss Monochrome acceptable were it not for the voice of Miss Monochrome herself. The premise of a robot idol trying to make her way to the top of the idol industry, despite her lack of experience, backing, or sense of realism, is a funny enough way to broach the idol genre from a comedic outsider perspective. Some of the details like her disinterest in color are more bizarre and less interesting, while others like having a catch phrase or an established idol to catch up to add a sense of enjoyment and grounding to the story. Her constant need for batteries and having a Roomba for a best friend poke in occasionally to remind us that she is indeed a robot—the other tell being the elephant in the room I mentioned before—but for all her idiosyncrasies we get a real human idol whenever we see her work hard at a convenience store to scrape together the funds for her idol career, or self-promote on the sidewalks on Christmas Eve.
Her convenience store boss and manager Maneo, cleverly named for his job indeed, brings plenty of enthusiasm with both his support for Miss Monochrome’s career and as the humble straight man to her ridiculous delusions. There are some other side characters that come in for a few gags, such as the scheming opportunist Mana who cheats them out of nineteen billion yen, although thankfully there seems to be no real sense of finances or monetary urgency in this universe. The gags get a bit tiresome at times, not venturing past a fairly safe line of high-tension back-and-forth, and as her story moves forward it can be disheartening to see the jokes going nowhere. But they can be amusing enough with a fresh coat of paint every few episodes, and at the length of a short movie in total split into eight minute parts there was no real need for them to go overboard anyway.
And all of this would be good, but inevitably we return to her voice. Horie Yui as a vocaloid is actually quite nice, with perhaps more nuance than Hatsune Miku often has, or perhaps that’s just in how the producers have used it. The singing bits are fine, typical vocaloid with the budget and minds of an animation company behind them, and even with the attempt to make the songs generic as part of the Monochrome character they can be quite catchy. But I have seen no better proof that vocaloids were never meant to speak. They were never meant to speak for five minutes an episode, or thirteen episodes straight. It is an assault on our ears. Grating, painful, and completely dominating to the point where no other voices can hang in the air once she opens her mouth. It feels low to recommend against a perfectly alright show just on the basis of a single character, and doubly so when it only has to do with her voice. But for all its good points, my favorite moments of Miss Monochrome were when her mouth was shut, which may not be the angle an idol is normally going for.