The summer 2020 anime season’s surprise hit Uzaki-chan Wants to Hang Out is all about how a loner college student named Sakurai gets his life turned upside down by his energetic kouhai Uzaki. Uzaki is a classic “manic pixie dream girl” – a term coined in 2007 by film critic Nathan Rabin that refers to boisterous female characters whose only purpose in the story is to give a sad-sack male protagonist a new lease on life through wacky antics and bright smiles. One of the most prominent anime examples in recent memory is, of course, Haruhi from The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya.