Shinku in her case
Sakurada Jun is a disturbed junior high-school boy who never goes to school beacuse he is unable to socialise with his class-mates. Instead he stays in his room all day, ordering “weird” or “cursed” items over the internet. He lives with his more normal sister, Sakurada Nori. Their parents are absent. (This is quite common in anime, probably because it saves the trouble of having to draw them).
One day Jun takes delivery of a weird doll, which is not just weird, it’s alive and thinks Jun is its servant! Jun’s life gets more disturbed as he is drawn into the world of the Rozen dolls and their sinister “Alice Game”.
Soon Jun has three of the dolls in his house and is drawn into the life-threatening “Alice Game” battles.
This is quite a good anime and if you ever found life-like dolls a but creepy it’s definitely for you. Jun’s relationship with the bad-attitude doll Shinku gradually becomes more complex. Consists of “Rozen Maiden” and “Rozen Maiden Traumend” – the latter is another 12 eps of the same, but with different credit sequence. The whole TV series is now licenced in the US by Geneon. It’s not without humour, for instance the characters quarrel childishly about cakes, and watch a TV puppet detective show in almost every episode.