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Manic Pixie Dream Girl
Misha wants you to tell her all about your boring and dreadful highschool life.

Okay, I didn't actually mean 'be different'. I just want silly and entertaining on command now and then.
-xkcd, Quirky Girls

Let's say you're a soulful, brooding male hero, living a sheltered, emotionless existence. If only someone — someone female — could come along and open your heart to the great, wondrous adventure of life...

Surprise! It's the Manic Pixie Dream Girl to the rescue!

A trope that has existed as long as there have been self-obsessed auteurs writing about self-obsessed losers, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl is stunningly attractive, high on life, full of wacky quirks and idiosyncrasies (generally including childlike playfulness and a tendency towards petty crime), and inexplicably obsessed with our stuffed-shirt hero, on whom she will focus her kuh-razy antics until he learns to live and love. She is distinguished by lacking any wants or motivations not directly related to the protagonist — a sort of Magical Negro for the loveless.

By the end of the story, she's either living out the rest of her kooky life with her newly happy loverman, or dead. Of course, such relationships seldom work out in the real world. While it is possible for her kookiness and his stability to balance each other out, she would most likely find him boring and he would tire of her nailing furniture to the ceiling and bailing her out of jail every other weekend.

May be featured as the Second Love, in order to break the character out of The Mourning After.

Coined by Nathan Rabin of The AV Club in his review of the film Elizabethtown, which features Kirsten Dunst playing this type of character, and further expanded on in their list of other famous Manic Pixie Dream Girls.

Often features a Manic Pixie Dream Girl Stare. Related to Magical Girlfriend, Cloudcuckoolander, Genki Girl, Perky Goth and Strange Girl. Compare Blithe Spirit. Contrast Yamato Nadeshiko and Yandere. Sometimes is a Sidekick Ex Machina.

Examples

Anime and Manga

Comic Books
  • Viciously deconstructed in the graphic novel Demo: A stressed-out businessman meets one of these girls. She encourages him to unwind and enjoys himself, as they meet over meals and he occasionally lends her money. Then one day he gets suspicious, breaks into her apartment... and finds an array of recording equipment. The reason she can say what he needs to hear is because she spies on him.
  • Harley Quinn/Harleen Quinzel of Batman mistakenly believes herself to be this to The Joker. Actually, she did mellow him out a bit, to the point where he didn't kill his own henchmen so often. Aww.
  • Ramona Flowers (come on, Ramona Flowers) of the Scott Pilgrim series. She's a little magical as well, but the whole series is Mundane Fantastic in nature, so it's okay.
    • She also highlights some of the issues with this character type, particularly her capricious nature.
  • Either played straight or subverted or something in Death: The High Cost of Living.
  • Penny Century ("Wotta name. Wotta phenomenon") from Love and Rockets.
  • Subverted/parodied in The Adventures of Johnny Bunko, whose title character accidentally summons a fairy to help him with his...career. The subversion comes in the fact that the fairy is highly practical, quite knowledgeable, and will not take crap from him or anyone.

Film
  • Katharine Hepburn as a scatter-brained heiress who loosens up Cary Grant in Bringing Up Baby.
  • Another Hepburn, Audrey, as Holly Golightly in the movie (but not the book) of Breakfast at Tiffany's. If she seems deeper than this onscreen... well, that's because Audrey Hepburn is a very, very good actress.
  • Zach Braff is a magnet for Manic Pixie Dream Girls. Some of the women who taught him how to love:
    • Natalie Portman in Garden State.
    • Heather Graham on Scrubs.
    • Rachel Bilson in The Last Kiss, who is something of a subversion in that he tires of her immaturity and returns to his wife.
  • Skipping the "stunningly attractive" requirement is the octogenarian Ruth Gordon as Maude in Harold And Maude, who teaches young Harold (Bud Cort) to get over himself and his obsession with death. And then she dies.
  • Young Winona Ryder heals Richard Gere's broken heart in Autumn in New York. And then she dies.
  • Charlize Theron changes Keanu Reeves's life forever in Sweet November. And then she dies.
  • Giselle from Enchanted, who has the excuse of being a fairy tale character. For his part, Robert helps her find some firmer ground.
  • Clementine in Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind is this type of character, though the relationship plays out more realistically. She even references the "you complete me" line, to her distaste, from Jerry Maguire.
    • She also Lampshades this to a certain degree, saying that Joel shouldn't expect her to "save" him, and that she's "just a fucked-up girl looking for her own peace of mind."
  • Juliette Lewis' character in What's Eating Gilbert Grape? may qualify as this.
  • Subverted with Enid from the movie version of Ghost World: told from the perspective of a sarcastic teen girl as she teaches Seymour, a shy, obsessive older man how to take chances and enjoy living; then she unexpectedly destroys his life in the process. Enid leaves to build her own life somewhere else. Seymour ends up in therapy.
  • Jordan in Real Genius lives somewhere between here and Cloudcuckooland. Although she's hardly the main motivator for Mitch's lightening up.
  • Ana from Stranger Than Fiction is a partial example — it isn't her who convinces the protagonist to start living life again, but rather the knowledge that he's a fictional character due to be Killed Off For Real.
  • The trailer for My Sassy Girl (I know, I know) shows Elisha Cuthbert playing a version of this. However, instead of simply being "quirky", it portrays her as being batshit insane. In that she may very well kill the protagonist for a lark. Of course, this troper is sure than upon its release the film shall subvert all expectations, win countless awards for its unprecedented originality and herald the dawning of a new golden age for romantic comedies. We sit expectantly for another noble troper to step in and update this entry when that occurs.
    • The original Korean movie subverts this trope, deconstructs it, and also plays it straight. Cuthbert-equivalent's character's "quirky antics" tend to have harmful consequences, but the protagonist falls for her anyway and she does indeed teach him to live and love. However, she definitely has issues and motivations unrelated to her man, and it turns out that she's been using him as a substitute for her dead fiancé, who was the protagonist's cousin. Things end up working out, but only after she (presumably) gets some help.
      • So it's Vertigo with a happy ending?
  • Goldie Hawn as "Gwen Phillips" in 1992's House Sitter, although a con artist and a pathological liar, plays this role for stick-in-the-mud Newton Davis (Steve Martin).
  • Judy Maxwell in What's Up, Doc?.
  • Jennifer Aniston's character Polly in Along Came Polly.
  • The title character of Amelie, even if she most definitely has a life apart from courting her Love Interest. Subverted in the fact that her neighbor has to tell her she's using her changing-people's-lives-for-the-better as a shell to not change hers before she realizes she has to take risks if she wants to break out of the trope.
  • Partially subverted in 1968's I Love You, Alice B. Toklas! Straitlaced Harold Fine, already feeling dissatisfied with life, encounters Nancy, the friend of his hippie little brother, and lets her spend the night at his apartment. As thanks, she makes him pot brownies, though he doesn't realize what they are until he's consumed them. Loosened up, he goes to thank her and they ultimately become lovers. Harold becomes a Runaway Groom to both be with Nancy and fully embrace the hippie lifestyle. After the initial bliss, the existence and his relationship with her proves unfulfilling and superficial. In the end, he chooses to Take A Third Option and find his own path to happiness alone.
  • Played with in Fight Club. Marla is grungy and nuts, and the Narrator initially hates her for screwing up his Support Group lies. But she keeps coming because she's in love with his alternate personality.
  • Little Miss Muffet (Shelly Duvall) is this in Mother Goose Rock'n'Rhyme, a star-studded Disney Channel movie from the early 90s. Driving backwards through the patchwork landscape, she teaches the only Only Sane Man in Mother Goose Land, Mother Goose's son Gordon Gander, to relax and enjoy life. He's so dull because he's literally incomplete — Gordon's rhyme had the word "orange" in it, and Mama Goose couldn't finish it.
  • Allison from the film Yes Man also fits this trope, though unusually, her love interest Carl also contains elements of the character type, having been dared to "live live to the full" by saying "yes" to everything.
  • Chungking Express, the beloved film from beloved Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-wai, features Faye the "California Dreamin'"-obsessed snack bar girl: to help a police officer get over his breakup with a flight attendant, she frequently breaks into (and floods) his apartment, switches the labels on all his canned foods, and rearranges his furniture. Eventually, he falls for her, but she stands him up and decides to "see the world" by becoming — yes — a flight attendant. But don't worry: everything works out okay.
  • The main character in May doesn't remotely fit this stereotype but the art school Bohemian type who meets her seems to think so. They shelve the movie in the Horror section, so you can gather things don't go well...
  • Played with by Happy-Go-Lucky. The main character is a free-spirited extreme optimist who starts taking driving lessons from an uptight, closed-off pessimist who develops a crush on her. Subverted in that she doesn't return the feelings, and stops the driving lessons so they won't see each other again after he lampshades this trope with a rant about how selfish it is - even if she ultimately doesn't fit the trope, no one could convince him differently.
  • The first half of the 1986 film Something Wild seems to be all about this trope when free-spirited Lulu (played by Melanie Griffith) sweeps into the life of Charles Driggs (Jeff Daniels) and "kidnaps" him for a weekend of unplanned adventure. However, the movie undergoes a wild Mood Whiplash when Lulu (whose real name is Audrey Hankel) and Charles encounter her violent ex-con ex-husband; by the end, Audrey/Lulu is as much changed by her time with Charles as Charles is.
  • Sam Rockwell plays the buddy-movie equivalent (a Manic Pixie Dream Guy, if you will) in Box of Moonlight. He wears a Davy Crockett costume and teaches John Turturro to love life; while there's no romance, there's certainly a lot of naked swimming.
  • Sandra Bullock in Forces of Nature. Subverted in that Ben Affleck goes back to his fiancee at the end.
  • Tom Hanks's character in Big, who actually is a child in an adult's body, is often something of a male example of this.
  • Rather surprised that while Elisha Cuthbert has been mentioned, The Girl Next Door has not. The eponymous character gets our hero, Matthew Kidman, off of his overachieving ass to loosen up and have some fun for once in his life.
  • FuckingÅmal had an interesting twist. It actually had a lesbian Manic Pixie Dream Girl.
  • And since we're talking about lesbians, Chasing Amy is a perfect example. Except it turned out that she wasn't so lesbian after all, which just goes to show how the Manic Pixie Dream Girl exists as a prop for the main character.
  • Gender-reversed in the Bollywood movie Kal Ho Naa Ho: Naina is an overstressed MBA student who doesn't believe in the power of love. Then wacky romantic Aman comes to her neighborhood and teaches her to enjoy life.
  • The whole point of the movie I Love You Man. Where Peter Klaven's repressed real estate agent is taught how to live life by the maniac pixie dream guy Sydney Fife.
  • Very darkly subverted in Martin Scorsese's black comedy After Hours. The MPDG the hero meets at the start turns out to be seriously disturbed and kills herself halfway through the movie.
  • Arguably Maria in The Sound Of Music, at least initially.
  • Catherine in Jules and Jim. Played with, considering that as compelling as she is, Catherine's joie-de-vivre seems to come out of sheer sociopathy. The questionable aspects of her behavior escalate until she kills herself and Jim by driving them off a bridge in her car, arguably out of sheer whimsy.
  • Annie Savoy in Bull Durham is sort of consciously a Manic Pixie Dream Girl. She really loves the Durham Bulls, and she knows so much about both baseball and the finer things in life that when she dates a player (she picks one per season) he has the best year of his career. She has a lot of fun with a bunch of strapping young men, helps the team improve at the same time, and makes no apologies for it.
  • Most definitely (descriptions of) "Regina George"'s runaway Southern girl in Whatever Works, especially considering the man she's influencing is ultimate misanthrope Larry David (they get married).

Literature
  • The title character of the Jerry Spinelli book Stargirl worked her magic on an entire high school. That also makes her a Blithe Spirit.
  • Daisy in Henry James' story Daisy Miller is the 1800s European aristocracy's version of the girlfriend from Planet Bizarro. And then she dies.
  • Hermine in Hesse's Der Steppenwolf.
  • Fenchurch in the later The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy books, although really she's probably the only woman on Earth weird enough fall in love with Arthur Dent. And then she vanishes into an error in space-time.
  • It might not count, but a character in one of the X-wing novels was once in love with an actress who played manic pixie dream girls, and was shocked to learn that she was married and had children. This comes to bear on his crush on a squadronmate, as he learns to accept that she's more than a pretty face.
  • Colleen Minou in Ron Koertge's Stoner and Spaz. Averted slightly in that while Colleen helps Ben, Ben is unable to help Colleen and she ends up back on drugs.
  • Arguably one of the oldest ones in the book. Eve is this for Adam in the first chapter of the Bible. Even does the petty crime thing...
  • Hazel Stone for Colin Campbell in Robert A Heinlein's The Cat Who Walks Through Walls. A variation from the type in that Hazel and Colin are both old enough to be grandparents, and Hazel is a secret agent deliberately sent on a mission to shake Colin out of a comfortably retired rut so her agency can make use of him. She starts out by essentially framing him for murder, so they have to leave his home and become fugitives together.
  • Alice from Twilight is SO a MPDG, to the point that she literally uses Bella as a doll, kisses anyone, sprints and dances instead of walks, etc.
  • Leslie from Bridge To Terebithia.

Live Action TV
  • Dharma And Greg. And once the first five minutes are over, this plot's been used up and they move on to... um...
  • Subverted on Dexter. Lila initially seems to have all the personality traits of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, and she latches onto Dexter, the main character, a forensic scientist who also happens to be an emotionless serial killer (who only kills people who really deserve it). As the series goes on, though, she starts showing the dark side of mania: her antics go from amusing to dangerous, and she stops being charming and starts being scary.
  • Brutally subverted on Arrested Development. Michael meets a quirky British woman whom he believes is a Manic Pixie Dream Girl but is actually mentally disabled. Her accent sounds so intelligent to Michael that he believes she voluntarily acts like a carefree six-year-old.
    • Maeby also serves as a Manic Pixie Dream Girl to George Michael to some extent, though played for laughs as GM is unbelievably strait-laced, and Maeby's actions go well beyond "quirky" and straight into "likely criminal." That and the fact that Maeby is kind of his cousin. Maybe.
  • In M*A*S*H, Winchester falls for a woman like this. She brings so much life into his existence. They're all set to make a go of it when she lets out that she's not a strong believer in marriage (and that her previous lover, of whom she talks in glowing terms, was never married to her). Winchester loses his chance at love, and not because his family would disapprove — though that's a consideration for him — but because he can't bring himself to accept this aspect of her.
  • Andy's girlfriend Kat in Weeds was a somewhat more hardcore version of this. She was much crazier than usual — he even told a story about how once she stabbed him because she thought he'd kicked her "spirit animal," although he hadn't figured out what that was. And he admitted that he didn't actually love her, and implied that he was still with her because she made life interesting.
  • Parodied/subverted/somethinged by Jennifer Aniston's character in the 30 Rock episode "The One with the Cast of Night Court", who ensnares powerful men like Jack Donaghy and, um, Scottie Pippen with her MPDG antics (designing bizarre hats, breaking into houses while wearing French maid outfits, singing inappropriately sexy renditions of "Happy Birthday to You", and frequently and emphatically "riding the F Train"). Everyone not currently sexing her up finds her completely insufferable.
  • Saffron seems to play this a bit with Malcolm in Firefly, at first. But we all know how that turned out.
  • Subverted on True Blood with Amy, who is homicidally crazy.
  • Subverted with Daphne on Heroes. Matt Parkman really, really wants her to be his Manic Pixie Dream Girl, but she steadfastly refuses to live into it.
    • Except not. By the time she gets killed Daphne is about as devoted to Parkman as he is to her. Of course, cue tragic death.
  • Phoebe in Friends seems to act as this to the rest of the group, as well as in most of her relationships. Notably, the group occasionally finds her actions annoying or intrusive, and in the 10th season, Phoebe admits that she has never been in a relationship which lasted more than a month. Occasionally, being an MPDG seems to actively work against her, such as the first time she was ready to move in with a man, and then broke up with him shortly after for shooting a bird. On another occasion, she ends a relationship because her boyfriend is even more of a Manic Pixie Dream Guy than she is, and she can't stand him.
    • You can't really blame her for breaking up with the bird-shooter, though. To add some context, this wasn't a guy who liked to go out hunting pheasants. This was an NYC cop who impulsively decided to use his gun on a bird that was annoying him by chirping during early morning hours. Use of deadly force on minor inconveniences = major red flag.
  • Frasier had one of these in the form of a Girl Of The Week, Caitlin the quirky artist, but the trope was subverted by having their relationship not work out because they shared no similarities - just very hot sex.

Music
  • The Dead Milkmen song Punk Rock Girl plays this trope enthusiastically straight, with a dweeby narrator describing a series of playfully violent encounters with an unnamed female other. "We got into her car, away we started rolling; I said how much you pay for this, she said nothing man it's stolen." "We went to the Village Pizza Company and ordered some hot tea; the waitress said no we only have it iced; so we jumped up on the table and shouted anarchy"
  • Tess from the song with the same name by Peter LeMarc is a classic example.

Theater
  • Deconstructed as far back as Ibsen's A Doll's House, in which the heroine Nora is a flighty, vivacious, kooky child-woman who gradually realizes that she's been so working so hard at playing this role for her more conventional husband — even through bearing him three children — that she has never really grown up and has no idea of her true self, and that their relationship is thus only a game, not adult love. She leaves him to try and learn how to be a fully formed human being.
    • Variants are present, or at least played with, in other plays of the same era. In August Strindberg's Miss Julie and arguably Ibsen's Hedda Gabler (the latter is a much darker variant, as Hedda is downright vicious at times), the titular characters at least resemble the type, but their free-spirited ways have severe consequences: both plays end with the title character's suicide. Or they're critiques of 19th Century gender roles. Your Mileage May Vary.
  • Rent is very fond of this trope. Mimi and Maureen are both MPDGs for brooding Roger and uptight Joanne, respectively. And then there's Angel, who acts as MPDG for the entire group as Collins is quite the free spirit himself.
  • Deconstructed, or at least subverted, in the musical Cabaret: Sally tries to be a Manic Pixie for Cliff, but her determined spunky optimism and unwillingness to grow up make her ignore the threat of Naziism and drive Cliff away from her.
    • She also sings "Stepping Out," which may as well be the theme song for this trope.

Video Games
  • Happens a lot in Baldurs Gate fanfic. One word: Xan.
  • Similarly, often used in Final Fantasy VII fanfic that pairs Vincent with Yuffie.
  • The titular character in the interactive fiction game Violet is a MPDG; she's the PC's quirky Australian girlfriend who has a limitless supply of pet names, makes gifts like origami trophies or custom snowglobes, is indefatigably supportive, and loves the PC despite the PC being a complete schmuck.
  • Super Robot Wars Excellen Browning, towards her boyfriend. Towards other people... slightly same, but different story.
  • Rinoa in Final Fantasy VIII has shades of this, but then again, while she has a quirky side, she's only really especially footloose and free when compared to the neurotic, emotionally repressed lead Squall. She's also told by the man himself to grow up and act more responsible.
  • Marta Lualdi of Tales Of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World. Perhaps not the typical MPDG in that there are some...rather important other concerns as well, but she seems to tie just about everything back to her unrequited crush on Emil.

Web Comics
  • The female character(s) from xkcd.
  • Blossom in Rhapsodies. This may or may not be literal.
  • In the rather obscure webcomic A Girl and Her Fed, said Girl is indeed manic, and said Fed is rather unsurprisingly a stuffed shirt. However, she didn't so much break him out of his funk so much as break him out of a brainwash given by the government agency that is now likely to kill them for it at some point, as the super intelligent koala pointed out. Also, her antics were kept under control in the past by the ghost of Benjamin Franklin. It's that kind of comic.
  • Subverted in Shortpacked!, where Robin's attempts at this usually do just wind up annoying the hell out of Ethan, Amber, and whoever else she might decide to latch onto.
  • Missi from Misfile. Of course, this puts her directly between Ash and her canon love interest, leading to Missi catching a lot of flak from some fans.
    • It probably helps that she's really rather irritating at times.
  • Several male characters in Ghastly's Ghastly Comic initially thought that Freddie would be this for them. Surprise!
    • The series also has the appropriately named Kwerki, a Cloud Cuckoolander who acts like she's looking for someone to play this role for. In her more lucid moments.
  • This Sex, Drugs, and June Cleaver◊ strip does something with the trope, with Bree (the comic's author) imagining herself in this role.
  • Nils in Platinum Grit. Though honestly, Given all the weirdness in Jeremy's life, it's actually up to the other girl, Kate, to be the inverse of a MPDG and pull him back to reality.

Web Original
  • Amy in John Dies At The End became this for David. He initially avoided her because she was strange and he figured his life was weird enough, but after she became important to the plot, the single night he spent protecting her made it clear that they complemented each other very well, and she ended up being the only girl mentioned in the book he actually loved rather than lusted after.

Western Animation
  • Dory in Finding Nemo, although a romantic relationship with Marlin isn't suggested. (They are different species, after all. And woe betide Dory should she ever forget that she's physically incapable of surviving a visit to Marlin's house...)
    • She does, however, teach him to love in a paternal way: the creators of the film stated on the DVD's audio commentary that she was meant to be a surrogate child figure for Marlin while he tried to find his own son.

Real Life
  • Kari Ferrell, the Hipster Grifter. Cute, funny, supercool girl approaches guy for sexual innuendo, partying and intense conversation. Mentions that she's broke and dying of cancer. Scams the guy for everything he's got and skips town. Ouch.

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