Manic pixie dream girl (MPDG) is a name given to a type of stock character in films. Film critic Nathan Rabin, who coined the phrase after seeing Kirsten Dunst in Elizabethtown, describes the MPDG as "that bubbly, shallow cinematic creature that exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures." MPDGs are usually static characters who have eccentric personality quirks and are unabashedly girlish. They invariably serve as the romantic interest for a (often brooding or depressed) leading male protagonist.

MPDGs are also called 'Amazing Girls' by Sadie of Jezebel.com, describing the type as "ideal muses whose beauty, sweetness and gentle, studied eccentricity renders them entirely docile." In 2005, before Rabin coined the MPDG term, JiJi Lee identified the same type and described in an article for The New Republic these characters' use in male protagonists' narratives. It has been suggested that the MPDG is, as defined so far, a distinctly American film character type; Rabin and others do not offer any European or Asian cinematic equivalent. However, many characters from European art-house cinema fit the criteria, including Paz Vega's character in Julio Medem's Sex and Lucia and Eva Green's character in Bertolucci's The Dreamers.

Though the MPDG is a relatively recent phenomenon, Rabin points to Katharine Hepburn's character in Bringing Up Baby as one of the earliest examples. However, English equivalents do exist; for example, Cassie Ainsworth in the E4 teen drama Skins.

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