Anime Spotlight #44: Rascal Does Not Dream Of Bunny Girl Senpai

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

Rascally Animeister.

Happy Easter AniMonday, Ticketholders!

And please don't sue me, Warner Bros.!

Animeister's Note: I originally composed this review during my posting hiatus in January, months before I changed to only doing the call to action at the end of each post, and most importantly for the intro you are about to read, months before the announcement that HBO MAX (now just called MAX, and I'm not going to allow them the dignity of linking to the service here because that dignity is undeserved) had scrubbed all Looney Tunes content from their platform and that David Zaslav was going to have the legendary Termite Terrace building (where WB animation got its start) torn down. In my heart, this is the same, spiny, hemorrhagic species of doom I felt when Blockbuster Video went out of business, when Chris Cornell and Chester Bennington and Jason David Frank and Kevin Conroy died. When...my little, green bird-bro died.

When things that defined our personalities and tastes and memories and the way we live our fucking lives are suddenly and soullessly taken from their integral places in our continued existence, who are any of us anymore, really? Why must the inevitability of decay and the counterintuitive need for wealth cost the world its little joys? What the fuck is wrong with us‽

*Deep, shuddering breath....*

I miss when I was being dry and sarcastic and didn't know that a South African Nazi and a rich, senile asshole were ruining American infrastructure to distract us from their planned invasion of Greenland, so even though I know it reads badly in the present time, I desperately want to get back to January.

Can I dream a little now? Please‽

Although, the Anime I'm shedding a Spotlight on today beat me to the "legally distinct 'Wascally Wabbit'" thing by at least six years, so I think I'll be fine. Not so much for the Warner conglomerate themselves, though, if they let the animation license lapse on their most iconic character and Bugs Bunny slips into public domain because of David Zaslav's stance on the profitability of animated media that doesn't have James Gunn behind it.

So screw American animation; this is the Anime Spotlight! And because it's Easter and I made reference to rascals and rabbits (and there's a post title and a thumbnail to be observed and remembered), you probably know the anime I'm going to talk about today.

But first, it doesn't take a quantum physics expert to remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, comment at the bottom of this post, help out my ad revenue as you read so I don't come down with a pre-geriatric case of Puberty Syndrome, and follow me on BlueSky, Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my content. In this digital age, it's the surest way to prevent me from being forgotten and fading out of existence.

Though not sporting the lengthiest title I've ever seen, 2018's Rascal Does Not Dream Of Bunny Girl Senpai is a thirteen episode anime adaptation of the first third of the Rascal (literal Japanese translation: Teenage Pig) Does Not Dream light novel-turned-manga series (as is the typical print media model in Japan) written by Hajime Kamoshida (writer of The Pet Girl Of Sakurasou, Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans, and their anime adaptation scripts, among a handful of other, less known light novels, anime, and manga). The animation is handled by Clover Works, whose massive library of anime is a mixed bag of extremes that bears rummaging through because when they're good, you get stuff like The Elusive Samurai, Shadows' House, and Spy x Family, and even when they get saddled with trash projects like Wonder Egg Priority, Darling In the FRANXX (a collaboration with Studio Trigger), and that second season of The Promised Neverland that fans don't want to admit ever got adapted, they still paint that literal shit gold.

As of last year, I have broken my long-standing dub-only rule for two things: the Date A Live movies and Dragon Ball DAIMA, so I have been waiting six years for the dub of Rascal Does Not Dream Of Bunny Girl Senpai, and I can tell you that it was worth the wait.

It might not be action-heavy like a majority of the...works that Clover have handled, but the effort and quality are clear in the fact that crowd scenes, vehicle motion, and establishing shots in Bunny Girl are hand-drawn, whereas the norm in the modern era is to animate such ambitious sequences with computer-generated models or leave the crowds static or low on detail. So I knew from the first few scenes that I was in for something special.

Of course, the story didn't disappoint, either. The titular Rascal is Sakuta Azusagawa, an ordinary high school boy who finds himself as the protagonist in a supernatural romantic dramedy when he notices something strange wandering around his school's library, that being the titular Bunny Girl, semi-retired child actress and upperclassman Mai Sakurajima, whose celebrity status and withdrawal from fame have rendered her unobservable (and eventually completely forgotten except by Sakuta) by the world around her, hence the pair's first meeting where she is wearing a Playboy Bunny-like costume to screw with people and find out if they will even acknowledge her presence.

Said quantum invisibility is termed as a kind of Puberty Syndrome (a real-world hormonal condition that results in physical changes like premature or stunted growth of adult features, gender dysmorphia, and associated psychological and/or behavioral changes that may have been thought to have a supernatural cause in the times before conventional wisdom and medicine), though because Japanese fiction, things go far beyond the norm of reality here.

Sakuta himself has "Puberty Syndrome" issues to contend with, such as his agoraphobic, amnesiac sister, Kaede, who loves pandas, speaks in the third person, and gets psychosomatic bruises when she's stressed, and the mysterious wound on Sakuta's chest that he sustained prior to the series beginning. There's mention of him allegedly hospitalizing three people, and his wound is hinted to be tied to Kaede's condition, but the anime doesn't provide any answers.

In addition to helping Mai exist again and developing a strained but real and sweet romantic relationship with her when she starts acting again, Sakuta encounters a revolving door of other quantum psychosomatic victims, including his de-aged childhood friend (or is she?), two jealous sisters who morph into each other, a girl whose inability to cope with her romantic feelings traps him in a time loop because they kicked each other in the ass once, and Rio Futaba, a convenient expert in theoretical quantum physics who splits in two because she also has Japanese romantic feelings, just for Sakuta's best friend this time.

Thankfully, though the series doesn't put a bow on all of its mysteries, neither does it degenerate into "Sakuta has five girlfriends now because he's kind and boring" territory. With the exception of Mai, all of the other girls he helps overcome their respective quantum conditions either already have their sights set on another guy or are content to just be his friends.

There are the odd handful of lewd jokes on Sakuta's part, and the series makes a running gag of Kaede thinking he's a playboy because of all the girls he brings over when they're in trouble, but Rascal Does Not Dream Of Bunny Girl Senpai never stoops to being harem trash because it doesn't need to.

Also, I don't usually like Japanese chick rock music because of the breathy, sugar-pitched vocals and generic instrumentation, but the OP ("Kimi No Sei" by The Peggies) is now on my Anime Bangers playlist.

I hope to be able to do an update on this series for Christmas (assuming the release schedule lines up for Rascal Does Not Dream Of Santa Claus this year), but first, it's time to look at the three canon movies that I just learned about while researching for this review, starting with Rascal Does Not Dream Of A Dreaming Girl.

Despite being the first movie, Dreaming Girl is the only of the three to not be dubbed in English, and while watching a dialogue-heavy, feature-length anime film with subtitles wasn't a deal-breaker for me, it is odd that it hasn't been dubbed despite releasing a year after Bunny Girl.

That isn't to say it's without its problems, though.

Clover Works still handles the animation (and continued to do so for the next two films and the upcoming Santa Claus season), but uses cheap, stock-looking CGI models for most of the vehicle motion, making this a minor but obvious step down in quality from the series (which is the opposite of how a movie continuation or adaptation of an anime should feel). As it is a continuation of Bunny Girl, the Dreaming Girl movie seems poorly paced, like it would have been served better as a three-episode arc than an hour-thirty film. And finally, its story wraps up the series' unresolved mysteries with some of the most cliché, poorly thought out, hand-wavy, and Japraved time travel I've ever been exposed to.

See, the titular Dreaming Girl is Shoko Makinohara (the aforementioned, de-aged childhood friend-or-is she?), a middle school student who "grows up from time to time" (except that's a lie because of reasons I will get into shortly) after getting Puberty Syndrome because she's dying of a heart condition and doesn't see the point of filling out her end-of-term future plans assignment.

Except...this doesn't make her age up and back, it creates an entirely separate Shoko from a future where she doesn't die from her heart disease. Can you guess why Future Shoko lived? It becomes so obvious and ends up being so bullshit that I no longer care if I spoil it, so here goes....

That scar on Sakuta's chest that looks nothing like a surgical scar and everything like he somehow survived being gored by Hugh Jackman actually is a surgical scar because the child Shoko who showed up to his apartment with an adopted cat may or may not also be the Shoko who's in the hospital Sakuta takes Kaede to for routine checkups on her Puberty Syndrome recovery, leading Sakuta to apply for a donor card offscreen so that when Future Shoko shows up to get Sakuta to cheat on Mai with her and guilt-trip him into a fake wedding before she saves his life and erases herself, he distractedly runs into oncoming traffic and gets hit by a car that he would have easily avoided if young Shoko hadn't distracted him by warning him about the car he could see coming at him, and he's dead so his heart goes to Shoko, except that because Sakuta and Mai know this is going to happen, Mai ends up pushing him out of the way and dying instead, so now she's Shoko's donor, so because Future Shoko is still around and she knows how to time travel, she sends Sakuta back in time to convince his past self to keep either of them from dying so that young Shoko will die without a donor heart, and Sakuta won't have a scar from two of his heart existing in the same timeline. But because this isn't happy enough, Shoko decides to travel back in time and finish her class assignment when she dies because the heart condition was her real Puberty Syndrome all along or something.... But Sakuta still has her cat?

On top of the time travel making Goku Black levels of nonsense, Rascal Does Not Dream Of A Dreaming Girl ruins the tasteful, thought-provoking, grounded appeal of the Bunny Girl series by hinging its story (and the resolution of the series' biggest unresolved mystery) on a child falling in love with, manipulating, and causing the temporary death of, a high school student because she was unwilling to commit to a Schrodinger's future, and then killed herself with time travel so she could complete a homework assignment. I'm tempering my feelings about this turn of events because at least the use of Japanese honorifics (Shoko-san for the future version and Shoko-chan for the young version) made the story easier to follow than an English dub probably would have been, and there's a cute meta reference in the end about Mai getting cast as Shoko in an in-universe version of the movie. But my ability to think makes me fucking hate Dreaming Girl with a passion of quantum intensity.

After the long, convoluted mess that was Dreaming Girl, I was pleasantly surprised by how normal Rascal Does Not Dream Of A Sister Venturing Out was.

As can be gleaned from the title and poster, Sister Venturing Out focuses on Sakuta's little sister, Kaede, who continues her battle with agoraphobia following the return of her original memories and personality at the end of the series.

I prefer this version of Kaede because she doesn't try to shove loli/brocon jokes into every episode, and the shift in her personality is a powerful indicator of character growth and maturity through juxtaposition.

Aside from the opening dream sequence where Sakuta encounters a younger version of Mai (and I get confused into thinking I clicked on Knapsack Kid by mistake), Sister Venturing Out is a simple, hour-long story about moving forward, being yourself regardless of how you think others perceive you, and giving life everything you have because family loves you no matter what. And in the country that invented karoshi and "the nail that sticks out gets hammered down," and is in the top four countries rife for "become a doctor/lawyer with a 6.0 GPA or you are dead to this family" jokes, that's quite the extranormative moral for a special-length theatrical anime release to have.

Basically, Kaede tries to live up to what she thinks Sakuta wants her to do because she read her other self's amnesia diary, and her efforts to enroll at his school are causing her Puberty Syndrome bruises to flare up again. So after much heartwarming, family and friends chemistry with Mai and Sakuta helping her study for entrance exams (which Kaede is unable to finish because of her aforementioned bruises and panic attacks), she gets into Sakuta's school by virtue of a quota shortage because a random, toxic social media campaign scared away half of the applicants.

But because Sakuta is a cool, supportive onii-chan, he gets her a meeting with one of the idols from "Sweet Bullet" (a group that Mai's half-sister is part of), whom he saw in an admissions video for an online school. Kaede turns down being a charity admit as a result and chooses the online school instead, making friends with the idol girl and patching things up with her old classmate from grade school. There isn't really an indication if Kaede's Puberty Syndrome is cured in the process, but this open ending gives the audience the opportunity to draw their own logical conclusions based on how the series has mostly worked so far, rather than tightening things up with contrived hand-waving like the previous movie did.

The animation is once again less good, using more CGI vehicles and featuring a walking sequence with such poor cell alignment that watching the characters jitter and glitch every other frame made my eyes combust, as well as a few dialogue-heavy moments where the characters' lip flaps barely flap, but the crowd animation and Sweet Bullet's performance near the end were hand-drawn to Bunny Girl standards.

Entertainment-wise, Sister Venturing Out feels longer than Dreaming Girl, despite being half an hour shorter. I still like its story and message better, but it takes too long to get where it's going.

Perhaps the reason for the second film's drop in pacing and quality is that it was announced concurrently with the third and the two films were released roughly six months apart in 2023, hinting at a doubled workload and division of human resources (like what happened with Volume Nine of RWBY and the DC crossover movies).

Whatever the case, Rascal Does Not Dream Of A Knapsack Kid picks up where the previous movie's post-credits scene left off, with Sakuta encountering a child version of Mai on the beach like he did in his dream from the beginning of Sister Venturing Out (hence my earlier confusion).

But despite hints that this might be a child actor morphed into a cinematic ideal of Mai by Puberty Syndrome, she (or more properly, it) serves only as a plot device to help Sakuta through his own case of quantum conflict.

Some time has passed such that Kaede is graduating from her online school and Mrs. Azusagawa is close to being discharged from the hospital following a psychotic break she suffered due to Kaede's Puberty amnesia. When Sakuta and Kaede go to visit their mother, he comes to notice a new scar and realizes the next day that no one is aware of him.

After a detour to another universe where Kaede never got Puberty Syndrome from being bullied so their family didn't split up, Sakuta has the young Mai return him to his universe, where he ensures that the real Mai can see and remember him (she has a marriage certificate they filled out together as a joke earlier in the movie, because pretend marriages can fix the fabric of reality in these things, I guess), and she helps him come to grips with the fact that he has become an adult (no, not like that; aside from Dreaming Girl, this isn't that kind of franchise, you hentai) so that he can swallow his awkward feelings of family estrangement and visit his mother in earnest, making him visible again and making me choke on a ball of emotion, mucus, and saline for five minutes straight because the feels are real with this one.

Seriously, just like wanting to follow your own path doesn't make you a disgrace to your family, growing up doesn't mean you don't love or need your family anymore, nor that they don't need you or never did. Don't get to the point where you can't give back to your family for everything they've done to make you who you are...like I have.

*Deep breath....*

Anyway, Knapsack Kid is paced very similarly to Sister Venturing Out, and has a similar runtime and composition, down to the post-credits scene that sets up the next part of the story (Rascal Does Not Dream Of Santa Claus), probably because they were worked on at around the same time and released in the same year. But it's clear that Knapsack Kid is the superior of the three movies, as its animation received greater attention (no stuttering walk cycles), there's a more relatable emotional element to the story and its resolution, and the post-credits scene fixes an issue I had with Dreaming Girl's plot resolution.

Shoko Makinohara visits Sakuta at work and they talk about how Mai's movie inspired a boom in organ donor applications (so Shoko lived because she got a heart transplant, not because of convenient happy ending time travel bullshit...entirely), how Shoko has multiverse brain (so she has the memories of every version of herself, including the two older ones with romantic feelings for Sakuta, which is gross even if she "waits three years," no matter what Abbot and Costello have to say on the subject), and most importantly for later this year, how a pop idol named Touko Kirishima (whom Sakuta's Variant from the perfect universe tells him to "figure out your relationship with" in a note when he gets back) doesn't exist in most of the timelines she remembers. Yeah, the young Mai thing is wasted as a multiverse taxi service (unless that, too, gets addressed in material I haven't seen or read yet), and Shoko continues to introduce questionable relationship dynamics into the Rascal story at large, but Knapsack Kid is my favorite movie in the franchise.

I hope you're all having a happy Easter today, and that you please remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, comment at the bottom of this post, help out my ad revenue as you read so I don't come down with a pre-geriatric case of Puberty Syndrome, and follow me on BlueSky, Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my content. In this digital age, it's the surest way to prevent me from being forgotten and fading out of existence.

Animeister,

Dreams Of Being A Debt-Free Senpai.