Rascal Does Not Dream Of Bunny Girl Senpai: When Quantum Mechanics Collide with the Familiar
Disclaimer: This review will include *SPOILERS* so read at your own risk.
Let’s start this review with a little thought experiment, just for fun: imagine that you’ve never watched a single episode of this show and all you have to go on from is its title and this poster above you. What kind of show would you think it’d be?
Now, if you were able to remove yourself from all your retrospective biases and all your thoughts of oh, but that’s not representative of what Bunny Girl Senpai is about at all!, then these are among the conclusions that you might have come up with:
- It’s a show based entirely around fanservice
- It’s a show made to target people with very specific fetishes
- It’s a show with no real substance
At the time of writing this, over one and a half years since its initial release (and countless discussions held about it in that time frame), you probably already know that looks can be deceiving in anime and that Bunny Girl Senpai is certainly no exception.
Bunny Girl Senpai tells the story of Sakuta Azusagawa, a teenage boy who has a chance encounter with teenage actress Mai Sakurajima inside a library. However, there are two odd things about this meeting: firstly, she’s wearing a bunny girl costume; and secondly, no one seems to be able to notice her except for him.
Our protagonist befriends her and later learns the cause of her invisible status, a phenomenon that he labels “Adolescence Syndrome”. Adolescence Syndrome, as it turns out, is a condition that arises from one’s subconscious cognitive dissonance, the psychological effects of which manifest differently in each person as a set of supernatural phenomena. Furthermore, the symptoms of said syndrome become increasingly prominent as the conflict in one’s psyche intensifies, making the condition (in my opinion) truly well-suited for its age demographic.
Sakuta manages to help Mai overcome her deep-seated insecurities, enabling her to overcome her Adolescence Syndrome and so enables her to become visible to the world once again. From that point forward, Sakuta meets a series of girls, one after the other, who all have their own version of Adolescence Syndrome and it becomes his job to aid all of them in overcoming their own psychological problems. As a result, the show adheres (approximately) to a general formulaic pattern: introduce a new girl with Adolescence Syndrome, Sakuta meets her and helps her complete her character arc, the next girl is introduced, etc.
Essentially, it’s a show about a woefully inexperienced psychotherapist (and I do mean that in the loosest of terms) who goes around administering therapy to female patients by hanging out with them, and everyone also happens to be a teenager.
Jokes aside, Bunny Girl Senpai is a show that centres very heavily around its characters and the relationships that they have with each other and the world around them. Due to the nature of the show, you can bet that dialogue is a large component of the story too, which is a large reason why many people (myself included) like to compare it to the Monogatari series (the other reason being the essentially identical plot structure to Bakemonogatari).
Through its characters, Bunny Girl Senpai takes pieces of the adolescent experience, like exploring one’s identity and dealing with feelings of inferiority, and gives form to them using these supernatural events. These events — whether it’s becoming invisible, manifesting a clone, or forcing time to reset in a Groundhog-esque manner — become sort-of metaphors for the struggles of adolescence that we’re all familiar with, which enables the show to be entertaining and easy to digest while still being able to capture complex emotions that people can resonate with. For that reason, from my point of view, the biggest strength of Bunny Girl Senpai lies in its ability to tell its viewers things that they knew all along but never quite knew how to put into words.
And so indeed, despite the somewhat risqué promotional poster and the questionable title, Bunny Girl Senpai has very little to do with bunny girls at all, and the bunny girl costume that appears in the first episode rarely ever makes an appearance in later episodes. One could say this show is “clickbait”, although that usually involves being tricked into consuming something that is much worse than advertised; in this case, it’s like the show is tricking hormonal teenagers into accidentally watching something that is introspective and meaningful.
At the beginning of this review, I made a few unfair remarks about Bunny Girl Senpai in an attempt to make a point, so I think it’s only fair that I end it now with something that more accurately reflects the essence of the show, something that conveys a little more of why exactly it has been so universally loved by adolescents and non-adolescents alike. I leave you, dear reader, with a quote, the message of which I hope will stick with you even if nothing else from this review will:
