Look, this was not a title that gave me high hopes. But I read a description and thought, hey, maybe I’ll give it a shot.

This was…weird. And often charming. There are fantastic elements, but it’s not really a fantasy. Maybe closer to magic realism, the kind of setting where everything is almost the same as normal, but there are just a few weird things.

Obviously, the first weird thing is the upperclassman (the bunny girl senpai of the title) who notices that increasingly, people don’t realize she exists. And she decides the best way to test that this is actually happening is to dress up like a Playboy bunny and head to the library.

I liked Mai (senpai) and Sakuta. Among all the characters but especially these two, there’s often snappy dialogue, and both of them are masters of delivering it with deadpan expressions. That dialogue is what pushed the show into “this is good” territory for me. They’re not resigned, but they approach (or talk about) a lot of the events with an air of slightly snarky acceptance.

There were times I wondered if I was missing context that might’ve made more sense to a Japanese person. For example, one of the themes is about how the status quo affects people. Mai keeps herself apart from people at school, and at one point they theorize that she’s becoming forgotten and invisible because that’s just what people are used to…so it’s becoming more literal in the wider world. Other characters also have their own status quo/passive peer pressure problems that start to have more tangible effects.

Obviously I understood what was said in the show, and understand that Japanese culture is much more group-oriented than American culture, but I wonder if there were tones to things that were more understandable if you’ve lived in that culture. (Whereas I’m sitting on the couch yelling at a 15-year-old to just tell your friends that you’re out and will be unavailable for a couple hours I SWEAR your friendship is not contingent on you answering texts within 45 seconds.)

Also, I greatly enjoyed the very accurate portrayal of cats.

Verdict

English dub? No

Visuals: Standard for modern anime (this is from 2018). Notice in the gifs that everyone has black or brown hair–this isn’t a brightly-colored fantasy world, it’s supposed to be a school/life story with some fantastic elements, and it conveys that pretty well.

Worth watching? I think so, I definitely enjoyed it, plus it’s only 12 episodes.