Bunny Drop

30 year old Daikichi Kawachi is living the dream... Well, maybe not, but he’s living on his own terms. As a lifelong bachelor, he’s dedicated himself to his job, and his free time to drinking, smoking and complaining about his job. He hasn’t bothered to keep in touch with his family, but when his elderly grandfather passes away, well, certain family obligations override hedonism. It’s at his grandfather’s funeral that he meets a shy, mysterious blonde child named Rin, whom he soon finds out was his grandfather’s bastard child, a shameful family secret that nobody else at the wake wants anything to do with. An outcast himself, Daikichi sympathizes with the poor girl, and when the word ‘orphanage’ comes up, he takes a stand, volunteering to take her in himself. This one act of kindness, in defiance of all conventional logic, would change both of their lives forever. Will little Rin’s new guardian be the unlikely ideal parent, or has Daikichi just gotten way over his head on a foolish whim? It doesn’t matter now, because he’s made his choice, and all they have is each other.

Bunny Drop is not your standard anime. It doesn’t fall into any conventional genre categories, at least not once you look below the surface. It’s not some action spectacle, or a some wacky gag comedy, but what’s even stranger is that I don’t think it fully qualifies as a slice of life title either, so you’d have to imagine that any animation studio picking it up would have to think a little outside the box in terms of style and presentation. Luckily, Bunny Drop is a Studio IG title, and while directing duties were spread out across seven different people... No, I did not stutter, and you can kinda tell if you pay attention to the level of detail in the background from episode to episode... There clearly was a unifying vision. The direction is very low-key and non-intrusive, you never feel like the visuals are trying to distract you from anything, and this gives the material a lot of room to breathe. Keeping in line with this, there isn’t a drop of fanservice on display... No beach or pool episodes, one or two tastefully shot bath scenes... You occasionally see Daikichi in his underwear, but even that is always played for laughs.

The animation budget looks surprisingly high, given just how little a money an anime like this one could realistically survive on, but rather than feeling over-animated, every cent they had went into character animation, and while there’s no real action to show off how smooth everyone’s movement is, the characters also never feel stifled or awkward. Even the best looking anime will occasionally default to key frames with moving lip flaps, and go lengthy periods without blinking, but Bunny Drop doesn’t resort to any of that. It captures even the subtlest of facial movements, offering them all a wide range of expression. I’m generally pretty good at picking out areas where a producer might have cut a couple corners to preserve money in the budget, even when it’s done extremely carefully, but I didn’t notice a single instance of that in Bunny Drop. Character movements feel graceful, energetic and completely unhindered from start to finish. Character designs skew mostly towards the norm, its cast of Japanese characters sporting dark hair and realistic proportions, facial structures that sometimes feel reminiscent of JC Staff, and highly elaborate backgrounds that feel both worn down and inviting.

The only exception is Rin herself, the only blonde in a sea of brunettes, although I’m sure that’s an artistic exaggeration of the slightly lighter brown hair some Japanese people have. Her hairstyle is unique, but not over-the-top or moe, and while she does have large bright eyes and an occasional blush, her cutest expressions are probably the ones she sports when she gets annoyed or upset, where she scrunches her face into scribbles like an angry Peanuts character. The music is almost your generic slice of life background score, but with much softer instrumentation, full of comfortable piano and violin. It’s the right kind of music for a slower, more relaxed story, and while it doesn’t really sound like anything special out of context, it meshes with the series nicely, especially during emotional high points. There’s no dub, but Ayu Matsuura was a legitimate child when she voiced Rin, and as this wasn’t her first role, she did have genuine talent. A lot of the charm of the series depends on her sincere delivery. Hiroshi Tsuchida also does a strong job as an inexperienced but well-meaning oaf doing his best to adjust to the unexpected turns his life is taking, and his warmth towards Rin feels absolutely genuine.

If there’s one thing that’s true of pretty much every form of media, it’s that a good child character is incredibly hard to find. This is largely due to the fact that the people writing them are usually not children themselves, and by that point in their lives they’re only familiar with children from, at best, a parent's perspective. But even if they do understand kids on an accurate level, accuracy might not always be the intention of their work. There are instances of child characters and even the actors who portray them being sexualized, sometimes in obvious fashion(see basically any lolicon anime) or on a more subtle and subtextual level. Even when presented in purely innocent fashion, however, child characters can still be written with the intention of manipulating the audience... Either to invoke a rosy, saccharine sentimentality, or to bash the viewer over the head with some kind of deliberate tragedy porn where they’re presented as the sweetest little moe mascot ever just to be killed off to the tune of her father/guardian’s man-tears.

Personally, I see all of these routes as being entirely cynical and disingenuous, but it is possible to swing too hard in the other direction as well. If you were to present a 100% accurate child character, it would be very difficult for the audience to like them, because for all intents and purposes, children are more or less sociopaths. If you think back hard enough, I’ll bet you anything you did SOMETHING as a kid that was so heinous, it would instantly get a sitcom about your life cancelled, as the only defense you can make for yourself is that you didn’t know any better at the time. Life isn’t like a sitcom, where kids can be reasoned with, adults are endlessly patient and understanding, and every major issue can be resolved in thirty minutes or less. You can’t just leave a toddler home all day and expect them to behave perfectly without getting lonely, only able to kill time by coloring and taking unaccompanied walks around the neighborhood. And yet, nobody wants to see a yelling, screaming nightmarish brat never receiving their comeuppance.

The best thing about Bunny Drop, and it’s biggest selling point by far, is that it presents you with a child character who is written in a perfectly balanced way. Not perfect herself, mind you, just perfectly balanced. When we meet Rin, she is immediately sympathetic. She was born into an unfair situation that she has no control over, she’s being treated as more of an inconvenience than a person, and she faces this reality in a shy and quiet way that subtly suggests depression... That she’s already tried to get some kind of love and affection from the family she’s been left to, and her efforts have been rejected on no unclear terms. This all becomes clear when, after Daikichi takes her in, she starts to come out of her shell and reveal her true personality... She’s bright, sociable, and naive to some aspects of the world, but she still occasionally shows signs that she never completely got over the trauma of her elderly father passing away, suggesting abandonment issues that Daikichi thankfully picks up on.

I won’t lie and say she isn’t at least a little idealized, as she’s more friendly and well adjusted than most kids in her position would be, but it’s never to the point where it feels unbelievable, and she has just enough negative qualities to not come off as a Mary-Sue. She can be bratty sometimes. She can be impatient sometimes. She can be insecure and dishonest, but you never resent her for it. This isn’t one of those weird stories where half the joke is how the child is so impossibly mature and precocious that they wind up parenting their own parents. There’s an episode where she gets sick and has to take nasty medicine, and I can’t count the number of anime children who would be like “It’s okay, I’ll take it, I know you’re doing your best...” But no, like a normal fucking kid, she won’t touch that shit unless you make it taste better. Same, sister, same. Also like a normal kid, she has a strange imagination that leads her to make up games and activities that nobody else would understand. Again, there is an element of idealization... She is impossibly cute, after all... But it never feels like she’s being sold to you on any level.

Another thing that this anime does a great job of balancing is conflict. You may remember last year, I compared Bunny Drop to Listen to me Girls I am Your Father, and since they begin in similar fashion, I feel compelled to revisit that comparison now. Both stories revolve around a single male protagonist adopting children who are in a dire situation, and there are a few key details that work better in Bunny Drop’s favor. Not only does Rin’s situation feel a lot less forced, making it feel more emotionally resonant, but Daikichi is bringing one small child into a relatively spacey house, rather than cramming three girls into a tiny apartment with him. But most important of all is where the conflict goes from here. One of my main criticisms with Listen to Me was that outside of the previous family drama, the cast’s living situation was devoid of conflict, despite four people living in a tiny space. To be completely fair, there isn’t a lot of conflict between Rin and Daikichi either... At no point does either act irrationally and turn on the other, there are no forced misunderstandings to create tension... But there are still some small, day to day squabbles, and ultimately, Bunny Drop takes the same approach as Kotoura-san, relegating all of the serious drama to the first episode and spending the rest of the series on recovery and growth.

Where Listen to Me spent most of its time using a thin facade of sweetness to blatantly sexualize its minor characters and ship-bait them with their guardian, Bunny Drop focuses on building a strong, realistic bond between Rin and Daikichi, which stays completely innocent and sincere throughout. And sure, when you hear that Daikichi was a hedonistic bachelor who takes in a little girl and had to become a single parent, it may give you flashbacks to Ben Affleck exploding at a small child in Jersey Girl, but Daikichi has two small advantages here. First, he takes Rin in when she’s six, and he never had to experience her infancy or her proverbial terrible twos. Second, unlike a lot of fictional characters stuck in the same situation, Daikichi had a choice, and goes into the changes in his life with an open mind. He gives up smoking and cuts back on drinking, and he takes a less lucrative position at work for more reasonable hours, and through it all, he never shows any resentment towards Rin at all. He worries about his own abilities, and if he’s making a mistake, but with Rin, he’s never anything but warm, caring and as responsible as he knows how to be.

Hell, Rin even manages to bring Daikichi’s estarange family together, despite them being on kind of cold terms at the beginning, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg in regards to how much these two characters improve each other’s lives. This isn’t a story with high stakes... As I alluded earlier, the only part of the series that you could consider a climax is when Rin catches a mysterious illness... And there’s no real driving tension or forced conflict to shake things up. The plot of the story is Daikichi’s evolution as a parent, and you spend the series rooting for him to be the best legal guardian he can, because he and Rin are both just so impossibly charming together, and you have no doubt how much they care about each other, and you want them to have the best lives together that they can so they can keep giving you that warm and fuzzy feeling. It’s one of the simplest stories I’ve ever seen, and yet it’s every bit as engaging as the most exciting sci-fi epics. Bunny Drop aims to be nothing less than heart-warming, and it pulls this off with flying colors, making it something of a masterpiece in its own right... Or it would be, if it weren’t for the ending.

So this part of the review is going to get into some very mild spoilers, and while I am going to paint with extremely broad strokes, this is going to be kind of an unavoidable topic. Still, if you're looking to go into this series completely blind, I won't fault you for skipping the next few paragraphs. To put it in the vaguest terms possible, the anime has an open ending... It’s not so much a cliffhanger, as it is an emotional send-off regarding the future of these two characters. It’s by no means the worst non-ending in the world, but it does create a very unique problem. You’ve heard the term ‘a read the manga type ending’ before, right? Some anime do tend to conclude prematurely, which is considered acceptable by studios in such cases as the anime was created to advertise its source material. When it comes to Bunny Drop, however, this is where everything goes wrong.

For those who know what I’m talking about, you may also be aware that, generally speaking, there is an unwritten rule among most Bunny Drop fans... If you know someone who is about to get into the series, then you have to choose to either warn them about the ending and prepare them for what they may find if they choose to venture further, or somehow convince them that the manga doesn’t exist. The actual ending to the story, as originally presented in the source material, is indescribably terrible. Learning about it in any way, whether by reading the manga yourself or hearing about it from an outside source, is the definition of cursed knowledge. This isn’t like some bad story arc that you can improve your experience by skipping... It’s a lot more insidious than that, and when you hear that the original manga author had that ending in mind from the beginning, it retroactively takes something that was previously wholesome, and turns it into something sinister.

To illustrate the exact gravity of this, remember Stephen King’s It? You know that one scene that’s exclusive to the book that everybody talks about? Nobody was talking about it in 2014. A Stephen King rennaissance was just around the corner at the time, but in 2014, I had no warning going into the novel, and it hit me like a fucking brick wall when I got to that part. Just like the ending of Bunny Drop, the sewer scene is a famously controversial moment that the author genuinely didn’t think anybody would mind, and which you’d have to be clinically insane to include in an adaptation. Granted, the ending of Bunny Drop probably isn’t as bad as the sewer scene, but at least Stephen King had the excuse of doing more drugs than the entire nineties cast of Saturday Night Live. I guess it’s not entirely fair to hold the flaws of the manga against an otherwise stellar anime, but when you get this invested in a story that leaves you hanging, you will have the urge to find out what happens next, and unfortunately for Bunny Drop, you're better off not knowing.

Bunny Drop is available from Viz Media. It comes with a handful of OVA bonus scenes that are entirely adorable. The original manga is available stateside from Yen Press. A live action drama is not available stateside, but just like the anime, it ends pre-timeskip.

I feel like the best thing that could possibly happen to Bunny Drop, and which would bring its score up to a 10/10 in my eyes, would be if it were to receive a second season, or even just an OVA, that completely ignores and rewrites the future events of the story. That way, it could have the satisfying conclusion it deserves, without shooting itself in the head at the last minute. I’m not going to tell you whether or not to seek out the ending of the manga, all I can do is give you my best advice... Watch the anime, go no further, and just be happy with the story as is... But it is ultimately your choice, and all I can really hope is that I’ve given you the best possible guidance to help you figure out what the right choice is for you. On its own, Bunny Drop is a near masterpiece. It knows what it is, it knows what it wants to be, and it pulls off everything it can gloriously under those parameters. You know an anime is special when it has the power to make you cry during the first episode on your third rewatch, and while it may be forever haunted by that one glaring caveat, it is still an experience that I would highly recommend seeking out.

I give Bunny Drop an 8/10.