Takena Nagao is a Japanese claymation animator who specializes in the genre of horror. Finding out about his work a few years ago led me down one of my favorite rabbit holes ever, which is saying something since the Internet is one giant rabbit hole full of rabbit holes. His work is also popularly considered to qualify as official anime, which is why we’re able to talk about it here, instead of being limited to the comment sections of his videos. I’ve reviewed a bunch of his short films already, and I was planning to review another one for the 2024 Horror season, but it took me literally the entire year to decide which particular one I would feature.

At certain points in the last eleven months I was considering reviewing the archaic Bloody Night, the infamously weird as hell Pussycat, and even that one computer animated short about the vampire lesbians. I also briefly considered saving the recently released Midnight Vampire for an October review, but then I realized that since it might have been MY reaction to it’s release and desire to review it that compelled site admin to create a listing and a sweet looking banner for it, I had kinda backed myself into a corner.

Ultimately, I decided that it was time to address a question that I’ve been asked more than a few times since I binged all of Takena’s works all those years ago... Why did I give Chainsaw Bunny the highest possible rating? On the one hand, with the number of short films Takena has released, how vast and experimental his output is, and how those shorts range across every possible level of the quality scale, it makes sense that there’d be at least one that I would consider, in context, to be perfect. On the other hand, seeing a claymation short about bunny girls with chainsaws sitting at the top of my completed list alongside masterpieces like Cowboy Bebop and Princess Tutu is an understandable cause for concern, so it is a valid question: Why is THIS my favorite Takena short, and why did I rank it as high as I did?

To go into that, we first do have to take a look back at Takena’s oeuvre, and how his work has evolved over the years. It should go without saying that his work has improved with time, and while this does stand true in a technical sense... Better craftsmanship, a better understanding of cinematography and camera techniques, better looking models, better lighting and so forth... He has also improved dramatically in terms of story-telling and character work, which is a difficult thing to do without any dialogue.

His early work tends to feel very impersonal.. Looking at the short film Bloody Night, you have a little girl running from a hideous monster, with an old man and a police officer also involved, but none of them really feel human. If the little girl were to be eaten, I don’t think I would have felt anything, I would have just filed it away under dark edgelord gore porn. In spite of this, seeing the monster die and the girl be rescued also doesn’t amount to much, so it’s not really a matter of personal investment. Later work would also follow the plot tropes of women being in dangerous and terrifying situations, but he would very quickly learn that a damsel in distress could ALSO be a proactive protagonist, making her both easy to sympathize with and exciting to root for.

There have been plenty of Takena shorts that follow this model, with female characters finding the strength to rescue themselves(Chainsaw Maid, Pussycat) or stories where a female character saves another female character, only for the latter to take charge towards the end when the former falters(Chainsaw Maid episode 0, Midnight Vampire) with each entry featuring its own distinct identity and circumstances. Again, not all of them have turned out ideal, Pussycat in particular is quite divisive, but the formula has churned out some of Takena’s very best work... And that brings us to Chainsaw Bunny.

Chainsaw Bunny is the story of a young woman who works at a bunny girl bar(think the retro Playboy Bunny costume, these have become culturally iconic in Japan). On her way to work, she meets a seemingly nice young man, and invites him to visit the bar as a patron. When he arrives, he reveals himself to be some kind of terrifying mutant creature, and the girls have to fight him to ensure their very survival as his every revival reveals just how far removed he is from the world of humanity that they know.

Now immediately, this should be setting off alarm bells in the heads of anyone who considers themselves sensitive to the use of metaphor. Generally speaking, a lot of the monsters that Takena’s female protagonists have to face are male-coded, and inherently predatory in nature, and while I think Pussycat was a lot more on-the-nose about it, the extremely creepy gentleman in Chainsaw Bunny couldn’t possibly be a better metaphor for the douche who thinks he’s entitled to a woman’s time simply because she had to act nice to him for her job. He is any dude who gets rough with a stripper, or follows a waitress to her car, and the phallic nature of his tentacle-based attacks is obviously no coincidence.

Of course I also really like this villain from a more literal perspective, as he represents my favorite kind of Japanese horror... In fact, it's the main thing I go specifically to Japanese horror to find. Don’t get me wrong, I’m always down to watch some vampire or zombie related horror fare, but the Japanese have always been the masters of gritty, ultra detailed, imaginative body-horror. Like, remember just how gnarly looking the entity in The Thing was? Yeah, in Japan, they go WAY farther with that shit, and if you don’t believe me, start reading some Junji Ito.

The villain in this short is like nothing you’ve seen before, a constantly creepy face attached to an unpredictably bizarre anatomy. There are some elements that might have been borrowed from Parasyte or Tomie, but they’re only elements swirling around a perfect blend of WTF. I should warn that he is in fact very naked, but I think it works, because whatever this thing is, if he’s trying to emulate the human body, it would be weird if he decided to go all Ken-doll just to avoid offending his victims.

The villain is creepy right from his introduction, not just because of his wide-eyed, lidless stare, but because of the awesome soundtrack of this short. The music sounds like eighties electronica if it were conducted by Nobuo Uematsu, and it’s both perfectly tense during suspenseful scenes, and pulse-pounding and adrenaline pumping during the actual action. The sound design in general is some of Takena’s best work, but what’s even more impressive is the set design, as he’s released plenty of films that looked like they were taking place in a middle-schooler’s shoebox diorama, but the interior of the bar from this short is charming both in its simplicity and in the few intimate details that WERE included, like the borderline glow of the bottles sitting behind the counter.

And of course, all of the technical aspects are top notch. I love the timing from shot to shot. The editing in this short is whip-smart, moving briskly from shot to shot while still allowing time for the audience, and more importantly the titular bunnies, to cool down between each new horrific detail of the villain’s transformation. The lighting is perfect, the animation is smooth, and I swear, I could compile a top ten list of the little moments and details that gave me goosebumps up and down my arms, from the villain’s first attack, to the upper third of his dismembered body crawling towards one of the bunnies, his creepy face still remaining unchanged.

Ultimately, though. I didn’t give this short a perfect score because I think it’s as good as every single other anime at the top of my completed list. This isn’t as good as Fullmetal Alchemist or Toradora. It’s a six minute stop motion short about two Bunnygirl bartenders brutally defending themselves against a horrifying monster. It’s a piece of fun, exciting action cheesecake that just happens to have some depth to it. I don’t think it’s perfect overall, but within the confines of what Takena can create, I do believe it is the perfect claymation horror short. This is, in my opinion, the peak of Takena’s resume, although he is more than welcome to prove me wrong in the future.

For that reason, and in that specific context, I give Chainsaw Bunny a 10/10.