This Week in Anime

Bedknobs and Bunny Girl Senpai

Nick
Steve that's obviously the Easter Bunny out for revenge over everyone staying inside instead of looking for his eggs.

Really though let's not compare something like Gleipnir to Rascal Does Not Dream of a Dreaming Girl. It's insulting to Gleipnir.

So, this past weekend the folks at Funimation and Aniplex were kind enough to stream the movie follow up to 2018's Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny Girl Senpai as what I interpret as a misguided late Easter present. And it uh, sure is more Bunny Girl Senpai What Is Not Dreamed Of By Rascal.

Oh yeah he sucks way more now.

Real talk, while I felt the TV series mostly missed the mark, there were at least a couple arcs that I thought had something going for them, where I could see why others would latch onto it even if I couldn't. But Dreaming Girl is basically a 90 minute reminder of everything I disliked about its predecessor.

If only we could put Schrodinger's cat in some kind of container, to isolate it from the anime and light novel writers who keep pulling it out.
Anyway, the actual plot of Dreaming Girl revolves around the secret 6th girl in Sakuta's harem of Monogatari ripoffs, Shoko. Who in the TV show was basically a lengthy red herring who hung around while all the stuff with Mai and Sakuta's sisters was happening.

Boy howdy let me tell you, revisiting Angel Beats this year sure didn't make me feel any kinder towards this movie. Jun Maeda please come back. I'm sorry.

See that's the rub. I kind of lied when I said this story is about Shoko, because it's not. Shoko is around in a lot of it, and she's integral to moving the plot along, but in terms of who gets the emotional focus and character development, this is entirely about Sakuta and how sad he is that Shoko is dying and GOSH if only he could save her because her dying is just so sad for him to watch. Well, she's also there so Mai can act jealous over Sakuta for the 100 millionth time in this series because that never gets old, right?

You see, it's funny because she's constantly defensive against every girl in Sakuta's life and doesn't trust him despite them supposedly being in love. This is what a happy relationship is like right?

I'd be with you there if the movie actually did interrogate it, but by the end credits it doesn't really feel like Sakuta's learned to stop feeding his nascent hero complex so much as he's learned to redirect it entirely at his girlfriend.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves. The first half hour of the movie is basically just subdued sitcom shenanigans as Sakuta hangs out with Future Shoko and tries to figure out how to get her puberty syndrome to chill out. And I do appreciate the movie's honesty in that their first attempt is to just have her marry Sakuta to fulfill her life's dream. This series knows what it's selling, at least.

It also doesn't help that, once now and forever, Sakuta sucks. He's somehow more flatly written than in the TV series and every time a girl falls in love with him the first and only question on my mind is:

Oh right, after that we get the first twist of the movie. And again, Jun Maeda, I owe you so many apologies.

Cut to Sakuta standing outside trying to pick out a car to run him over

It's also just a magnificently shitty way to make Shoko even less of a character. Even her own death ultimately has to be about what Sakuta wants. And to be clear, she doesn't want him to effectively kill himself to save her. She says so multiple times along with every other person in Sakuta's life, but god knows nothing can stop this boy from RSVPing his own pity party.

Don't you see Steve he's just so kind and generous that he can't help but give too much of himself when he sees a sad girl. But it's ok because even if Mai misses him she'll be okay. Nothing could possibly go wrong.

Unfortunately Sakuta is somehow denser than Shiro Emiya, if that's possible, so the only thing he takes away in the long run is he should have been harder to push.

The moment Future Shoko brought up Time Travel I had a desperate, doomed hope that this would devolve into a Futurama gag where Sakuta and Mai keep going back in time to die for each other until we just have a minivan plowing through a street of teenagers like bowling pins. Alas it just ends up with Sakuta re-enacting the end of Bill & Ted with himself.

I do genuinely like that the quantum mechanics of it means Sakuta has to get somebody to observe him to actually manifest. It's a cheeky little callback to the original arc that made me smile even as I rolled my eyes at everything else.

Disappointed he chickened out and went the kigurumi route. Put the fishnets and bustier on and stop being a coward, boy.

I want to like it, but history with this series taught me that Sakuta isn't a character designed to have his motivations and psyche dissected by the narrative. He's an existence meant to lionize his particular brand of empathy that insists he must help every person he encounters and the show always steps back from criticizing him too harshly so it can reward him being such a nice guy.

Like sure, he does make peace with Future Shoko and then push his past self out of the way. It's like reverse Donnie Darko when you think about it. But then after being sad for a week he realizes they can use relativity or whatever to save Past Shoko from becoming Present Shoko so Future Shoko never has to die. Or Something. I admit by this point I was playing on my phone.

I like to believe that the driver of the car that failed to kill Sakuta dies and she gets his heart instead. Because at least then there's some kind of consequence to all this.

Maybe we'll get to meet the sad daughter of the driver in Rascal Does Not Dream Of Traumatized By Vehicular Manslaughter Sensei or something.
Oh and there's also like, a two minute conflict where if they change the past Sakuta and Mai might never meet, I think? It doesn't actually mean anything but they sure do brush it off even though I think if that happened Mai would have vanished from existence in the first arc.

The story tries to be about Sakuta making a hard choice and living with the consequences because he realizes he can't save every sad girl who comes into his periphery. Except it turns out he totally can and just needed to be smarter about it. So don't worry, no consequences for anyone! Future Past Shoko is now Present Shoko and she's seemingly totally fine and she even remembers him. Hooray.

Look it's clear by now I have very few kind words for this movie, but I want to stress I did approach it in good faith. The Violet Evergarden movie took me by surprise and charmed me with an IP I was less than impressed with, and I was totally open to this movie doing the same. But then I got to the scene where we find out Mai starred in an in-universe movie that's just this movie and I flipped off my computer screen.

And I think that tidbit is the deciding factor in Dreaming Girl. If that seems like a cheeky wink to you, the viewer, then you'll probably like this movie. If it looks like somebody huffing their own farts in a paper bag and begging you to be impressed, you can join me in the salt mines.