The Cute Family Anime That Took a Dark Turn in the Manga

Bunny Drop is considered one of the most endearing family anime out there. But the manga took a dark turn the anime ignores.

Good family anime can be difficult to come by. While there are tons of anime made every year that is age-appropriate, not only is it rare when those types of series come to the states, but it is even rarer when that show is one that both kids and adults enjoy equally. Yet if there is a series that is safe for the whole family and can be enjoyed by everyone of all ages, it is Bunny Drop. The anime is one of those rare series that is sweet as sweet can be, and everyone who views it walks away commenting on how wholesome and charming it is.

What many people don’t know is that it is only a partial adaptation of the manga series of the same name. The manga series was written by Tumi Unita, and while it has glowing reviews for the first half of the series, the second half takes a dark turn that left many readers disgusted with where the characters wound up. It’s such a drastic change from what came before that when viewers of the anime find out how the manga ends they are thankful the series never attempted to go in that direction. But how dark a turn can this family-friendly story really go?

What is Bunny Drop About?

Bunny Drop revolves around a 30-year-old man named Daikichi Kawachi, who returns home to attend his grandfather’s funeral. While at the funeral a revelation is discovered: His grandfather fathered an illegitimate 6-year-old girl named Rin, and the whole family is discovering this for the first time. None of the family members want anything to do with this child, and after the suggestion is made to send the child to foster care so that no one will “burdened” by her, Daikichi decides to adopt her as his own daughter.

What follows over the next thirteen episodes is a charming story where the two learn to become a family. He doesn’t know how to be a father, but he does the best he can and eventually becomes the kind of dad anyone could be proud of. Rin, likewise, is shy and reserved at first, wondering where her place in the world is after being born into a family wanted nothing to do with her. As the series proceeds though, she finds a family in Daikichi, and begins to live her life like a normal girl. Soon she’s making friends at her new school.

By the end of the series the two have grown to become a loving family, with the promise of that family growing being strongly hinted at. While the resolution of whether Rin gets a new mother and brother remains unresolved, the series ends with the two comfortably becoming father and daughter with a lot of hope for the future. Fans of the anime loved the ending and hoped for a second season. When they discovered there was a second half of the manga that existed, they first hoped it would be adapted (and then were disappointed when no second season came to fruition). As it turns out, the best thing the anime did was NOT adapt the second half of the manga.

The Time Skip that Ruined Everything Before

For the second half of the Bunny Drop manga the series skips ahead ten years into the future, where Rin is now 16 years old. Viewers of the anime – impatient with the lack of progress for the second season and wanting to see what happens next – bought the manga hoping to see Daikichi and Rin with an expanded family and living happily ever after. While most viewers have their own ideas of what this would look like, the author decided that the next logical step would be for Rin to go through puberty and fall in love with Daikichi.

And no, I’m not kidding, this is REALLY where the series decided to go: With Daikichi and Rin struggling with romantic feelings they develop for one another. To say that readers were furious and disgusted with this change of direction would be an understatement. While adoption can usually lead to conflicting feelings between adopted family members, there was NOTHING in the first half of the manga that even remotely suggested that this is where the story was going.

The idea that Rin would want to have a child with her adopted father disgusted readers so much that the author had to come up with a convoluted plot twist in which it turned out Daikichi and Rin weren’t related by blood. This twist probably would have made their father and daughter relationship more poignant and touching had it been used differently, but with it being used as an excuse to get the two characters in bed together it was viewed as an incredibly shameless tactic. The series got so uncomfortable it prompted Jason Thompson of Anime News Network to write:

You could think of the manga and the anime/movie as parallel universes: one heartwarming (if fairly predictable) and one fetishy and gloomy. Maybe it was important to Unita on some emotional level to develop the story the way she did. Or maybe not. It takes talent and work—lots of work—to develop a concept into a story, but it also takes talent to f*** it up this badly.

Did the Producers Make the Right Call?

While it is true that some people did like this dark twist to what was originally a sweet family story there are many fans of Bunny Drop who prefer how the anime ended, and consider the manga ending to be dark and sick. If you need more proof of just how misguided the whole idea for the manga’s ending was, consider the fact that Bunny Drop also received a live-action adaptation. Like the anime, it was also praised for the slice-of-life story about two people forming an unlikely family and was loved by viewers for the same reason.

Also, like the anime, the live-action movie ends before the time skip in the manga happens, meaning neither adaptation of the source material wanted to acknowledge the true ending. It's interesting, isn’t it? Bunny Drop is a series that was so good two companies wanted to adapt it into a series, yet both companies wanted absolutely nothing to do with the original ending. If that isn’t a miscalculation on the author’s part, then I don’t know what is.