Title: Gochuumon wa Usagi Desu ka (Is The Order A Rabbit?)
Format: TV anime
Genre: comedy, slice of life
Series Creator: Koi
Series Director: Hiroyuki Hashimoto
Studio: White Fox
Series length: 12 episodes
Original Airing dates: April 10, 2014 – June 26, 2014
Reviewed format: high def download with fan subs
Synopsis:
“Cocoa Hoto moves into a new town to attend school. There, she begins living with Chino Kafuu at her family’s Rabbit House café, working as a waitress to pay for her accommodation.”
Review:
One of my secret pleasures in anime is the genre nicknamed “cute girls/people doing cute things” 4koma adaptation. It pretty much started when I watched Azumanga Daioh a few years back & continues with Acchi Kocchi (my 1st review here), onto series like Yuyushiki & Seitokai Yakuindomo up to this current review. I think it’s the punchiness of the jokes when translated from the 4koma style, meaning that you pack a lot of humour into a short space. When combined with cuteness, it’s a winning formula in my book.
Unfortunately, Gochuumon wa Usagi Desu ka doesn’t pack an awful lot of jokes in when compared to other series & most of them are based upon the Japanese reaction style (straight man paired with joker, can’t remember the name for it right now) but it still is uber cute.
Mainly because of the bunnies running around but also because of the girls.
& by cute girls I mean the kawaii fashion than any form of sexual or romantic attraction. There is a big difference, even though some of the characters are sexualised (such as underwear & swimwear scenes as well as emphasising Rize’s chest at certain points).
The construction of the female characters is the real draw for the series, because the defy the clichéd roles set forth for them.
All of their names are puns on coffee, tea or other hot drinks that you find at a café. Cocoa is the daydreaming ditz who is obsessed with being Chino’s (whom she is staying with for an education exchange) big sister (onee-san) role model yet is surprisingly clever at her studies & an excellent baker. Rize is the daughter of a high ranking military man & military-otaku but still loves to be a girly-girl, combining war-lust with modelling & other things. Chiya, whose family runs a rival Japanese tea & sweets café, like Cocoa, seems like a bit of an airhead but is clever with language & telling terrifying stories. Her neighbour & best friend is Sharo, whom everyone assumes is a rich girl because she goes to the privileged private girls’ school but is in fact a scholarship student who is terrified of her poverty being found out by the others. Leaving Chino, who is the day to day head barista at the Rabbit House café (which doesn’t have any rabbits in it aside from Tippy), who has tsundere-like tendencies but is actually just very shy & not well adjusted socially outside of a café environment.
Each episode is pretty much broken into two parts, with slightly interconnecting stories or running gags but mostly they are isolated. The humour isn’t as rapid fire as Seitokai Yakuindomo or as painfully cute as Acchi Kocchi, it’s still a sweet & very funny series brought together by the kawaii interactions of the cast.
Really not much more that I can say about other then if you like your kawaii anime, you’ll love to add this to your list (but only after you’ve watched Acchi Kocchi. Go on! Do it now! NOW!).
And The Geek Shall (Inherit the Earth) 