Fantasy in Fox Bunny Funny

When I think of a story containing bunnies and foxes, I think of a children’s bedtime story. When I think of a children’s bedtime story, I do not think of realistic and terrifying facial expressions. The third panel of the story contains the illustration of a human-like face of fear and doubt. The expressiveness of the animals is human-like because it conveys sadness, fear, panic, shamefulness and other emotions that people might rather hide. A graphic novel about bunnies and foxes is also “a real human topic” exactly because it contains unsavory motifs such as exclusion.

Pages 58 through 60 contained the most human patterns of behavior, to me, as the fox quickly transformed from realizing his true identity of harmony with the bunnies to being shamed into becoming the most vicious type of fox. I suppose it is interesting that this scene seemed the most human to me when it was also, in my opinion, the most disgusting type of human behavior- hypocrisy and hate incited by fear. The evolution of the fox’s behavior during these particular panels exemplified the maturity of the story. In a “normal” comic book, average people often turn into superhuman beings with an emotional trigger like anger or hypersensitivity to danger. Instead of becoming a superhuman being (or superfox being), the fox transformed from a loving fox sympathetic to the plight of the bunnies to a violent, bunny-eating machine. The transformation exposed more weakness than strength in the character of the fox, who was shamed by his peers into behavior he actually found detestable. Fox Bunny Funny is fantasy because it’s about anthropomorphic creatures, but the evolution of human emotions through facial expressions and emotional transformation are very real. By the end of the graphic novel, when my brain had settled into treating the foxes and bunnies like humans, the fantastical last scene was startling. The black instead of white background of the pages seemed to indicate a dream sequence or simply a dark experience. Bunny DNA and fox DNA mixed together during the pages with the black background, yet the fox woke up as a bunny in pages with a white background. Had the fox’s dreams and reality fused so that so that he is living a dream world by the end of the novel? Did he become so singularly obsessed with his fox identity that it drove him to madness and thus, starting from when he chased the bunny on page 67, was he merely living in a world of fantasy that could guide him to his true identity as a bunny? Some of the most fantastical elements of Fox Bunny Funny are separate from the fact that it contains fox and bunny characters. Instead, the story communicates the very real human topic of identity issues and the fantasy lies in distinguishing real events from events imagined in the head of the main character.