Short Animation: Bye Bye Bunny

Graduation shorts are where animation schools show their range: not only modeling and lighting, but whether a team can commit to a premise weird enough to justify years of nights in a computer lab. Bye Bye Bunny (France, 2012), from six students at Supinfocom Valenciennes—Julia Bueno, Cheng Li, Catherine Lepicard, Inès Pagniez, Julien Roguet, and Paul Torris—passes that test with a question that sounds like a children’s book and behaves like a screwball crisis movie: what if every rabbit on Earth vanished at once?

The premise as Rube Goldberg engine

Distribution notes from Autour de Minuit’s catalog put the runtime near seven minutes twenty seconds, with English dialogue, and summarize the chain cleanly. A magician loses his stage partner when rabbits disappear globally. He will do anything to get the act back. A chicken becomes an improbable assistant. A mad scientist complicates the rescue. Directors Notes adds the economic gag that makes the worldbuilding sing: vanishing rabbits spark a global carrot crisis. That detail is not decoration. It turns a magician’s personal emergency into a systems comedy—agriculture, media, and stagecraft all wobbling because one species of prop/animal has clocked out.

Student films often choose either intimate emotion or spectacle. Bye Bye Bunny chooses escalation. The hat trick fails; the failure becomes news; the news becomes ecology; the ecology becomes farce. A chicken in the assistant slot is a visual joke with plot teeth—wrong species, wrong silhouette, still trying to fill a rabbit-shaped hole in show business. The mad scientist is the genre’s permission slip for gadgets, labs, and bad ideas pursued with confidence. Together they keep the short from being only a single gag about a missing bunny.

Six directors, one coherent cartoon

Ensemble direction is a Supinfocom hallmark and a logistical risk. Six authors can mean six styles fighting for the camera. Here the public record of the project—team Tumblr production posts, prop research, character sheets, even a fake “Carodent” carrot toothpaste commercial sequence—suggests they treated the world as a shared toybox. Cars, a magician’s bike, an army tank, apartment posters of the magician with his rabbit: the film’s comedy depends on a lived-in clutter of objects that feel designed, not defaulted from an asset library. Composer Kenny Wood and sound designer Florian Calmer are credited in the team’s own materials; voice work from Kimlinh Tran, Amanda Gonzalez, and Edward Bosco gives the English-language track a performed bounce rather than placeholder temp dialogue.

That production texture matters for how we review the short now. It is not an anonymous internet cartoon that appeared fully formed on Vimeo. It is a school film with a paper trail of drafts and props, later circulated through animation blogs, CG press posts, and short-film distributors. Art-Spire’s 2013 write-up pushed viewers toward the “world without bunnies” thought experiment; 3DVF covered it as a Supinfocom graduation piece asking what happens if all rabbits disappear the same day. The consistent through-line across languages is the magician as emotional anchor inside a planetary gag.

Magic, media, and the missing animal

Stage magic depends on the audience believing a living creature can vanish and return. Bye Bye Bunny inverts the contract: the vanish is real, global, and unscheduled, and the return is the quest. That inversion lets the film satirize performance and news at once. A magician without a rabbit is unemployed symbolism. A planet without rabbits is suddenly rewriting grocery aisles and headlines. The short’s humor sits in the mismatch of scales—intimate career panic versus worldwide absurdity—without needing a lecture about ecology. The carrot crisis does the thematic lifting: remove one animal, watch human systems reveal how oddly they were wired.

Compared with auteur-driven internet shorts that hinge on a single illustrator’s line, this film’s pleasure is group timing—character animation, set pieces, and joke construction that feel storyboarded for a crew. Watch how information travels inside the world: news broadcasts, commercials, military overreaction, lab hubris. Each institution gets a cameo in the panic. That variety is how a seven-minute student short feels longer than its runtime without padding; it keeps changing the room the joke is told in.

Where it sits among school films

Supinfocom Valenciennes (in the lineage now associated with Rubika) has sent a steady stream of graduation films into the festival and online circuit—pieces that often mix high CG finish with unapologetic cartoon logic. Bye Bye Bunny belongs to the comedy branch: readable characters, prop-heavy staging, a premise you can pitch in one sentence. It is less a tearjerker thesis and more a stress test of comic continuity. Can the team cut from apartment to lab to wider chaos without losing the magician’s motive? The short’s reputation suggests they could.

For viewers discovering it through a pathname rather than a festival program, the useful framing is apprenticeship made public. These six names shared a credit line; the film is their argument that collaboration can still yield a singular comic voice. You do not need a spoiler map of every twist. You need the opening dare—rabbits gone—and the willingness to follow a desperate performer into increasingly wrong solutions.

Comedy without cruelty

Animal-vanishing plots can tip into gloom. This one stays buoyant because the film cares more about human overreaction than about mourning rabbits as tragedy. The missing animals are the MacGuffin; the real subject is how quickly people invent substitutes, scapegoats, and scientific overconfidence. That choice keeps the short in farce territory—closer to a backstage comedy that accidentally becomes a disaster movie than to an eco-elegy. Viewers looking for tears may find the tone too light. Viewers looking for invention will find the lightness is the craft: hard to sustain escalating absurdity without nastiness, and the team largely manages it.

The chicken assistant is central to that tone. Casting the “wrong” animal as sidekick generates sympathy and slapstick at once. The magician’s loyalty to his original partner stays readable even while he improvises. Loyalty plus improvisation is a sturdy comic engine for student films because it gives animators clear acting beats—frustration, hope, ridiculous plan B—without requiring a novel’s worth of dialogue.

A way to rewatch

First pass: ride the plot. Laugh at the chicken, the scientist, the crisis inflation. Second pass: inventory institutions. How many human systems get a joke? Third pass: ignore plot and study prop and set dressing—the show posters, the vehicles, the fake ads. That third pass is where student craft shows. Comedy shorts hide labor inside timing; looking at the furniture reveals the hours.

If short animation sometimes feels disposable, Bye Bye Bunny argues for the opposite: a disposable-sounding question (“where did the rabbits go?”) treated with enough world logic to become a tiny comic epic. The magician wants his partner back. The planet wants its carrots explained. Somewhere between those wants, six graduating animators built a machine that still runs when you press play—hat empty, stakes ridiculous, timing intact.