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Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny Girl Senpai
The title is a lie. She's only a bunny girl for maybe half the first episode.
Teenage angst is ridiculous but not for the ones suffering it, and that's where Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny Girl Senpai sets the starting block. It's definitely not magic, it's "puberty syndrome", a condition that makes the affected individual alter the physical reality around them. In the first arc, the titular Bunny Girl Senpai becomes invisible except in school. Hence why she runs around as a bunny girl. Puberty syndrome cannot be cured by conventional means; the patient needs to realise how dumb their first world problems are before reality can return to the scheduled programme.
Our Hero Sakuta is the only person who can see Bunny Girl Senpai outside of school. Since he's got some personal experience with puberty syndrome through a hikikomoro sister, he takes it onto himself to be therapist to Bunny Girl Senpai. And when she gets over herself, there's a new girl in line.
Haruhi Suzimiya did it better, on all accounts but not the arguably most crucial one: Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny Girl Senpai is sincerely heart-wrenching. Maybe twice, but that's still more patos than Haruhi ever got out of me. But between those two moments, it's mostly just cute enough. It's not particularly clever, and though it tries for some genre commentary, it's not very profound. But it's funny, it's cute, it's certainly likeable. It tries to build up to some ending that doesn't quite pay off the way it wants to because they couldn't possibly not have the final scene be about the main couple, could they. But it's fine, it kept me watching. I liked it.
With little more to be said about the series itself, we can always say something about the reception, which seems split between people declaring it to be on the Top Five of 2018, and people who hate Sakuta and find the concept of a boy helping girls sort out their lives is inherently sexist. I can't say I get either camp; the only 2019 anime I watched all of was Banana Fish, and even if Bunny Girl Senpai is better, it's hardly memorable. As for the sexism thing, it's not like Bunny Girl Senpai is worse than others, and certainly not as bad as the title could've suggest. The quasi-harem story of "boy solves problem for lots of girls" isn't Japan's finest, but it's also an odd thing to focus on with Bunny Girl Senpai specifically all the time Clamp has no less than three titles boiling down to that description, two of which are counted as their timeless classics. It's not to say that the trope doesn't bear criticism, but it isn't like Bunny Girl Senpai is the only transgressor, and a far more fruitful discussion would be to call it out in general, not single out one work for sins that dozens of others probably are equally guilty of.
There also seems to be debate about whether or not his frequent, tasteless and deadpan announcements about girls are sarcasm or perversion. I have a hard time taking them as anything but sarcasm all the time the boy has his rare displays of intense, sincere emotion that is very different from his everyday mode. It strikes me as an odd thing to focus on anyway, anime being anime and I refuse to believe that low-key ero jokes has been the most sexist thing to happen in anime lately. Interpretation is fun and subjective, isn't it, and I'm sure that among the people who hate Sakuta's icky sexism/Sakuta's offensively sexist ideas of funny, there are those that absolutely loved Eureak Seven, which I dropped halfway through in in cold fury over how the kickass Eureka was thoroughly ribbed of all kickassery for Renton's benefit.
I think this is a long-winded way of making the point that Sakuta was more or less the only character I particularly cared for, which on one hand is as it should be but on the other points to the rest of them being not terribly interesting, at least not in the parts that count.