Say you’re a high-school-aged boy, and for whatever reason you’ve turned out to be a kind of magnet for really weird stuff going on with various people around you. Like, pulling an example purely out of thin air, there’s a girl who wanders around in a bunny-girl outfit to prove that nobody can actually see her… except you, of course, or there’d be no plot to this story.

This is basically the core premise of the Rascal Does Not Dream light novel series that later became an anime series followed by a string of theatrical release movies. Most folks refer to it as the “bunny-girl senpai” show, since that’s the first novel installment from which the anime series takes its name.

Following on from the televised show that covers the events of the first handful of novel installments and an absolute tearjerker of a film dealing with the contents of the paired novel installments after that, Sister Venturing Out is… almost anticlimactic.

It’s still very good, though.

This installment of the story is sort of a breather between the increasingly intense storyline leading up to the previous movie’s events and the “college age” storyline to follow, both of which are full of “Adolescence Syndrome” shenanigans, or in other words the supernatural wonkiness which kicks off most of the plotlines in the series. That doesn’t make it any less compelling, though, because Sister Venturing Out does a nice job of showing a lot of the characters having settled nicely into their post-Syndrome lives, happier and healthier (for the most part). The primary focus is on Kaede, younger sister to lead character Sakuta, who’s trying to pick her life back up again after… well, spoilers. Go read the books or watch the show.

Weaving in and around this main story arc are Sakuta and the girlfriend he adores, Mai, as they navigate their relationship and what their future together may look like. Those two remain the core of the whole thing and their ability to work together to solve any weird problem which comes their way is a lot of why the Rascal series works as well as it does.

The movie also takes a moment to make reference to the singer known online as Touko Kirishima, thus doing its part to seed in that future storyline.

What I find interesting on a meta level about this movie is that it shows the novels could easily have all been done as a movie series, one per volume, at the length of about three televised episodes apiece. Because that’s basically how long this is, and it’s not like there are major animation flourishes on display which wouldn’t have looked out of place in an aired show. (Seriously, it looks a bit better than a TV show but not that much better.) But I suppose this saved the production team from having to commit to 12-or-whatever episodes all in a row again, instead tackling each novel’s project in discrete packages.

I’m not against it, I’m just amused.

In the end, I can’t really tell you to go watch this movie because if you haven’t watched the TV series and previous theatrical film already, this movie will leave you absolutely bewildered. There’s no hand-holding for newcomers here. You’re assumed to be all caught up when you walk into the theater. It’s a good time with characters you like well enough to have gotten through all the preceding material, otherwise you wouldn’t be here in the first place.

And it is a good time. I’m glad to have it on my media shelf.