Big Buck Bunny
A Gentle Giant bunny who loves nothing better than watching the butterflies is harassed by a gang of nasty little critters, until he's pushed too far...
Big Buck Bunny is the second short film from the Blender Foundation after Elephants Dream, made partly to drive development of Blender, an open-source 3-D authoring software package, and partly to showcase its capabilities. The plot is simple but the characters are quite charming and the whole thing is reminiscent of Pixar shorts of old.
This short is released under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0, and is downloadable at the project's website or archive.org.
Tropes used in Big Buck Bunny include:
- Adorable Evil Minions: Granted, all three are fuzzy squirrels, but the chinchilla and red squirrel are cuddly and barely count as evil.
- Beware the Nice Ones: Oh yes.
- Comic Trio: A more serious variant. The flying squirrel comes up with evil schemes, the red squirrel carries them out while acting stupid, and the chinchilla pretty much gets dragged along.
- Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: Buck is surprisingly competent when he's mad.
- Cute Is Evil: Who knew that cute-looking rodents would be so evil as to kill two butterflies and bully an innocent bunny For the Evulz?
- Death Trap: Buck creates an entire course of them to teach the trio a lesson.
- The Ditz
- Disproportionate Retribution: The squirrel gang's leader deserves what he gets, but the red squirrel and chinchilla seem to take severe beatings for just following it.
- The Dog Bites Back: The Stinger at the end of the show. That bird that the flying squirrel bullied (twice!) does a poop on his head.
- Gentle Giant
- Humiliation Conga: The flying squirrel becomes used as Buck's kite. And gets pooped on by the bird he bullied.
- Lock and Load Montage
- Kick the Dog: The flying squirrel knocking the bird out of the tree with an acorn. Twice. (The bird gets his revenge)
- Mismatched Eyes: The red squirrel.
- Misplaced Wildlife: One of the squirrel trio is a chinchilla.
- Oh Crap: All villains have their BSOD moments.
- Pretty Butterflies: Purple ones, which Buck likes. And then the squirrel trio had to kill them For the Evulz...
- Save the Villain: Buck saves the flying squirrel from falling onto Spikes of Doom... then uses the flying squirrel as a kite.
- Screwy Squirrel: The three rodents; the leader is literally a flying squirrel and the red squirrel clearly has some screws loose.
- Shout-Out: To Robin Hood: Several of Buck's traps.
- Spikes of Doom: One of Buck's Death Traps.
- Terrible Trio: The flying squirrel, red squirrel and chinchilla.
- Big, Thin, Short Trio: The flying squirrel is the short one (not exactly short, but he is the smallest), the red squirrel is the thin one, and the chinchilla is the big one.
- The Stinger
- Took a Level in Badass