Bunny Girl Has A Carrot.

Bunny Girl Has A Carrot.

Bunny Boy Has His Hands In His Pockets.

A friend recently found these 50’s plastic toys in the family toy box and has let me play with them for a while.

They are great for so many reasons:

• The girl is holding a carrot; I am sure in the 50’s that was just sweet, but as the drawer of many girl-bunny-with-carrot scenarios I find it wickedly funny.
• The boy bunny sports a beer-belly, and with hands in pockets and workman’s overalls looks like a dodgy old-man-child.
• The way they are cast in two colours of plastic is just odd. It highlights the seams and glue and from the front the ears are disconcertingly mismatched to the face. Even better, the girl bunny’s blue front is slightly transparent, so the pink glows through giving her a slightly pulp-horror luminosity.
• They are rattles for baby – baby could put his/her precious eyes out with bunny’s pointy ears.
• They seem to have just the wrong mix of animal and human attributes, rendering them scary and of dubious moral character. An artful mix indeed.

I tried to find my first bunny-carrot drawing, it turns out it was not a bunny at all but some sort of other creature.

Later it was all about bunnies.

Later still it was all about bunnies with crocheted carrots, but that’s a story for another day.