White Bunny

In Real Life rabbits come in a variety of colors. Most of these colors are a result of breeding for appearance in domestic breeds of rabbit (though as with any animal, breeding exclusively for color can lead to health problems). Wild rabbits and hares are almost invariably gray or brown in order to aid in camouflage, though some will have white winter coats to blend in with the snow.

In fiction however, rabbits are frequently depicted as pure white, regardless of breed or season.

This may be due to the fact that bunnies and the color white both have associations with innocence and gentleness. It may also be that any animal which is pure white tends to be visually striking and easy to watch. Or it could just be that a white bunny is so darn cute.

It is also likely due in part to The Coconut Effect. White is a color favored in pet rabbits, so if a person's first exposure to rabbits is through someone's pet it is likely to make them expect to see more of the same.

Eye color also plays into this trope. Most colors of rabbits simply have brown eyes. White rabbits however can also have blue or what rabbit breeders call "ruby" eyes. The ruby eyes can be portrayed as sinister red, or as a cute and feminine pink. The sinister red-eyed version would be a tie-in to the idea that Albinos Are Freaks, and the cute version is an aversion or subversion of that idea.

The bunny can be either all or mostly white or light grey. Aside from that, white rabbits in Japanese media may also have a black tip on their ears- this is largely due to the common Japanese snow-hare having such a feature and thus is much more relateable in Japan.

The white or light grey bunny is likely to be played to one of two extremes. It may personify gentleness and innocence, in which case it is likely to be a pet or friend to a pure, innocent character. Or it may play a deliberate subversion of that perception by being evil or vicious, in which case characters will probably approach it unsuspectingly only to get a nasty surprise.

See also White Stallion, White Wolves Are Special, and Great White Feline for other white animals portrayed as good, albeit in a noble way than an innocent one. Not to be confused with Follow the White Rabbit.

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Examples:

Advertising

• Crayola used to have a anthropomorphic white rabbit named Crayola E. Bunny as its company mascot in the early 90s.
• The Trix Rabbit is a white rabbit Funny Animal.

Anime & Manga

• The Mother Bunny who was a one shot characters form the 70's anime Bannertail: The Adventures of Gray Squirrel who is searching for her missing baby bunny.
• Beastars is the story of a wolf who falls in love with a pure white rabbit.
• Clover, the main protagonist of the Happy Happy Clover manga/anime series along with her mother.
• In Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?, this is protagonist Bell Cranel's particular form of Animal Motifs; he has white hair and red eyes and a Fragile Speedster turned Lightning Bruiser fighting style, whilst his Born Lucky status invokes the symbolic association of rabbits with luck.
• Ruby, the protagonist of Jewelpet, is a typical albino white rabbit with red eyes. She's however very mischevious.
• In the "Land of Waves" arc of Naruto Naruto "accidentally" throws a shuriken at a white bunny and narrowly misses. However, Kakashi notes that a wild rabbit should not be that color at that time of year and figures out that it's a decoy; cue rogue ninja with a big-ass sword.
• Carrot, in One Piece, has all-white fur accompanied with blonde hair. The hair, too, becomes pure white when she transforms via the full moon.
• Pretty Cure
  • KiraKira★Pretty Cure à la Mode: Cure Whip's theme animal is the white rabbit. Her costume includes white bunny ears, white gloves, and white puffballs on her boots.
  • Episode 25 of Soaring Sky! PreCure has Elle-chan become protective of a white bunny she meets at a zoo.
• Mimirin, from Shima Shima Tora no Shimajirō, although she does have black ear tips in line with most Japanese snow rabbits. Her father, Sota, however, is a pure white rabbit.
• Lulla, the musical bunny from Suzy's Zoo: Daisuki! Witzy, is an adorable white rabbit, albieit a plush one.

Asian Animation

• Violet from Boonie Cubs is a white rabbit girl who is a Foreign Exchange Student to Pine Tree Kindergarten, coming from the UK.
• In Harry and Bunnie, Bunnie has the look, but not the innocent personality.
• Any rabbits that appear in the Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf series are almost invariably colored white. This extends to the spin-off Pleasant Goat Fun Class with Miss Earth, the rabbit woman who guides the goats through the carnival in the season The Earth Carnival.
• Qiube from YoYo Man has her appearance fashioned after a bunny, with white fur to match.

Comic Books

• Bunny vs. Monkey: The protagonist of the series, Bunny, has white fur.
• Max from the Sam & Max franchise is a hyperactive borderline psychotic white rabbit.
• Sami The Samurai Squirrel: Doug and his older sister are white rabbits.
• The Multiversity version of Captain Carrot is a white rabbit. (The original version was brown.)
• Most rabbit characters in Usagi Yojimbo are white.

Fan Works

• Infinity Train: Knight of the Orange Lily: Kisaragi is a large bipedal talking white rabbit denizen who resides in the 400 Rabbits Car.

Film — Animation

• Timmys Gift stars a young angel named Timmy, who's following a light from Heaven. Throughout the film, he encounters various talking animals. One animal that he befriends is a timid white rabbit who becomes Timmy's travel companion◊. By the end of the film, Timmy and his animal friends encounter Mary and Joseph after Jesus' birth.
• Boingo in Hoodwinked!. He seems to be a white bunny of the innocent variety until he is revealed as the movie's villain.
• Wandi and Queen Luna from Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf - Moon Castle: The Space Adventure, as with other Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf installments' rabbits, are white rabbits.
• The members of the rabbit family in Robin Hood (1973) are all light gray.
• The Secret Life of Pets gives us Snowball, the Cute and Psycho leader of a group of pets who weren't treated right.

Film — Live-Action

• Harvey the pooka is depicted as a giant white rabbit. His best friend Elwood is a very sweet, gentle man.
• Hayride 2: After tying Amanda to a tree, Ol' Pitchfork takes a white rabbit he caught out of its trap and kills it with a Neck Snap. He then takes a chunk of its flesh and tries to make Amanda eat it.
• Jurassic World Dominion: Blue the Velociraptor is shown teaching her baby to hunt in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Their initial target is a rabbit, and it's very clearly an albino domestic rabbit rather than a more appropriate native (brown) cottontail.
• The Killer Rabbit in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Definitely of the deceptively gentle-looking variety.
• In Resident Evil (2002), Alice recovers a memory of life in the Hive before the T-virus outbreak. An Umbrella researcher injects first the T-Virus and then its antidote into a white rabbit. The whole film is about the extreme evil of the Umbrella MegaCorp, so using a white rabbit could represent the innocents put at risk by Umbrella's research (as well as another Alice's Adventures in Wonderland reference, of which the movie has several for whatever reason).
• The title character of Who Framed Roger Rabbit is white-furred with blue eyes.

Literature

• Flop the rabbit from Art the Gecko Makes a Friend.
• The Ur-Example might be the White Rabbit from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Averted by the March Hare who is usually shown as brown.
• Largely averted in Watership Down where most rabbits are natural gray or brown. Played straight however with Silver, who is teased at Sandleford Warren because his fur is so light it's almost white.
• In The Emerald City of Oz Dorothy travels to Bunnybury, a city created by Glinda for all the pink-eyed white rabbits of the forest.
• The main characters Max and Ruby by Rosemary Wells.
• Mr. B in Teddy And Co is revealed to be white once he's washed all the dirt off.
• Survivor Dogs: The dogs require pure-white rabbits for a puppy's Rite-of-Passage Name Change Ceremony. White rabbits are harder to find than darker coloured rabbits, but there's always a few around the hunting grounds.

Live-Action TV

• Lost named an early episode that used the Follow the White Rabbit plot "White Rabbit." In later seasons,actual rabbits appeared — white rabbits. They were often associated with Ben, and their scenes with him caring for them as a boy showed his own innocence.
• Justified in the Sherlock episode, "The Hounds of Baskerville": The rabbits Dr Stapleton are working on are pure white: genetically engineered lab animals are usually white, because it's easier to see bioluminescence in a light-coloured specimen than in a darker one.
• White Rabbit Project - there is no rabbit in the show, but it's in the title (itself an Alice Allusion).
• On Utopia (US), Mr. Rabbit is a white rabbit in the Utopia comic and there are several pure white rabbits grazing in the grass at Home. The rabbits at the petting zoo, though, have various fur shades, including white with black spots and at least one entirely black one.

Music

• German music company Jamster/Jamba gives use Snuggelina (Schnuffelienchen) whose fur is mostly white but with a mix brown fur mostly around her ears, paws and feet. She is Schnuffel's girlfriend.
• The Jefferson Airplane song "White Rabbit", whose enitre lyric is an Alice Allusion.

Newspaper Comics

• They occasionally appear in Garfield

Popular Culture

• The Easter Bunny is usually shown as white.
• Whenever there's a magician, they will almost always pull a rabbit from a hat, and that rabbit is most always white.
  • Somewhat justified, as a white rabbit will be easier for the audience to see against any dark-colored backdrop. In the days before electric stage lighting, this was likely to be a prime consideration.

Puppet Shows

• There's a group of innocent white bunnies in later The Muppets productions, whose main role in life is being Swallowed Whole by Big Mean Carl.

Toys

• Mattel had a line of infant toys called Angel Bunny (more info here). (No relation to Fluttershy's pet) that ran from 1984 to 1985. The main character is a white rabbit. With golden angel wings.
• White rabbits tend to appear in the Precious Moments franchise quite often.
• Mattel's "Miracle Baby" toys has a female white bunny who is the mascot for the toys.
• Several in the Sylvanian Families toyline: The Periwinkle milk rabbit family and the Chocolate rabbit family (who despite their name, are mostly white save for the tip of their ears) are the most prominent.
• In the Tamagotchi series, the white-furred Lovelitchi resembles a rabbit with her rabbit-like ears.

Video Games

• The rabbit villager named Ruby in the Animal Crossing games is white with red eyes. She specifically describes herself as albino.
• In the Bloody Roar series, Alice's beast form is a giant, anthropomorphic bunny (the fur can vary depending on the color pallete selected, but the default form is always white and she's depicted as such in official art).
• Funtime with Buffy: Buffy is a white rabbit with pink ears, paws, and belly.
• Mario Party Advance: A special case in a franchise like Mario where bunnies do come in different colors. The minigame Grabbit has a solo player catch as many white rabbits, which are mischievously running within a prairie and hiding in their burrows, as possible. If the player fails to capture a rabbit and clashes against a wall, they'll be stunned and waste precious time. Every captured rabbit grants points and adds extra seconds to the time limit. In Shroom City mode, seven rabbits have to be captured under a time limit.
• General Makora from Namu Amida Butsu! -UTENA- represents the Rabbit in the Eastern Zodiac and thus he has white hair and clothes with a largely white color scheme.
• The Fire-type starter Pokémon in Pokémon Sword and Shield, Scorbunny, is a white rabbit with orange/yellow fur accents. Its evolutions have white fur too, though Raboot also has black/red fur fashioned like a training outfit while the fur on Cinderace's lower body resembles red-orange football shorts and blue football socks and boots.
• In Potion Permit, Bubble has a pet white rabbit named Cotton, and she gets worried when the latter gets sick because there aren't many rabbits like her on Moonbury Island due to habitat destruction. Bubble used to have another white rabbit as a kid, which was a gift from her mother before she passed away. Conserving Cotton's species is what inspired Bubble to become a ranger.
• In Roco Kingdom, one of the ice mons, Daermaodou, is a white creature greatly resembling a bunny.
• The Wolf and the Waves: The bunnies on the island are defenseless white fluffballs the player can kill for health.

Web Animation

• Snowball, the main character of Bunnykill, is the only major white bunny of the main cast.
• Melody Briar, one of the main characters in True Tail.

Webcomics

• Pooky Bunny, the protagonist of AntiBunny is a blue eyed white rabbit. However, Pooky is also a chain smoking cynic with depression.
• By the Tail has Ivory Monroe, one of the call girls of Melody's.
• In Freefall, Florence's Lunch and Dinner.
• Kevin & Kell: White tends to be the predominant color for rabbits in the comic, but the trope ranges from being played straight (both versions of Danielle is one of the nicest characters) to being played with (Coney's nice, but she's also an omnivorous predator thanks to her hybrid heritage, with all that entails), to subversions (Bentley is a career criminal and Wendell is a little too fond of troublemaking) to double subversions (Angelique is a Corrupt Corporate Executive, but since she lost her rabbit license for selling their secrets to R.L., legally she's not a rabbit, and passes herself off as a rat), to aversions (Kevin's political opponent Fran Caudal is a cream yellow rabbit), and even an inversion (one of Miranda's dads is a black rabbit, but he's a nice if overprotective man).

Web Original

• The short-lived e-card service Zoobe (the idea was, you could record a message and then use their software to pitch it up and lip-sync one of many animal characters to it) had a white bunny character that became a viral breakout star when people started making... interesting videos with her. You can learn more about it here.

Western Animation

• Arthur: Buster Baxter, D.W.'s friend Emily, Binky's friend Molly, her little brother James, the Show Within a Show superhero Bionic Bunny, and Prunella's friend Marina are all white rabbits. Some background rabbit characters are brown, however.
• Big Buck Bunny: The titular character is a white rabbit. After he snaps, he applies camouflage to his face and body before heading off to set up the traps for revenge.
• The cast of Alice's Wonderland Bakery includes Fergie, a descendant of the white rabbit from the 1951 Disney film.
• Blue's Clues & You!: One of Blue's classmates is a white bunny named Pearl. She's shown to have albinism, needing a walking stick and outdoor shades to find her way around better.
• Brandy & Mr. Whiskers: The titular rabbit character is white.
• Bugs Bunny: The prototype Bugs from 1937, dubbed "Happy Rabbit". He didn't become something closer to the familiar old grey hare until two years later.
• Codename: Kids Next Door: The class pet of the first grade class at Gallagher Elementary is a white bunny named Mr. Fluffalupagus.
• Elinor Wonders Why: Elinor is a white rabbit. By extension, her parents and other extended family members as well.
• Molang: The titular Molang is a white rabbit.
• Miraculous Ladybug: Fluff, kwami of the Rabbit Miraculous, is a white rabbit with blue eyes and ears. Her Miraculous is a pocket watch and grants time powers.
• My Little Pony:
  • My Little Pony 'n Friends: Habbit, the Moochick's long-suffering assistant, is an all-white rabbit, complete with pink ears and a pink nose. Notably, in his debut in Rescue at Midnight Castle, he's brown — his all-white appearance was created for the TV series.
  • My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: Fluttershy's pet is a white rabbit named Angel Bunny. Fluttershy is the sweetest and kindest member of the mane six. Angel himself is rather questionable in his disposition. Outside of Angel, most regular rabbits are also depicted as pure white; other colors, like brown or grey, usually only turn up when multiple rabbits are present in a single shot.
• Peter Rabbit: Lilly Bobtail is mostly of the light-grey variety.
• Ricochet Rabbit and Droop-a-Long Coyote: Ricochet has white fur except for his tan muzzle.
• South Park: In an Easter episode parodying The Da Vinci Code, the secret heir to the papacy is revealed to be a white rabbit named Snowball.
• The Tale of the Great Bunny: The titular great bunny is white all over.

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