AUNT FANNY'S STAR

An elder relative leaves memories and mementos with three young bunnies.

Signaling its theme with its subtitle, the tale begins with the arrival of Great Aunt Fanny to the Bunny household, where she takes over a bedroom but proves to be an easy new addition, being a playful soul with “more silliness in her head than the three little bunnies put together.” (Pleasantly, all of the grown-ups seem to accept the new family arrangement as a matter of course.) Every night she takes Lisa, Linda, and Tony out to the porch to wave at the stars and watch them twinkle back. She also teaches them how to make daisy crowns and willow whistles, shares small treasures from her chest of drawers, and warns that sooner or later she’ll be going “to that place where we were before we were born.” And so it is, when one day she doesn’t wake up, that everyone gathers amid tears to bury her reverently in the woods. Afterward the children, thinking of where she has gone, wave at the stars and watch them twinkle back. Oral echoes the episode’s gentle, low-key tone with scenes of fuzzy anthropomorphic rabbits in cozy country dress and surroundings.

A gentle preview of mortality for young ones, softening but not disguising the prospect and arrival of loss.