How Beastars Rejects Humanity

gamerant.com:

The animated world has a long history with animal characters, dating back to the oldest Disney and Hannah Barbera cartoons. While the animalistic aspects of these characters are usually only in their aesthetics, Beastars aims to make them matter.

Beastars is the brainchild of mangaka Paru Itagaki, and is her best-known work to date. The series is set in a world inhabited by anthropomorphic(human-like) animals, whose society is largely based on our own. Beastars features a strong conflict between carnivorous animals and herbivorous animals, as the former are known to occasionally murder and eat the latter. It follows a young wolf boy, Legoshi, as he attempts to discover who in his school ate his alpaca friend, Tem, while also navigating social life and love as a large, imposing carnivore.

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You might be unfamiliar with the word, but you are definitely familiar with its use. Mickey Mouse, Sonic the Hedgehog and Bugs Bunny are all easy examples of anthropomorphic characters. Usually these characters feature slightly more humanized versions of the usual animal anatomy (e.g Sonic the Hedgehog standing up, having long legs and arms etc.). Usually this is done to use the appeal of animals, while still making them more relatable to the human audience. Beastars’ characters however, are far more on the human side of the design spectrum, and it is those human aspects that are used only aesthetically.

Functionally, they have human bodies with stylized animal heads and tails. If Haru, Legoshi’s love interest, didn’t have a rabbit’s head and tail, she wouldn’t look strange for a human girl. There are some examples of this not being the case though. Birds for example have arms that are