Audience reviews
5 · Sample from the first available page, separate from the total number of ratings.
Cristina_G
We follow the surreal experience of two British hunters caught up in an eerie forest scene. I loved this version a lot more than the 1958 stop-motion film. In the first they were better behaved but it’s their antics in this later version that make the story compelling and very much worth watching.
This is hand-drawn animation that’s beautifully made. The art is gorgeous and I loved the almost monochrome and surreal quality of the forest’s Autumn colours. Unlike the first film, it has no words except for what we read on the restaurant notices. It doesn’t need them anyway, the story tells itself well. The music and sound effects are also quite effective in adding to the storytelling. Finally, I love the wit of the title’s wordplay.
I haven’t read the original story by Kenji Miyazawa so I…
Read at the sourceBizancio
Excuse me, I'm Spanish and I don't usually write in English. If you want you can read my review in Spanish.
Kenji Miyazawa is one of the best known Japanese authors internationally. One of the reasons for his "relatively" recent prestige has to do with the adaptation of part of his works to anime. The first of them was Night on the Galactic Railroad (1985) thanks to the Group TAC study. But the period of greatest abundance was the 90s. This interest in the author materialized in animation with the medium-length film Spring and Chaos (1996), but also with the work reviewed: The Restaurant of Many Orders (1991). There is a later version in the same decade, but it lacks the benefits of the Tadanari Okamoto version. He is sorry that the independent animator died before completing it because o…
Read at the sourcepanuru
This short is very interesting, even without any dialogue, can stir your curiosity for what lies ahead. Is artistically sublime and the characters, animals, everything seemed to be painting a picture of the hand that suddenly began to move. There was something missing to make the experience more satisfying, but is artistically sublime.
Read at the sourceHybridMedia
Based on a short story by Kenji Miyazawa, it tells a tale of two British hunters getting lost in the woods and discovers a strange restaurant. Mainly, it is a situation of Man vs. Nature or hunters becoming the hunted.
Like Angel’s Egg, this short doesn’t have any dialogue at all. I’ll admit that no dialogue did bother me a bit, but I was completely OK with that. Sometimes it takes more than dialogue to do any story right. Once again like Angel’s Egg, it has that eerie atmosphere but this time, it doesn’t give away that it’s haunted. Once you enter the restaurant, the realization of it being haunted will come to you sooner or later.
Instead of the typical Japanese look, the animation has borrowed the European pastel style and it did work……at a few times. For me, it can look very lazy a…
Read at the sourcestarshinesMonet
This wonderful film tells the story of man verses nature in it's most imaginative and primative state. Reminiscent of more European animation styles than Japanese, this anime had more of a pastel or artistic look to it, much like that of Hedgehog in the Fog, The Man Who Planted Trees or anything by Katou Kunio.
With nothing in the way of real dialog to assist us, this anime used incredible sound effects, music, and it's animation to convey the story and moods to the audience. I found this method to be more successful than if there had been dialog and was excited and spooked the whole time and couldn't wait to see what might happen next! The sound and music in this anime really shine through and make this something very special indeed.
Also, I saw this film raw (which means I could not re…
Read at the source