Unlike the previous shorts by Okamoto, made in stop-motion, A Well-Ordered Restaurant was made using an animation style reminiscent to the films of Koji Yamamura, with a story evoking several cautionary tales many of us many heard as children, featuring enchanted houses in the woods, usually inhabited by witches or monsters.
Without any single spoken word, the eerie atmosphere gives this a mysterious tone, almost reminiscent to a horror film. The climatic sequence in particular, with the feline monsters revealing themselves it's pretty haunting, though I'm not really sure about the miraculous off-screen escape of the two main characters at the end, when everything seemed to indicate a tragic fate for both, almost feeling like some sort of deus ex machina.
But other than that, this is a pretty solid short, quite ahead of its time.
There is another animated adaptation of this tale, a bit more conventional, directed by Setsuko Shibuichi in the year 1993.
Without any single spoken word, the eerie atmosphere gives this a mysterious tone, almost reminiscent to a horror film. The climatic sequence in particular, with the feline monsters revealing themselves it's pretty haunting, though I'm not really sure about the miraculous off-screen escape of the two main characters at the end, when everything seemed to indicate a tragic fate for both, almost feeling like some sort of deus ex machina.
But other than that, this is a pretty solid short, quite ahead of its time.
There is another animated adaptation of this tale, a bit more conventional, directed by Setsuko Shibuichi in the year 1993.
