Does Restaurant to Another World Critique the Fantasy Genre

Restaurant to Another World is an Animated television show by Junpei Inuzuka. It tells the story of a restaurant in Japan which is open during the week to regular customers. On Saturdays it closes to regular customers and instead accepts customers through a different door from where odd characters from a completely different world appear.

The show is structured in way that focuses on the Saturday patrons. As they discover the doorways that lead to the restaurant, as they enter into our world and as they are kindly invited to enjoy the food prepared by the chef.

Each person who comes is blown away by the food. Be they royalty, adventurers or dragons. The reaction is always amazement at the quality, the perfection of the food and the consistency of it. We hear stories of how they experience a little bit of our world in terms that would cross the cultural barriers between the real and fantastical worlds (i.e. food)

The back stories make it clear how difficult their world is. Despite (or because) of the existence of mystical creatures like dragons, magic and knights with giant swords. There is much suffering in between any epic story line and continued hardship which is softened by, but not extinguished by, visiting this restaurant once a week.

This, I think, serves to highlight just how ridiculously blessed we are in the modern world to be surrounded by such riches. That we’ve become numb to our good fortune. That our tv and films provide us escape into fantastical worlds that would actually be more dangerous, more difficult to survive and less fun. But we desire to experience these worlds without being able to see just what we’d give up.

The survival horror genre is much like that too. If everyone died, and I survived, what a world I could build by starting from scratch. It’s tempting. And rarely do shows like this focus on the cornetto of truth, that we have such wealth already.

The gratitude of customers from the other world, the way they treat the door as a treasure or sacred, directly informs us about how we could readjust our world view to look upon the simple pleasures of food and the security and safety within which most of us live. We could be happier with what we have.

It’s a quiet animation overall, which only touches lightly upon the epic of the other world. An epic which would be the central concern of any other shows is thrust to the backdrop to hang over the patrons like a cloak, but never detracts from them coming in, ordering amazing food and enjoying the break from that epic.

The chef, for him, he likes making food and likes making people happy. There’s no malice or unfolding narrative for him other than a life well lived through meeting people, making them happy by making them food and maybe trying a foreign flavour every now and then.

Anyway, what do you think? Is this quiet show an answer to big loud epics or is it something else? Comment bellow.

GPF – He who must not be named… Bill Gates?

The comic General Protection Fault has been doing a special story based around the Harry Potter book series but converting the story from magic to computer geekery called Harry Barker. GPF is now doing the second book and in today’s comic we find that he who must not be named is “Bill”.

I’m guessing that the inspiration is “Bill Gates”, considering the time period and the glasses.

Do you think so?

Britonaut Sez, Done in Ubuntu!

Hey weekenders, fancy cheering up after the week long roller coaster ride that was Coronation Street? Did you watch Senator from Vermont Bernie Sanders impassioned fillerbuster against tax breaks for the super rich and can’t seem to get your blood pressure to go down? Have you got a whole spare case of frustration at the treatment of Wikileaks creator Julian Assange?

Then let me cheer you up with a bit of comedy for the holiday season:

And before you start,this was made completely with Ubuntu using Inkscape, totally vector based and is excellent practice for making Ubuntu training and advertising materials.