Kaidan Restaurant

Title: Kaidan Restaurant Genre: Comedy, Horror, Mystery, Supernatural Rating: 6.5/10

Summary: Shou transfers from London into Ako's class at Yamazakura Elementary School. Because strange things are always happening in Yamazakura, people call it a cursed town. It's a good thing Shou is interested in paranormal phenomena, because in each episode he, Ako (whom everyone calls Anko), and their friend Reiko are in three short horror stories introduced by the ghostly garcon of the restaurant. But don't worry. The restaurant adjusts the spices so those who don't like scary stories can still enjoy the meal.

Review: So from a first look perspective I would say this is a rather kiddy anime considering the main characters are in elementary school and go on these crazy adventures. And I can’t say I was too far off. Jumping right into the faults of Kaidan Restaurant, the art style was simple and colorful, leaving out the horror in a horror anime. Quite honestly I think that the stories could have really cent a chill down your spine if they took the time to make it a little more gruesome. But as I said this was probably aired on the weekends during kids hour in Japan, so they probably wanted to stay away from that. If anything it was the same style as Scooby Doo but with real ghosts instead of farmer John wearing mask (if that spoiled the Scooby Doo series for you shame on you). Then again these meddling kids can’t seem to stay away from a good ghost story. Another problem I had were some of the characters… well most of them… all of them. I understand that they are just elementary kids and you can’t expect much more than childish pranks, but some of them really need to learn from past experiences. To give you a clue on how the anime works, there are three stories per episode: appetizer, main course, dessert. The appetizer and main course are roughly the same length and take up almost the entire episode. The dessert, however, is very short (5 minutes) and tells the tale of a recent phenomenon. This was probably my favorite part of Kaidan Restaurant. The stories seemed a lot scarier as well as short and sweet. That isn’t to say the first two were bad. In fact, as the anime progressed the stories got scarier and scarier. Some actually made me shiver a little at the end. This is probably what kept me watching, to see just how scary they would make it. The little surprise at the end wasn’t too shabby either. The soundtrack was nothing memorable so I can’t say it is even worth mentioning. The stereotypical horror noses like piano were present though.

Final statements: A kiddy horror anime that isn’t half bad. It did entertain me for a good 23 episodes and the stories did get a lot better. The only real complaint is the art style and characters. Sad to say the stories weren’t amazing and took some time to get going, so it is a low priority watch, a time killer basically.