One Last MealCartoon

▣Logline

A mysterious restaurant that serves the last meal to the dead. To become a certified chef, apprentice Stella must prepare final meals for six departed souls.

▣ Setting

After death, a soul passes through five Gates before reaching Afterland (the world beyond death). Each Gate centers on an aspect of memory—place, food, attire, and more—and its Gatekeeper helps the dead recover a cherished memory so they can cross over with it intact. Among these is a restaurant that prepares the last meal. Stella, an apprentice chef working there, must welcome six souls, find the dishes bound to their dearest memories, serve them, and guide each guest safely on to Afterland to earn her place as an official chef.
 

There is a restaurant that serves the dead their last meal. Stella works here as an apprentice chef. She admires the master chef and takes a promotion test to become an official chef. To pass, she must find the most precious food hidden in the memories of six deceased guests, serve it to each of them, and guide them safely to Afterland, the world beyond death that souls reach by crossing the Five Gates. The first guest is Betty, a six year old girl. She repeats only one wish, that she wants to eat a unicorn. Stella enters Betty’s memories to search for clues, but the memory treats her as an intruder and its guardians attack. After many twists she discovers why the unicorn matters. Betty has lived in a hospital since birth with a terminal illness. On her sixth birthday she goes outside for the first time, to an amusement park, and her happiest moment is holding a unicorn plush in her parents’ arms. When she later receives a terminal prognosis and sees her parents crying in secret, she fears they will abandon her and clings to the unicorn as her only family. Stella returns and serves a unicorn shaped ice cream. Betty transforms into her adult self because in life she remained in a coma and fought the illness for twenty years. Her parents arrive at the restaurant. Without recognizing their grown daughter who wears a mask out of shame for having once resented them, they share the ice cream together. The parents depart for Afterland first and Betty follows with a smile. After the first test Stella is shaken. Ego, a small being she met inside Betty’s memories, now follows her around. Before leaving, Betty also handed her an empty potion bottle. Unsure what it is and afraid to ask the master chef, Stella goes to the Tailor in the city, one of the Five Gatekeepers who outfits the dead. The Tailor is not there. An old woman appears instead and tells her that drinking the potion can restore fragments of memories from life. The woman passes Stella a bottle filled with potion and disappears. When Stella returns, the second guest arrives without warning. Isabel, a twenty one year old woman with a brash manner, demands the most expensive food in the world. Stella chases clues in Isabel’s memories. Despite fancy clothes, Isabel’s life looks threadbare. She works in a shabby diner and is treated with contempt. In a later memory she has married a nobleman, yet she is not happy. She learns that he married her because she resembles his late ex wife and that he killed the woman in a drunk driving crash. Terrified, Isabel flees and slips on the stairs. As she dies, she thinks of the older sister figure who worked with her at the diner and protected her when her family cast her out. Isabel hated poverty so much that she married into wealth, but she realizes the plain soup her sister made was a priceless luxury to her. Stella returns and serves a simple, watery soup. The second test ends.