Read Or Die
(dr. Koji Masunari 2001)
published in Empire No.73, Sydney, 2007
Who would have thought you could combine something as boringly learned as ‘reading books’ with the high-octane phantasmagoria of anime? The title says it all: Read Or Die. Yomiko Readman works for a Bond-like secret British espionage network housed within … the British Library. She has the mystical power to transform paper into, well, anything. With her fellow spies, she embarks on recovering some ancient tomes which in the hands of evil-doers could destroy the world. That is when she’s not distracted from her pursuit to collect rare books herself. Delightfully nerdy, powerfully animated and a delirious mutation between British bookishness and Japanese apocalyptica.
