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Read or Die (2001) on Netflix

NR20011h 30mAdventureAnimationFantasy

Yomiko Readman, a British Library agent who controls paper, holds a rare German book of sheet music. With Drake Anderson and Nancy Makuhari she hunts whoever attacked the Library of Congress.

  • Netflix3.7/5
  • IMDb7.3/101,555 votes
  • Rotten TomatoesNot available

Trailer

Plot summary

Yomiko Readman, a substitute schoolteacher in Jinbo-cho, Tokyo, spends her free time buying books and retreating into them. On one shopping trip she comes away with an ultra-rare German first edition, die Unsterbliche Liebe, whose pages carry handwritten sheet music, and a superhuman attacker riding a mechanical grasshopper tries to take the volume from her. She fights back, shaping and controlling paper, and a man in a suit asks her to accompany him. She works as an agent of the British Library Special Operations Division, which locates and protects rare books, and is sent with the American operative Drake Anderson to look into the attack on the Library of Congress. There she meets the fellow agent Nancy Makuhari, and the two are paired on the case.

Cast

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Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Read or Die (2001)

Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.

  • Writer Hideyuki Kurata first pitched the OVA around a male lead, Hiraga Gennai, who would use electricity as a weapon, but SME rejected the idea and thought the project should be shelved. Kurata went back to the original proposal of a female hero and recycled the Hiraga plot in Episode 1.
  • Kurata first planned villains based on Thomas Edison and the Wright Brothers but dropped them because "American historical figures tend to be protected by things like portrait rights." To avoid lawsuits he switched to German historical figures, and SME green-lit his pitch.
  • The three episodes of the OVA took up to two and a half years to complete; the staff met on a monthly basis in coffee shops and later moved to once-a-month, four-hour phone meetings to discuss progress and exchange ideas.
  • Masashi Ishihama, the OVA's character designer and animation director, called the work a turning point in his career because it was the first time he had been hired in the position of animation director.
  • Yomiko Readman's look was modeled on actress Miki Nakatani, whom writer Hideyuki Kurata was following in the 1999 TV drama Keizoku, and her bedhead hair mirrored Nakatani's disheveled character, Jun Shibata.
  • A character named Jiggy Stardust, heavily prominent in Kurata's manuscript of the first light novel and an important British Library staff member, was to be written into the OVA, but was axed due to time constraints despite Taraku Uon submitting rough designs.

Stills

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