R.O.D. - Read or Die
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Okay. The Royal British Library has a Division of Special Operations. Okay? There are these James Bond type spies whose mission it is to retrieve rare books. The person in charge is called Joker, though he seems to report to someone called the Gentleman. Joker has a cute and competent, if somewhat bumbling, secretary, named Wendy. But enough of that. Some of these spies have super powers. The main one is Yomiko Readman (whom I love), codenamed "the Paper." Her power is... well, basically, she can turn paper into pretty much anything. She is also seriously addicted to books, nothing seems more important to her than reading as many books as she can get her hands on. She's rarely aware of anything around her when reading. I mean anything.

Anyway, when some villain makes a bunch of clones of great historical figures (none of whom I seem to have ever heard of, except Beethoven; and btw, his "Death Symphony" is going to cause all humans to kill themselves- though the piece played in the movie sounds like "Ode to Joy" to me, and suicide is rather the opposite of the effect it normally has on me) and starts stealing rare books for a reason that eludes me, Yomiko gets teamed up with an American commando (with no super powers) named Drake Anderson, and another agent named Nancy Makuhari, codenamed "Miss Deep," whose power is to phase through solid objects. At first I guess they're just supposed to prevent these clones- which are called I-Jin, and also have super powers- from stealing books, but then it turns out they want to destroy all humans and leave behind a new Paradise, because we've all messed the world up so bad, or whatever. So now our heroes have to stop them from doing that. I still have no idea how the book stealing figured into that, unless they just wanted to have some decent reading material for after the human race was eliminated.

But anyway, there's an evil clone of Nancy, too, and um... well, things get complicated. I dunno what else to tell you, except it was all pretty damn cool, and the animation was very clean, I liked it. And the story really isn't very strange, by anime standards, but just strange enough. There's a 4 volume manga that I've read, which was also decent. Then there's a "Read or Dream" manga, which I haven't read yet, and that, I guess, leads into "R.O.D. the TV," which I do want to see eventually, after reading the manga. Of course I should also rewatch this OVA someday and try to do a better review of it. I may not like it as much as I want to, but Yomiko Readman is still one of my favorite anime characters ever....