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paulisweeabootrash · 6 years

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Series Review: Read or Die (R.O.D. the OVA)

Welcome to another episode of Paul is Weeaboo Trash! Today’s topic is a show I’ve previously seen one episode of, so long ago that I’m almost going in fresh: the OVA (what we in the US would call a “direct to video release”) of Read or Die (2001–2002)! I was lucky enough to grow up in a household where education and fun were not portrayed as opposites, and we had the means to find plenty of fun educational things to do. My parents searched for all kinds of potentially interesting activities, and living in southern New Hampshire, the Boston area was not prohibitively far to go for them. And so I was signed up for Splash, a program one weekend per fall in which MIT students teach middle- and high-school-age kids seminars on a wide variety of topics.

What counted as topics worthy of education was quite broad, however. I ended up in a "class" that consisted of watching one episode each of several anime that the student running the class was a fan of. This was back in the days where anime fandom spread person-to-person by recommendations and there was more emphasis on developing a background knowledge of "classics" among the more informed and/or snootier fans. (I still feel this way a bit because certain tropes and references are so common or influential that being familiar with the original sources can make newer shows suddenly make a lot more sense, but I disapprove of the gatekeeper tendency to look down on people who don't yet know the things "everyone knows".)

I don't remember how many shows we sampled there, but the two that made an impact were Hellsing, which in retrospect was at best questionable for the age of the audience, and was very much not my thing because I have a low tolerance for gore, and the topic of this post, Read or Die, which was very much the kind of thing I wanted to see: a nerd being a badass in a fantastical way. Especially since I was also really into James Bond at the time, so I was probably primed to eat up other media involving a British spy fighting a mysterious secret organization. Since I'm incredibly averse to media piracy and had no clue where to buy anime, though, I never followed up to finish watching it, and eventually it faded from my mind. Until I stumbled across the first volume of the manga for super-cheap at Saboten Con last year, and it flicked some nostalgia switch that reminded me how much I'd enjoyed it at the time, although I barely remember any actual details, so I am practically going in fresh here.

Read or Die follows Yomiko Readman, a teacher, obsessive book collector and reader, and superpowered secret agent who can manipulate paper in nearly any way. Any paper available, from money to ribbons to a briefcase full of blank looseleaf she apparently just brings with her. She uses this power in the course of her service as a secret agent, codename The Paper, working for the British Library?! Along with Miss Deep, who can selectively phase shift, and Drake Anderson, a gruff and dismissive military type (and apparently potter in his cover job), she is assigned to a plan to save the world in a way that vaguely involves collecting books. Saved from whom? The I-jin, clones of historical geniuses with superpowers related to their areas of expertise, such as... knowing stuff about insects, or... uh... spreading Buddhism to Japan... who are going to flashy and violent lengths to steal books the British Library is trying to acquire legitimately. Trust me, it eventually gets explained, and the Big Reveal, although pretty goddamn weird, fits in with the rest of what has been established. Suspend your disbelief enough to accept the I-jin at all, and it’s fine, although still a bit ludicrous.

And I submit that all that is still less weird and ridiculous than your typical superhero or spy movie, and this show does after all have elements of both genres in one. Or, well, more and more superhero and military action as it goes on. Although the theme music uses 60s guitar sounds, chromatic chord changes, and blaring brass hits that are virtually guaranteed to evoke the James Bond theme, and our main cast do work for a secret intelligence agency, they are in quite open military-style conflict with the I-jin -- with the approval of the UN -- and very little that’s actually covert occurs, with the notable exception of something I can’t spoil that happens at the end of ep. 2. And because of the superpower angle, some of the instances of weirdness are not flaws at all but pretty creative implementations of the characters’ powers (using a paper airplane as a lethal weapon?!).

This last point didn’t really fit in organically, but I'd also like to mention a couple of things about the art that I love but don't see often. The very first shot of the series uses multiple flat backgrounds at different distances moving in relation to each other to convey the camera moving across the scene, which I have seen in other animated works (at the moment, I can only think of examples from very old Disney movies off the top of my head), but not in recent ones. I don't know whether it's simply out-of-fashion or this is a result of the shift to CGI so animators figure "why would we do this when we can actually render a city with realistic perspective?" This show also has a particular kind of fluid motion in characters that I’ve seen in many reasonably-high-production-value shows from the 90s and 00s, but rarely in newer shows (Space Dandy being a notable exception). Maybe I'm watching the wrong recent shows, maybe it's just a stylistic choice that's out of fashion, maybe it's harder to pull off convincingly when you're not animating by hand.

I’m glad I finally got to watch this. It’s even better than I remember. Now to get to work on the rest of the manga and the other series. Oh yeah, haha. The abbreviation "R.O.D." stands for both "Read or Die" and "Read or Dream", which are different parts of the same larger series. The Read or Die manga (4 volumes), this OVA series, the Read or Dream manga (also 4 volumes), and a 26-episode TV series all take place in the same narrative universe, rather than the usual model of the anime being an adaptation/retelling of the manga. There is also a light novel series I know nothing about, but it sounds from the Wikipedia article like that is the single ongoing series that is the source for the two manga and two anime. (There is also apparently a barely-related future side story manga.)

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W/A/S: 1/3/3

Weeb: I don’t think there’s much, if anything, in here that would require explanation to a typical Western audience and which isn’t also explained in the dialogue.

Ass: There is a single implied nipple in the opening sequence. Gasp! And Miss Deep's costume design is pretty fanservicey, but only barely more explicitly so than you're likely to get in American media deemed suitable for older children.

Shit: Until the Big Reveal, it's just unclear why anyone involved other than Yomiko should be this interested in acquiring the specific books that serve as the show’s MacGuffin, nor is it clear that the I-jin’s plans extend further than searching for them in a very destructive way, leaving me baffled that the Library immediately makes the connection that the books are key to saving the world. There are a few minor errors in the subtitles and a visual glitch (Blu Ray remaster, please?), and a couple of places where faces just... don’t... look right. Oh, and if you’re watching the dubbed version, add another half point of Shit for Crispin Freeman’s British accent.

And for the first time I feel the need to add a CONTENT WARNING. Usually, I think the review is sufficient to give you the idea whether there is anything likely to be disturbing in a show, but this is different, because the first two episodes have the sort of over-the-top stylized combat you might expect from other action anime or Western superhero media, where even a death comes off as un-shocking. But in ep. 3 of this, there is a shocking pivot. There are several short instances of graphic and sudden violence of kinds that are quite a bit more disturbing and distressing (even when they involve the use of powers) than anything that occurred previously.

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Stray Observations:

- Yes, those of you who know a little Japanese caught that joke: "Yomiko" could be loosely translated as "read girl". Her name is "Read Girl Read Man". Because she likes to read. Get it? Ha! Ha! Ha!

- In the manga, Yomiko is also established to be a literal bibliophile. As in "books, regardless of content, turn her on". I'm kind of glad this is not a plot point in the anime.

- The “secret” operation in the last episode, which is conducted with UN approval and involves an actual military attack with an actual goddamn naval fleet (and collaborating with North Korea to keep the US too distracted to notice it, even though this is a British operation against an organization that literally burned down the White House in the first scene of the first episode) might actually beat the first few episodes of Full Metal Panic! for “worst undercover operation ever”.

#R.O.D.#Read or Die #anime review #weeaboo trash

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