NYICFF Review: Whoever Steals This Book is a dizzying, delightful bookworm's odyssey

I used to be such a reader. For years of my life, I was averaging a book a week, and I was constantly buying new books, devouring them, filling my shelves. In the past few years, my reading has fallen off drastically. It's honestly alarming. Now, I read maybe two or three books a year. I'm a philistine, filling my time instead with video games, movies, and anime.

Thus, Whoever Steals This Book, which made its North American premiere at the New York International Children's Film Festival yesterday, felt a little bit targeted. By the end, I kind of felt like that oft-quoted moment from Euphoria: "Is this movie about me?" The film is about the joy of reading, the transportive journey of diving into a good book, the sense of community that can come from sharing a beloved tome with a friend or neighbor. It scratched some itch in the back of my brain, like...hey, you should start reading again. And don't worry, I intend to.

I love how devoted this film is to its literary themes, which goes right down to the way it approaches its storytelling. The set-up is very bookish, laying out important backstory and telling us directly who our protagonist is. In this case, it's high school student Mifuyu Mikura, whose family owns an impossibly large collection of books. This library was once open tot he public, a centerpiece of the town. But Mifuyu's grandmother locked the collection away after a large swath of books went missing. Further, it's said she put a curse on the books, making sure no one could ever steal another one of her precious volumes.

Mifuyu, for her part, doesn't want to have anything to do with it. She's decidedly uninterested in literature, and is only back in town to help look after the collection, and her extremely bookish aunt, while her father recovers from an accident. But Mifuyu promptly gets swept up in an adventure that takes her into the worlds of some of the collection's various books. Think The Pagemaster, but make it anime. And instead of notable historical works, she's going into various (fictional) genre titles. It's a lot of fun.

I don't know if it's because I was watching this right after work, or if I was a little tired, but I found Whoever Steals This Book a little hard to follow at times, but in a really pleasant way. This movie has the feel of rushing through a bookstore, grabbing various books off the shelf, and flipping through them at full-speed, trying to figure out what you want to read next. The pace is breathless, light, a rush. I love how time is not wasted here. Mifuyu's adventure begins so suddenly, and barrels along until its thrilling conclusion. It's dizzying and thrilling. I loved trying to keep up. 

And even if my footing wasn't always firm, this isn't a hard plot to keep up with. The basic gist is that Mifuyu and her new shape-shifting friend Mashiro get pulled into various books from Mikura Hall's collection that are the targets of literary thieves. Time is of the essence, as spending too much time in a given story leads to magical transformations, even more magical than being transported into these stories to begin with. Each story has its own genre, sheen, visual language, and the characters from town take on new roles in each one. It's so fun to find yourself dumped into world after world. I particularly loved the film noir story, during which the film takes on a monochromatic sheen.

Whoever Steals is absolutely stunning, with so much imaginative imagery and big bold flourishes. It's action-packed, and keeps finding new visual identities that feel unique but also of a piece. Simply, this movie is a joy and a thrill to watch, constantly reinventing itself while also constantly being a big, blinking sign imploring you to pick up a book. It certainly made me want to get back into reading.