Whoever Steals This Book

Born into a legendary family of book collectors, Mifuyu Mikura lives in Yomunagamachi, a town so obsessed with reading that her great-grandfather built its central library, Mikura Hall. The twist? Mifuyu genuinely hates books. She wants nothing to do with them. Which is a real problem when a thief breaks into Mikura Hall, steals rare volumes, and triggers an ancient curse that warps the entire town into a tangle of giant plants and collapsing story dimensions. Now the one person who has to fix everything — by literally diving into the narratives of the stolen books to retrieve them — is the girl who's never wanted to open a book in her life. Alongside her is Mashiro, a mysterious dog-eared girl whose deal is not immediately clear but who clearly knows more about what's happening than she lets on. The whole movie has this layered, mysterious atmosphere where each book world Mifuyu enters has its own distinct visual identity, and Michiru Oshima's score ties it all together with this sense of magical unease. It's a single movie from Kagome Company, based on a novel, and it does a lot with its runtime. If you liked Re:Creators and its meta take on fictional worlds bleeding into reality, or the way Fushigi Yuugi pulls characters into a literal book, this hits similar territory but with a moodier, more mystery-driven angle. The irony of a book-hater being forced to live inside stories carries the whole thing.