Anime Review: Rakuan Tsuiho Expelled from Paradise

Heaven (Paradise)....it's not a place on Erf....that nasty dirty place we ruined years ago! Utopia is in The Matrix DEVA...a satellite that orbits Erf and is home to the digitized humans who opted out of a physical existence. So when Deva gets hacked by someone known as Frontier Setter DEVA sends Agent Angela Balzac (really O.o) to track down Frontier Setter on Erf. Angela's contact on Erf is a man named Dingo....

OK the names for the characters are so awful, I admit it, but lets get past that....

The first half of Expelled from Paradise is fairly routine, and feels a bit too similar to GitS....we're looking for a wizard class hacker but instead of a cyber brain in a prosthetic body Angela's conscience is "downloaded" into a flesh and blood body made from stored DNA.
Obviously Angela was inspired to some degree by Sega's virtual Idol Hatsune Miku...

The fan service in this movie is in no short supply and up until the 60 min mark I wasn't expecting anything out of the ordinary from this movie but thankfully I was wrong and when we finally track down Frontier Setter the intelligence level of this movie escalates surprisingly! The movie actually changes up the order of character relevancy and positions Frontier Setter as the primary protagonist and relegates Angela to an observer as Dingo and the criminal hacker bond in ways that the "superior being" (Angela) can not relate to.

Another aspect of Rakuan Tsuiho that I appreciated was that it took the ol' trope of machines destroying or enslaving humanity and turned it on it's head, we enslaved our selves without realizing it. 

And one of the most interesting conversations in the movie occurs between Angela and Dingo after Dingo finds he may have more in common with a self aware AI then a flesh and blood Human that's lived her entire existence in a digital world.  The conversation is actually surprisingly deep and actually involves the values and detriments of a capitalist society.  

The production value of Rakuan Tsuiho is very impressive, The characters and animations are beautiful, the Mecha design didn't impress me but the battle at the end was extremely cool, the sound track fit well.
I enjoyed the movie and the twist in the plot was a welcome change, but all the fan service and Angela's last name made it kinda difficult to take the movie seriously...not that I minded this....
B+