With the encouragement of my friends, I’ve decided to continue my efforts to spotlight anime films of note. This one was making headlines in Japan just a few months ago.

What’s It About? When the digital world she calls home is hacked by an unknown entity, DEVA security officer Angela Balzac assumes a flesh-and-blood form and travels to the wasteland known as Earth to find the source.

STRAIGHT UP: Smart concepts, but dry presentation. 3/5

What I Liked

Top-notch voice casting – Since voice actors in Japan often come with their own fanbases, landing the right one can be a big deal. This film features not just one, but three A-list talents with industry veteran Shinichiro Miki, multiple award-winner Hiroshi Kamiya, and a rare recent appearance by fan-favorite Rie Kugimiya. The strong acting gives the characters a feeling of depth and vibrance that, due to a thin narrative, they might have otherwise lacked.

A worthy premise – Over the course of her mission, Angela – who has spent most of her existence as a digitized human consciousness – meets Dingo, a human born and raised on the post-apocalyptic Earth; and Frontier Setter, a self-aware AI that has come to its own conclusions about what it means to be human. Through these encounters, a movie that begins with the feeling of a sci-fi action thriller becomes an introspective piece about what it means to be human, examined from three very different perspectives. It’s one of the most thought-provoking core themes I’ve encountered in anime in some time.

What I Disliked

The Toei Animation Engine – Rakuen Tsuiho is entirely rendered in this unique graphics engine designed by Toei Studios, which attempts to blend the advantages of CGI with the cel-shaded look of traditional animation. It’s impressive, but still a work in progress, as the characters’ appearances and movements still step lightly into the uncanny valley.

Exposition overload – The filmmakers have imagined a world that’s far too complex to be fully explored in a 2-hour movie, which doesn’t stop them from trying anyway. As a result, long stretches of the film are filled with nothing but characters breathlessly explaining things to the audience and each other, which does flesh out the world and its history at the expense of the plot at hand.

Not enough DEVA – Considering that Angela’s digital homeworld, DEVA, is one of the most interesting concepts introduced in the film, it’s a shame that almost none of the action unfolds there. Such a setting offers many opportunities for exciting, creative storytelling (see Hosoda’s Summer Wars for a great example of this), but Rakuen Tsuiho is content to leave that potential mostly untapped.

The robot fights – They’re exciting and beautifully animated, but they feel very tacked-on in the context of the rest of the movie. It’s like the execs didn’t have any confidence that people would want to watch the core film, so they threw in some robots just to make it more merchandise-friendly.

Needless fanservice – It would be easier to take this film seriously if Angela wasn’t wearing a tight cyber-thong for most of it. I suspect this was the work of the marketing execs again.

CLOSING THOUGHT: It’s difficult for me to describe this movie without going into detail about the meta-concepts that come up in the interactions between its characters, which would incidentally result in me spoiling the whole thing. Due to the nature of its content, Rakuen Tsuiho is an extremely subjective experience – your enjoyment will depend largely on whether or not you find its dialogues engaging and/or intellectually stimulating. I did, to the point that I feel I can recommend this film even in spite of some serious grievances I have against it. There’s too much dialogue and too little of anything else, an unfortunate hallmark of scriptwriter Gen Urobuchi; the material is much better suited for a 13-episode TV series than a feature-length film; the ending is weirdly unsatisfying; and in general, there are other works of science fiction out there that handle some of the same concepts more comprehensively. That said, this has the feel of an ambitious and forward-thinking anime production at a time when those have become extremely rare, and I have to admire it for that.