Frontier Setter

Expelled from Paradise is a 2014 science fiction film from Japan. It runs 104 minutes and opened in Japanese theaters on November 15, 2014. A month later, Aniplex of America showed it in 15 theaters in the United States. Toei Animation made the film together with Nitroplus, and the studio Graphinica did the animation work. Seiji Mizushima directed it. The story was written by Gen Urobuchi, a writer famous for dark and thoughtful anime, and the music is by Narasaki. The whole film is made with computer graphics (CGI), but it is drawn to look much like hand-drawn anime. The film imagines a far future where most people have left their bodies behind. They live as digital minds on DEVA, a huge station in space. Life there happens inside a computer world, a kind of endless virtual reality. People can shape their surroundings and do not need food, sleep, or health. To the people of DEVA, this is paradise. But not everyone can live there forever. How much freedom and space a person gets depends on how useful they are to the system. Earth, in contrast, is now a dry and empty planet. Fewer than two percent of humans still live on the surface. People on DEVA see Earth as a dirty, backward place that they are happy to forget. The main character is Angela Balzac, a young and very proud officer in DEVA's security force. She is smart, confident, and eager to rise in rank. A problem comes up that DEVA cannot solve from space. A mysterious hacker called Frontier Setter keeps breaking into the station's systems. No one knows who or what this hacker is. The signals seem to come from Earth. Angela takes the job of going down to find this person. To do it, she must live inside a real, physical body for the first time in a long while. Her new body is grown just for this mission. She has to deal with things she has forgotten, such as hunger, pain, tiredness, and getting sick. On Earth she works with a local agent named Dingo, a relaxed and clever man who knows how to survive in the wasteland. Angela and Dingo see the world in very different ways, and they often argue. Together they search the empty lands for clues about Frontier Setter. Under its action scenes, the film asks big questions. What makes a life truly free? Is a perfect digital world really better than a hard life in a real body? Can a machine or a program think and dream like a person? The story looks at these ideas through Angela's growth, as she starts to notice small joys in the physical world that she never knew she had lost. The film also has plenty of excitement. There are fast chases, gunfights, and big battles with giant robots, called mecha in anime. These scenes use the CGI style to show smooth, detailed motion. The bright look of the action mixes with the quiet, lonely feeling of the empty Earth. The film has stayed popular for years. A sequel, Expelled from Paradise: Resonance from the Heart, was announced in 2024 and is set for release in November 2026. A visual novel game set in the same world was also announced in 2026.