When watching Expelled from Paradise, you get this incredible sense of familiarity: like the feel of a heavy winter coat pulled out of storage for the season. The kind that always seems to feel just right no matter how many years you’ve owned it. But that familiarity, while great, can be an anchor for works trying to reach great heights. Another word for “familiar”, after all, is “predictable”.

Let’s start with the casting: Wendee Lee, Steven Blum, and Johnny Yong Bosch. Not exactly unknowns in the world of anime. In fact, combined, they’ve probably been in about 70% of the anime I watched from ages 13-23. This, obviously, isn’t a problem in and of itself; we don’t begrudge movies because they star Brad Pitt or Jennifer Lawrence, after all. But their voices are just SO recognizable, that hearing the voices with a similar character that they’ve played before pulls you out of the experience of the movie. You don’t see Dingo, the tracker-for-hire because all you hear is Spike Spiegel, bounty hunter. Also, I’m pretty sure Johnny Yong Bosch is only capable of one voice, making basically every character he plays sound like Vash the Stampede to my ears. 

Now, it’s important to remember that these are problems with me, not the movie. In fact, the movie itself is good… but, again, all too familiar. If you’ve seen Dances with Wolves (1990), Avatar (2009), Pocahontas (1995), or The Last Samurai (2003), you know how the story goes: character from one culture learns to appreciate another culture that they thought was inferior to their own and, eventually, has to defend it from their own culture, usually in some kind of armed combat. Same deal with with Expelled from Paradise, but with a cyberpunk twist, taking the idealized version of the post-singularity dream of your brain into some massive virtual reality world and contrasting it with a nightmare post-singularity scenario of nano-machines turning the bulk of the planet into a barren dustbowl. 

This movie takes some serious cues from Cowboy Bebop, Trigun, and Ghost in the Shell. Not doing it any favors in the familiarity front, but it certainly doesn’t hurt it either. Those are all A-Level anime and if you take the best elements from A-Level stuff and combine them, chances are good you’ll end up with something at least decent. This movie was more than decent. It was good.

All told, Expelled from Paradise is a solid film. Go watch it if you like sci-fi anime