I just finished watching Ergo Proxy, one of the more interesting and complex anime series I've been slowly working my way through via NetFlix. It took longer for me to finish this show than usual because two of the discs arrived unwatchable due to deep scratches or cracks and I had to wait for NetFlix to send replacements. Sadly, it seems that the more esoteric a movie is the more likely it is that NetFlix's copy will be damaged. Arrgh!
Visually, Ergo Proxy was sort of a fusion of 2D and 3D animation techniques. I found the look of the series to be quite beautiful and well done, especially when compared to some of the older anime titles I've watched lately. It did have its problems, though. Sometimes a character seemed to be fully CGI rendered and other times they were obviously hand drawn. Most of the vehicles were CGI as well as many of the backgrounds.
Unlike some anime shows (yes, Agent Aika, I'm looking at you!), there is very little "fan service" in this series. There was one scene where the character Re-L Mayer works out in her underwear for no good reason but it's over quickly and I'll forgive the directors for introducing that bit of eye candy. Being male, I like a little fan service in my anime from time to time :-) but I think it has its place and a series as sophisticated as Ergo Proxy could have done without it.
Story-wise, Ergo Proxy is a dark, dystopic vision of the future thousands of years after an ecological collapse of some sort. Humans live in huge domed cities ruled by regents and served by robotic AIs that may or may not be gaining consciousness. What I found especially appealing about this show is that it's filled with tons of philosophy references and cyberpunk themes such as Descartes and cloning. And as in the Matrix trilogy, several of the characters are named after classical philosophers. There are also thinly veiled references to religious themes and greek myths such as the flight of Icarus.
Ergo Proxy was one of those shows that makes you work. You can't just pop in an episode and veg-out in front of it and expect to keep up. At times the dialogue can be difficult to follow and concepts get thrown at you quickly and with little opportunity for you to absorb what's going on. This is especially apparent in the last few episodes when you finally find out what the Proxys are and how everything relates.
I thoroughly enjoyed this series but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone new to anime. I think its unrelenting darkness and deep, opaque philosophy themes could be a turn-off for the uninitiated. And those with short attention spans need not apply as this is a long series of 23 episodes and several of them are used to build tension or as setups for later episodes. Viewers without the perseverance to push on through the WTF?-factor generated by those episodes would find them an easy place to write the series off. That would be a mistake. But even with that said, this series is good stuff and worth checking out if you're into weird shows that make you think.
