Well to start out with the positives, it’s fair to say that Ergo Proxy is definitely a very philosophical and dense anime, and certainly one for a viewer who can disseminate symbolism and isn’t afraid to think for themselves. Taking place in a post-apocalyptic world, it follows Re-l Mayer, a female detective, Vincent Law, an immigrant to the city with a mysterious past, and Pino, an AutoReiv or humanoid robot whose been infected causing her to have feelings & emotions. Ergo Proxy deals with a lot of philosophical themes, such as that of Gnosticism (attaining knowledge as a means of personal salvation), Postmodernism (the rejection of universal meanings or truth), the humanity & ethics of sentient beings, as well as xenophobia and how the government uses ideology to subjugate the population.
Sounds pretty great so far, right? Well my issue with Ergo Proxy is not so much the themes, but how the story is paced to handle them. Ergo Proxy begins as a thriller/mystery with Rei-l investigating strange occurrences across the city. I’m not going to lie, at the beginning I was completely hooked. After the first 3 episodes however Ergo Proxy pivots slightly and turns into an adventure show, with the mystery of who the proxy is already made clear if you were paying attention. At this point I was still somewhat invested in the plot, but after a few more episodes the show loses any semblance of a cohesive story and just becomes a bunch of random episodic stories with little semblance.
Don’t get me wrong some of these episodes are pretty good, but there is also some bizarre and dumb stuff, like the out of nowhere gameshow episode 15 where parts of the plot are literally told to the viewer through exposition of the characters playing their version of Jeopardy, and the strange episode 19 where for whatever reason Pino finds herself in looney tune land. My personal favorite is episode 16, where the ship thingy their riding on stops working, and Rei-L starts going insane because she’s too bored, which means that even in the context of the show the characters were getting bored with the story.
Even in terms of the animation, Ergo Proxy is pretty inconsistent. Rei-l has a really unique and beautiful character design, but her animation shifts from incredibly detailed in some scenes to inconsistent and poorly drawn in others, to the point that the shape of her face and eyes seemed to be constantly changing. Also worth mentioning is that often the animation was so dark that it was hard to make out what was happening. I’ve head Ergo Proxy get praise for its music and sound, but while the background noise did do a good job in building up suspense in the show itself, the opening sounded like a bootlegged version of a bad Linkin Park song.
I hope I’m not sounding too negative, in fact there were a lot of concepts and ideas in Ergo Proxy I liked. In fact I wished the show spent more time on the themes of the AutoReivs gaining the ability to feel emotion, which started out as the prominent theme of the show it slowly ignored more and more as the anime went on. Even if you’re not into philosophy or deep thinking, Ergo Proxy does have a few cool fight scenes and boast good character development, not just among the main caste but the supporting characters as well.
Yet the show is too haphazard to fully do its ideas justice. There are a few other dark philosophical animes I’ve seen such as Angel’s Egg, Texhnolyze, Monster, and Serial Experiments Lain, and while I have mixed opinions on some of them, at least they all had a consistent tone and message, something that Ergo Proxy simply does not have. Yes it is very philosophical and deep show, but I also feel that it is grossly over-analyzed by some fans out there, to the point I’m pretty sure that if they made an episode of just Rei-l taking a shit there would still be fans who would write their whole doctoral thesis about it.
In conclusion, for the philosophical and intellectually inclined Ergo Proxy can be a rewarding show, and perhaps I owe it a rewatch, but if that stuff is for you I would personally recommend something else such as Texhnolyze which do similar themes and ideas but better.
