This is a bastard hard series to write about. More so than almost any other show it demands a commitment to finish all twenty-three (this isn't the series you're looking for, look the other way) episodes before you even really know what it's about. It's also constructed in the same way as almost all anime shows that I've seen, in that it's absolutely a game of two halves. The pacing and tone of the show changes markedly at the eleven/twelve episode mark, that's when you really start to get your emotional payoffs and plot reveals. This is television that displays a phenomenal amount of trust in the viewer.
A plot summary, which contains elements from a thousand and one previous sci-fi stories: Romdeau is a barely held together bubble of "utopia" in a frozen world after an ecological disaster, populated by good citizen humans, middle class immigrants and a robotic working class. When a virus starts making the robots think for themselves and have emotions and the city is terrorised by beings of phenomenal power known as the Proxy, three of Romdeau's inhabitants are compelled to journey out in a tiny boat into the shattered wilderness on a quest to find out who they really are.
To begin with it's so overloaded with ideas that it creaks and strains at the edges and in places comes apart altogether, often in extremely interesting ways. This is one of the series' major strengths, and also its major weakness. The first half of the series is frontloaded with a bunch of dry, unfeeling character designs (not characters) portentously delivering dialogue that's half philosobabble and half deliberately opaque, leaving the viewer running around trying to tie all the threads together. It left me groaning wondering whether I'd have to sit through nearly twelve hours of the same deeply hair-tearing out screenwriting immaturity that made the Ghost in the Shell and Matrix movies so bloody annoying. More philosophers are named than you can shake a stick at, check the series' wikipedia entry for a pretty good list of all the philosoporn on display (I say porn because the series relationship to its references is empty and unfulfilling, and it will be a point of some debate amongst viewers whether writer Dai Sato intended it to be that way). And these tendancies rather come back at the end, leaving you with three final episodes that will take a fair bit of decoding.
There were only three things that really kept me going throughout the first half of the show. Firstly, Pino and Iggy are fascinating characters almost from their first appearance, both are peerless examples of anime's ability to tie characterisation seamlessly into character design. Note the range of expression in Iggy's immobile features. Even before the Cogito virus starts to run its course there is a lot of material here, like most anime, on humanity's often anthropomorphic relationship to technology.
Secondly the little sail/hover boat, curiously named The Four Hundred Rabbits, is a beautifully evocative piece of 3D computer design. It really is a character in its own right, to be filed alongside The Millennium Falcon and Serenity in the annals of great sci-fi ships.
Thirdly, the opening theme. When it's introduced in the series' third episode it strike a peculiarly dissonant note with the content of the show, in that it's an extremely yearning, emotional piece that seems to jar considerably with the cold, empty content of each episode. Some beautiful design work in the credits too.
So after a whole load of underselling, is it actually worth it?
Oh fuck yeah. And I'm not going to spoil it for you. Suffice to say that when the inhuman and pseudo-intellectual bloody mindedness of the opening half starts to crack it does so brilliantly. When the reveals start to come the realisation of what has been going on the whole time spreads like dawn over everything that has come before. There are a series of episodes in the second half that are amongst the finest character studies I've seen. And prepare yourself, because there are a number of just completely bonkers mindfucks that knock you sideways with their audacity. This is a series that continually forces you into the deep end and dares you to float. Essentially, if you're feeling overwhelmed by the endless machinations, Gnostic allegories and academic babble then I'm starting to think that Sato's mission is accomplished, and he's about to blindside you by making you focus on all the wrong clever-clever stuff. Reference points abound, but you might think of it as a cross between AI, Ghost in the Shell, Heart of Darkness, a whole shedload of Gnostic/philosophical texts and Eureka Seven.
At heart, Ergo Proxy is the story of three people getting to know themselves and each other in a tiny little boat far beyond the edge of everything they know. Not a series for everyone, but hugely rewarding with perseverance. |
