30th Dec 2007
Ergo Proxy
http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/encyclopedia/anime.php?id=5115
Spent all night on this and am now 11 episodes into the series. Ian recommended this a few months ago, but I didn’t get around to watching it till now. I’m not usually into post-apocalyptic sci-fi andriod stuff since it usually ends up addressing the same issues, but this one seemed potentially interesting.
On the whole I have to admit that the anime is quite pretentious. Every episode there are a million references to some philosopher or author or psychologist or ancient civilisation mythology. There was one episode where I’m pretty sure they said ‘raison d’etre’ at least 10 times in the space of 5 minutes. I’m sure it would all be deeply profound and meaningful, if I could only understand the relationship between the references and the plot. Unfortunately I’m just not cut out to make such obscure connections without Wikipedia-like help, none of which is offered in this case.
The animation is a bit too dark, literally. In the first episode especially, I just couldn’t tell what was going on cos it was all black and shadowy. The main female character, Real (what a typically stupid anime name, I know), is your typical headstrong determined female character, except she wears way too much eyeshadow. Isn’t eyeshadow just supposed to go on the lids?? She has eyeshadow below her eyes too. Maybe that’s how goth chicks are supposed to wear their make up? The main male character, Vincent, is your typical useless emotional male character, and his eyes are closed for the most part of the first 3 episodes. I don’t even know how that works. I can understand if your eyes are just really small (like my dad’s), but clearly this guy has visible eyes. And it’s not like he’s smiling or anything. Are they actually closed or is he squinting or something? Why is he squinting? Why does he stop squinting after episode 3? Sadly these are questions that I doubt the story will ever get around to addressing.
The first couple of episodes are pretty baffling and there’s a lot of dialogue that serves more to obfuscate than anything. Anymore and they would have been pushing it with the whole suspense thing, but the plot begins to move along pretty nicely after that (although I still didn’t get what happened with Halos/Asura…too bad no one who reads this will be able to tell me pfft). I might have stayed up all night watching this, but nothing happened episode 11 except that the storywriters got to show off how much philosophical bullshit they can spill without being in the least bit illuminating.
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