Anime review: Ergo Proxy (2006)

I remember having dropped this very early the first time I tried it maybe a decade ago but this autumn was so lacking in decent anime that I decided to give it another chance.

The overall style and ambiance is "aggresively" 2000s, very reminiscent of the legendary Kino no Tabi through its episodic nature held together by very consistent atmosphere and other classics like Texhnolyze or Mushishi for the occasional bleakness and slow pacing.

But the most 2000s aspect (other than the OP/ED and Rei's "Evanescence makeup") is the very transparent obedience to the rule of cool. Even the writer says that the title was chosen because it sounded cool.

This can work when you're artsy and talented enough but sadly, instead of completely aping the aforementioned works, it burdened itself with a middling plot that distracted it from its core value and made it lean in the Psycho-Pass direction.

The second large mistake of this anime isn't unrelated: its length, or more precisly its pacing. Some plot-heavy arcs in the middle felt either too ponderous and long (the Commune and Halos/Asura ones) or unevenly paced… yet I wouldn't remove any of them. After thinking out loud, the need for these arcs to fit perfectly inside 1 or 2 episodes and that final impression means that 24 minutes may be too much in those cases.

I still liked it outside of these few plodding passages and can honestly say it had a lot of personality (I mean, look at the game show and Walt Disney episodes…), like most stuff of that era. Even with Vincent being a bit boring, I grew attached to our sexy tsundere and robololi but also some of the secondary roles like Raul Creed.