Cinnamon Ass

The ED for this episode is Paranoid Android by Radiohead, which I’m sure many of you reading this will know (I live about ten minutes walk away from Thom Yorke!); it’s appropriately depressing. However, as it’s credited as the “Main Theme” and I believe a different ED has been announced (I can’t be bothered to waltz over to the main website to check!) I don’t think it’s permanent. The animation is non-existent; angular credits over brownish clouds, woo.

In the futuristic, post-apocalyptic Romdo City, humans co-exist with artificial androids and other robots known as “Autoreivs”, ranging from industrial models to more humanoid ones. An epidemic of a disease called Cogito has been sweeping through the Autoreivs, corrupting their programming to give them free will. Lil Meyer and her sidekick Autoreiv Iggy investigate Cogito infections, but Lil is attacked by a monstrous humanoid thing; she (rightly) suspects that the central intelligence bureau, newly headed up by Raul, is covering something up, and it seems she may be more involved than she realised as she is placed in danger in her own home; meanwhile, the seemingly innocuous Vincent Rowe, an Autoreiv technician, may know more about what’s going on than it first appears, and judging from the pre-airing info and the credits the Autoreiv child he repairs for an obnoxious aristocrat, Pino, is going to be important along the way.

Hmmmm. Ergo Proxy is intriguing. But it’s not grabbed me in the way that the first episodes of other intriguing shows like Noein or Fantastic Children have. I think the biggest problem is the maddening dialogue; not only is it damn hard to understand, but everything is left cryptic. We don’t know what people are referring to when they talk about particular things, and we get very little exposition to ease us into the story; I understand that watching the Previews that WOWOW showed for a few weeks beforehand clear some of this up, but based on the first episode alone it’s hard to tell exactly what is supposed to be going on. This isn’t a bad thing per se - I love mysteries in anime - but Ergo Proxy is a little on the impenetrable side.

On the other hand, though, it’s an amazingly well made show. The atmosphere, while rather generically Blade Runner-esque, is really well done, with unsurprisingly fantastic art direction and animation; the world of Romdo is excellently realised. The characters also seem as though they could be intriguing once we know a little more about them; Lil, while goth beyond compare, is a nice change of pace from most anime heroines, and I’ll be very interested to learn more about Vincent in particular, leaving aside the enigmatic supporting cast members like the kid who seems to know a lot about the monsters and the imperious-sounding woman giving Raul orders.

So I’m tentatively looking forward to more Ergo Proxy; I can’t unhesitantly recommend it based on one episode, but it looks to be an interesting show at least.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 1st, 2006 at 1:38 am and is filed under Ergo Proxy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.