Ergo Proxy (エルゴプラクシー, Erugo Purakushī) is a science fiction suspense anime television series, produced by Manglobe, which premiered across Japan from 25 February 2006 on the WOWOW satellite network. It is directed by Shukou Murase, with screenplay by Dai Sato et al. Ergo Proxy features a combination of 2D digital cell animation, 3D computer modeling and digital special effects. The series has some cyberpunk elements and focuses heavily on the psychology and mentality of its protagonists.

The story initially takes place in a futuristic dome city called Romdo,^[1] built to protect its citizens after a global environmental apocalypse. In this utopia, humans and androids (AutoReivs^[1]) coexist with each other peacefully under a total management system. A series of murders committed by berserk robots infected with the Cogito virus are starting to jeopardize the delicate balance of the social order. Behind the scenes, the government is conducting secret experiments on a mysterious humanoid lifeform called Proxy, which is believed to hold the key to the survival of mankind.

In an interview [1], Dai Sato describes his latest project.

"It is set in the future. A group of robots become infected with something called the Cogito virus, and become aware of their own existence. So these robots, which had been tools of humans, decide to go on an adventure to search for themselves. They have to decide whether the virus that infected them created their identity, or whether they gained their identity through their travels. This question is meant to represent our own debate over whether we become who we are because of our environment, or because of things that are inherent in us. The robots are all named after philosophers: Derrida and Lacan and Husserl."—Dai Sato

A number of characters in the supporting cast are named after various figures taken from both history as well as mythology. Most notably, names of significant profiles in philosophical and psychological sciences appear throughout the series.

• The following characters are all named after French Post-structuralist philosophers: Husserl, Kristeva, Derrida, Lacan, Berkeley, Deleuze and Guattari.
• The character Pino and her name is thought to be a play-on of Pinocchio, there are also some similarities to her and the story of Pinocchio specifically the becoming a real person idea. It also pays homage to Pinoco from the manga Blackjack. Pino's character was partially inspired by Pinoco.
• Episode 1 begins with a quotation from Michelangelo's reply to Giovan Battista Strozzi's epigram [2] for the Night Stature in the Medici Chapel. The opening sequence from Episode 3 onwards features fragments of this quotation in Italian as part of the background graphics montage.

	Caro m' è 'l sonno, e più l'esser di sasso,	Welcome is sleep, more welcome the sleep of stone.
	Mentre che 'l danno e la vergogna dura:	Whilst crime and shame continue in the land;
	Non veder, non sentir, m' è gran ventura;	My happy fortune, not to see or hear;
	Però non mi destar, deh! parla basso	Waken me not - in mercy, whisper low.
—Michelangelo Buonarotti

• In Episode 1, when Vincent is pouring milk into his alphabet cereal, the letters float up in such a way to spell "Awakening".

• The Cogito Virus refers to Descartes' "Cogito ergo sum," which means "I think, therefore I am."

• Inside Regent Donov Mayer's chamber, the stature of two reclining figures on the right is based on Michelangelo's Night and Day stature placed above Giuliano di Piero de' Medici's sarcophagus in Medici Chapel, Florence. In the show, the female figure (Night) represents the voice of Lacan and the male figure (Day) the voice of Husserl. The stature on the left is based on Michelangelo's Twilight and Dawn stature placed above the sarcophagus of Giuliano di Lorenzo de' Medici in Medici Chapel. In the show, the female figure (Dawn) represents the voice of Derrida and the male figure (Twilight) the voice of Berkeley.

• The robots (AutoReivs) in the show are installed with a Turing Application program that can be switched on and off, allowing normal human-like conversation between humans and robots. This is named after Alan Turing, who proposed the Turing test as a test of AI sentience.

• In Episode 2, the baby carriage falling down the stairs during the Central Mall massacre is reminiscent of the Union Station shootout scene in the film The Untouchables, which is itself a reference to the Odessa Steps scene in The Battleship Potemkin.

• Episode 3's title is taken from the title of a science fiction novel "Прыжок в ничто" (Leap into the Void) by Alexander Beliaev.

• During the intro theme song, after the head of the kneeling AutoReiv is seen, there is a short sequence showing an electron-microscope image of the Ebola virus.

• In Episode 3, Re-l Mayer's ID Card No. is re-l124C41+ (homage to Hugo Gernsback's Ralph 124C 41+), a word play - Real one to foresee for one.

• In Episode 4, the character Hoody is reading poetry by Joë Bousquet, a 20th century French surrealist poet who later had enormous influence on Gilles Deleuze. Also at the beginning of the episode Vincent is pouring milk into his alphabet cereal, the letters float up in such a way to spell "Misfit". "Misfit" meaning one who is unable to adjust to one's environment or circumstances or is considered to be disturbingly different from others.

• In Episode 5, Hoody mentions a boat called the Centzon Totochtin, named after the group of 400 rabbit-deities from Aztec mythology.

• In Episode 7, the Amrita immortal cell line is named after Amrita, the immortal drink in Hindu/Buddhist mythology.

• In Episode 8, base commander Patecatl, first officer Omacatl and the female prisoner referred to as Mayahuel in the end credits are named after Aztec gods. This episode also features a number of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland references, including two of John Tenniel's illustrations (Gardeners Two, Five and Seven, Alice and the Queen).

• In Episode 10, you can see Dai Sato's name engraved on one of the tombstones right before the opening of the anime.

• In Episode 11, the bookstore is named after City Lights Bookstore.

• In Episode 11, the bookstore owner quotes Jean-Jacques Rousseau's "On the Origin of Language" and Heraclitus' writings on Logos and Bios.

• In Episode 12, FP Ray is probably based on FP Sync (Focal Plane) mode flashlights used for syncing with cameras operating at high shutter speed (1/100th of a second or faster).

• In Episode 13, the title Conceptual Blindspot (構想の死角) is also the Japanese title for the TV series Columbo 1st season episode "Murder by the Book" (1971).

• Episode 14 pays homage to John Everett Millais' painting Ophelia.

• Episode 15 parodies the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? game show. The shift from the image of a Neolithic man wielding a bone as tool to the image of a spaceship is reminiscent of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.

• In episode 17, the long-ranged ICBM is named Rapture, as in Christian eschatology.

• In episode 18, the title "Life After God" is taken from the title of Douglas Coupland's collection of short stories Life After God.

• In episode 19, the episode "eternal smile" mimics Disneyland, in which the creator Will B. Good is an exact replica of Walt Disney. The two characters who accompany Pino through her journey in this episode seem based upon the two main characters from Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. This is furthered by the constant reference to Will B. Good as "the creator".

• In episode 21, the title Shampoo Planet is taken from the title of Douglas Coupland's novel Shampoo Planet.

• Episode 22's title - "bilbul" - is drawn from the Hebrew word בילבול, which means "bewilderment".

• In Episode 23, Daedalus' duplicate of Re-l is given wings, and thus flies too high into the sunlight, which causes her to die. This is a direct reflection of Icarus from Greek Mythology whom is given artificial wings by his father Daedalus and perishes when he flies too close to the sun. In this episode is also a statement made by Proxy One to Ergo Proxy saying, "Certainly, the Ark and the Cradle were necessary for your education." The statement refers to the journey taken by Vincent Law on the Rabbit into "the dead, ashen world spread out before [him]..." as well as his reclaiming (or actually, discovery) of Proxy One's memories. Both events mirror the Jewish parables of Noah and his Ark, and the finding of the baby Moses in the cradle of reeds (a small craft of bulrushes coated in pitch).

There are three different resources identified and used for the snippets of text shown in the introduction/opening sequence that starts on episode 3:

• The poem introduced in the beginning of the series, written by Michelangelo (poem is in the trivia section of this page).
• Several pieces of text and graphics taken from the ancient text called Landnámabók (mostly from the title page).
• A piece of text (source unknown) word-for-word as:

_{The century of how many is a futuristic stories from now. People who lived there were given the history of mankind as follows, saying that "As for the environment of the earth, the large discharge of Metanhaidorad that was called burning iced happened in old times in century how many now, and it changed suddenly, a lot of living things died out and thus, the ancestor we of human races who had survived came to live only in the bubble dome"}

_{Bubble dome "Romud". It is an ideal city that is called utopia that repeats production and consumption. An advanced making to the network advanced, and people seemed to be satisfied with going by a multipurpose robot from which Ortorab was called by the system of maintenance, the life-support of the reached infrastructure, and the complete social security in this society where everything had been managed in an orderly manner if it gave neither crime nor an an antisocial molecule. ... and it peeped at the problem on falling birthrate ...}

_{However the event that causes the accident to the order happens several years ago. Another bubble dome "Mosque" collapses, and a lot of shelter immigrants have flowed in "Romud". The event brought different sense of values to "Romud" and gave birth to rich and poor and the class difference, and the dissatisfaction that came there smoked in the underground formed dangerous culture, and was becoming a breeding ground for crime.}

_{Another big social issues had been generated in in such and Romud. It is existence of the virus program of the mystery of awaking the clinging ego in the artificial intelligence of Ortorab. Violated Ortorab did not follow man and caused a serious trouble frequently to the virus that was called alias "Cogito".}

_{It begins to appear though people who have dissatisfaction in the dome are small number of people thus. Nobody said putting to practice and the person who gave up, "You should finish one's life in a peaceful dome though it was tedious" was most though they were all driven by the desire that it wanted to go out of here. Because it was taught that the external world was the world of the death to which the monster strolled and the infectious disease was furious for the Romud citizens.}

The series' opening theme song is "Kiri" by Monoral and is first shown in episode 3. The ending theme song is "Paranoid Android" by Radiohead, although the preview version of the first episode did not feature it.

• Director: Shukou Murase
• Chief Writer: Dai Sato
• Script: Dai Sato, Yuko Kawabe (Office Crescendo), Seiko Takagi, Yusuke Asayama, Naruki Nagakawa, Jun'ichi Matsumoto
• Character Design: Naoyuki Onda
• Music: Yoshihiro Ike
• Sound: Keiichi Momose
• Production Committee: Manglobe, Geneon Entertainment, WOWOW, Geneon Entertainment USA

• "Centzon Hitchers & Undertaker" Ergo Proxy Comics - illustrated by Yumiko Harao, serialized by Shogakukan Monthly Magazine Sunday Gene-X from March 2006
• "Centzon Hitchers & Undertaker" Comics Vol.1 by Yumiko Harao
• Ergo Proxy DVD Vol.1-9 (END) - Region 2 (Japan) DVD
• Ergo Proxy DVD Vol.1 (English Dub) - Region 1 DVD from November 2006
• Ergo Proxy Soundtrack Opus Vol.1-2 CD - composed by Yoshihiro Ike

• Ergo Proxy Official Website (English)
• WOWOW - Ergo Proxy Website (Japanese)
• Geneon Ergo Proxy MySpace (English)
• Ergo Proxy (5115) at Anime News Network's encyclopedia
• Ergo proxy @ imdb

Template:Ergo Proxy info