Production
Manglobe initially approached Shukou Murase with a bare-bones vision for a futuristic detective thriller, which included the title, a plot outline for episodes 1-3 and a design concept for Romdeau. Beyond that they let him develop the idea towards a more existentialist slant.
"There was almost too much freedom," he laughs. "A show slated to be on a commercial network carries restrictions according to the time slot," he explains. "Sponsors often have requests intended to help propel the work to hit status; and merchandising entails another set of requirements altogether. By comparison, all Ergo Proxy had to deal with was a DVD release and a TV broadcast over a pay satellite channel."
At first they intended to have Vincent as the leading protagonist and Re-l as a supporting character; however, as they fleshed out her character, she became a much stronger character and began to steal the spotlight from Vincent. This gave them the opportunity to split the narrative between the two characters instead of having a single protagonist lead the story.
In an interview, Dai Satō describes the project:
It is set in the future. A group of robots become infected with something called the Kojiro 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 Satō
Asked about how he devised the title Ergo Proxy, Sato replied "It's cool."
Read more about this topic: Ergo Proxy
Famous quotes containing the word production:
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—John Dewey (1859–1952)
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—Debbie Taylor (20th century)
“An art whose limits depend on a moving image, mass audience, and industrial production is bound to differ from an art whose limits depend on language, a limited audience, and individual creation. In short, the filmed novel, in spite of certain resemblances, will inevitably become a different artistic entity from the novel on which it is based.”
—George Bluestone, U.S. educator, critic. “The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film,” Novels Into Film, Johns Hopkins Press (1957)