By skyforbes 
Angel’s Egg is a film that, among anime fans at least, approaches lengendary status, mainly because of the mystique that comes with unavailability. Originally released as an OVA in 1985, it was also granted a limited theatrical release in Japan, and almost no-one went to see it. As the first work by director Mamoru Oshii where he was granted complete creative control, its commercial failure left him unemployed for three years, until the Patlabor team came knocking at his door. He’d given himself a reputation for being a director who was hard to understand, a man whose own team didn’t understand his instructions or intentions. From the evidence of both his previous and subsequent works, this isn’t hard to grasp.
In the West, Oshii is best known for his international breakthrough work directing the movie adaptation of Shirow Masamune’s Ghost in the Shell manga. Although the film itself is fairly inscrutable, Oshii did a remarkable job of streamlining a sprawling, unfocused, willfully obtuse manga into something resembling a coherent, taut narrative. His later sequel, Innocence, is much less accessible, as are most of his subsequent works, none of which (neither animated nor live action) have achieved much cultural impact in the years since. His most recent work was a pair of poorly-received TV animated series, VLAD LOVE and The Fire Hunter. I disliked VLAD LOVE and didn’t even bother with the other, after ANN Executive Editor and Oshii fan Lynzee Loveridge gave up her weekly reviews of the show halfway through in despair.
My own relationship with Oshii and his works vacillates between love and hate. His early work on Rumiko Takahashi’s Urusei Yatsura series is remarkable, and I especially adore his first movie in the franchise, Only You, although it’s second movie Beautiful Dreamer that gets all the attention. (Note: while every other Urusei Yatsura movie got a UK VHS and then DVD release from AnimEigo/Anime Projects/MVM, Beautiful Dreamer’s rights were held by US Manga Corps, and this prevented a UK version for some reason. I had to import a region 1 DVD to watch it.) After Urusei Yatsura, in 1983 Oshii directed Dallos, the first of a new release format — the OVA. This didn’t receive an uncut Western release until Discotek brought it to DVD in the US in 2014, and I’ve never seen it.
Of Oshii’s later works, the tryptych of Patlabor 1&2 and Ghost in the Shell represent the pinaccle of his career, at least commercially and in terms of general entertainment, in my opinion. Even then, these films tend to be slow, contemplative, and cryptic. Following these, Innocence is beautiful yet bogged down by its own bloated sense of importance, representing the point where Oshii disappears up his own orifice, as he had always threatened to do. Live action movie Avalon is one of the most obtuse, repetitive, frustratingly slow and boring films I’ve ever had the misfortune to experience, and following that, I mostly gave up on his work.
I’d always held great curiosity towards Angel’s Egg, however. One of the aspects of Oshii’s work I find most interesting is his fascination for Biblical themes and imagery. We see this in Ghost in the Shell, with prominent angelic imagery (as also found in the original manga), plus quotes from Paul the Apostle (“for now we see through a glass darkly,” etc.) Patlabor features an antagonist with a God complex. While never professing Christian faith personally, Oshii is on record stating he’d studied the Bible since his youth, deliberately mining it for story ideas and concepts. For anime, Christianity has always held something of a foreign mystique, with potent imagery and symbols ripe for plucking — just look at how saturated Hideaki Anno’s Neon Genesis Evangelion is in Biblical, Gnostic, and Kabbalistic symbols and terminology, even if their significance is purely cosmetic. Also consider the prominence of nuns and crucifixes in all kinds of anime, both serious and comedic.
Angel’s Egg finds Oshii displaying his fascination with aspects of Judeo-Christian religion most prominently, as it is an 81-minute mood piece that ponders the reality, and dangers, of blind faith in a dying world. There isn’t much plot, and the dialogue so sparse the entire script could probably be transcribed on the single side of a postcard. It’s famously difficult to understand, to the point it achieved a certain notoriety, fuelled mainly by its forty-year unavailability. I have no idea what sort of complex legal issues prevented Oshii’s great unseen work from showing internationally until now, but four decades after its initial release, it’s finally receiving a (relatively) wide distribution, and even home releases. Umbrella’s Australian release is due on 3rd December, if you can’t wait for either GKIDS’ or Anime Limited’s inevitable respective US and UK discs. The Australian set may be the only way to read Jonathan Clements’ and Andrew Osmond’s essays about the film, however.
Happily for me, Angel’s Egg screened as part of Scotland Loves Anime 2025, first in Glasgow, and then at the Cameo in Edinburgh, which I attended this weekend. I took my non-anime-fan friend along, jokingly as “revenge” for all of the black and white Doctor Who episodes he subjected me to on VHS tape back when I attended university with him in the late 1990s. “Serves the bastard right,” remarked the aforementioned festival compere Jonathan Clements when I tried desperately to explain why in hell I would have brought a non-weeb to Angel’s Egg. “We’re trying to create new fans here, not drive them away,” he claimed, understandably. Angel’s Egg is probably not the first anime you should show to anyone, except for revenge purposes, obviously.
My friend did say beforehand “I’ve seen Solaris (Tartakovsky’s 166-minute Russian version), so I can cope with anything,” which is an admirable sentiment. I’ve only ever seen the much shorter Steven Soderberg version, therefore I’m clearly the inferior cinephile. At only 81 minutes duration, Angel’s Egg being less that half the length of Solaris is probably a mercy. Much of those 81 minutes are filled with slow pans and still shots pregnant with unspoken dread, enhanced by a choral soundtrack of wails and cries that work surprisingly hard to evoke an impeccably dark, mysterious atmosphere.
The plot, if one can even call it that, follows an unnamed young girl who walks across what could be an apocalyptic landscape, all dark blues and greys, clutching close to her a large white egg that she stuffs underneath her dress, and holds as if she were in the third trimester of pregnancy. It’s clear that the egg is the single most important thing in the world to her. She stalks the land, collecting rounded glass bottles and filling them with water, for reasons unclear. From the desolate countryside, she wanders into a dark, shadowy town that seems initially bereft of human inhabitants, scouring abandoned shops for jars of preserved food. The backgrounds have a detailed, yet rough appearance, not so much drawn but scoured, that adds to the abstract, nightmare-like ambience. Watching her journey is a little like being the observer in someone else’s dream, where you can’t quite grasp the associations between images and meaning, and locations begin to blur into one another, logic is optional.
She meets a mysterious young man who carries a large crucifix-shaped gun. Although she asks “who are you?”, and he asks the same, neither give an answer. Is this because they don’t know, or aren’t willing to share? The boy also seems to be a wanderer, and against her initial protestations, takes a protective role over her. He’s intrigued by her egg, asking her what’s in it. The girl replies “I don’t want to tell you,” but he muses that she can’t possibily know what’s in it until it breaks open. He’s troubled by her blind faith, and also by his own memories of a great and terrible bird that hatched from a similar egg in the past. Yet, he’s unsure of the accuracy of his own memories — he doesn’t even know where he’s from, or why he is wandering. Perhaps neither does the girl know for herself.
While much of the film is taken up by scenes of the two characters wandering from city to wasteland, and to a strange underground catacombe full of animal fossils, there are some bizarre, unexplained interludes with other characters. We eventually see the city is filled with blank, grey people-shaped statues, solemn, dark and unmoving. It’s only when the “fish” arrive that suddenly an army of men spring into motion, flocking through the streets carrying their massive harppons, launching them towards the enormous fish silhouettes that “swim” along the streets and walls of the city’s empty buildings. The girl remarks “there are no fish to be found, chasing them is pointless”, so the harpoons succeed at only wreaking wanton destruction upon the city, the shadow fish are unimpeded, seemingly completely unware of the men and their attempt to “catch” them. It reminded me a lot of the concept of “Plato’s Allegory of the Cave”.
Another bizarre element is the enormous, floating eye-like orb that rises from the sea with terrifyingly loud crashing noises. It seems to house myriad statues of people, and it appears twice — both at the start, and then end of the film, with the boy watching it each time. Is this some kind of ark? There’s also the appearance of what looks like an enormous, grounded boat with oars on top of a hill that I wonder is meant to represent Noah’s Ark? Later in the film, there is potent flood imagery, as the city becomes submerged, the statue-like people allowing themselves to be immersed in the rising waters, seemingly without noticing. What makes these people so inert, why is their city so desolate, why do their lives seem so pointless, so fruitless?
To get into MAJOR SPOILER TERRITORY now, the girl and her quest to protect her egg is also shown to be fruitless. Perhaps as an act of mercy, the boy takes her egg as she sleeps, and smashes it, to find it’s completely empty. I presume this is to signify the emptiness and pointlessness of blind faith without an honest, effortful search for truth and meaning. The girl’s hollow scream as she finds the broken eggshell is haunting, and disturbing. I suppose the boy thought this might be best for her, a way to free her from her self-imposed restrictions, yet later he sees her, now become a statue on the Ark, holding a stone egg, perhaps now an eternal prisoner of her faith? He, however is left to wander, aimlessly on a dead island, surrounded by feathers of a long-dead bird.
The film does open with an image of an embryonic bird within an egg, and the film end with multiple of these eggs appearing on creepy tree things, growing across the landscape. I must admit to being mystified as to what the meaning of this is meant to be. When the girl falls down a ravine into deep water, it looks like from her death(?) she releases more eggs into the world. By this point in the film I was shaking my head in resignation, sighing “I haven’t a clue what’s going on or why.” I suspect most of the audience were in the same boat.
In regards to the titular angel, the girl regards the winged humanoid fossil she finds underground as the source of the egg, and believes that if she cares for the egg long enough, it wil hatch into a new angel. We are shown no proof that this is the case. Was the egg empty the whole time, or was it like a fantasy form of Schrodinger’s Cat? If given long enough to incubate, could an angel have hatched? We’ll never know for sure, the boy took that ambiguity, and hope, away. Oddly, Angel’s Egg reminds me a lot of the episode Before the Flood from French/Japanese TV anime co-production Ulysses 31, one of my childhood obsessions. I wonder if Oshii saw that and if it factored into his creative process at all?
I knew going in that this would be a difficult movie to interpret, and although I’ve read a couple of Mamoru Oshii’s interviews where he talks about his intentions with the film, I’m really none the wiser as to what much of the imagery means. At least it’s a very interesting movie to look at (except, perhaps, for some of the more obnoxiously long still shots), and the soundtrack really is quite remarkable, and haunting. Angel’s Egg’s extremely limited use of colour for the backgrounds make the two main characters stand out, especially the girl’s light clothing, and her flowing white hair. The animation quality is mostly quite decent, and I like the little touches like flowing waters in the backdrops, the wind in the grass, and the weird, otherworldly rock formations the characters walk by. The highly regarded Yoshitaka Amano (Final Fantasy, Vampire Hunter D) provides the character designs, and the girl particularly features his signature willowy, fragile aesthetic. Amano’s input lends the film an unmistakable air of ethereal beauty. So much of the setting is unexplained, such as the huge levitating aye, and the enormous, bright orange, pulsating war machines rumbling through the city, one of which the boy disembarks from.
I think what we can take from Angel’s Egg, at it’s most basic level, is that it’s a warning against blindly following religion, without thinking for yourself. That’s definitely a reasonable message, though I’m not certain what Oshii is offering here as an alternative. The boy, who questions the validity of the girl’s faith, isn’t left any better than when he started, he’s still wandering without any clear idea of his origins or destination. The girl either died in despair at her life losing meaning, and is now immortalised in unmoving, rigid stone, or her death somehow brought more eggs into the world. I don’t know if that’s meant to represent hope, or false hope, or what. I also don’t know what to make of the final shot of the island, as the viewpoint pulls up higher into the dark sky, displaying the entire panorama of this weird, empty world. I suspect Oshii himself has no clear answers, it’s probably not a film that’s supposed to be completely explained, more one to be debated and pondered. At least the 4K restoration is gorgeous, with none of the melting people horrendousness that plagued the Interstella 5555 equivalent. There’s a trailer on YouTube, and the comparison between that and the old trailers is like the difference between night and day in terms of image clarity.
Angel’s Egg is absolutely not a mainstream film, you wouldn’t watch it with your gran, or your Marvel and Star Wars-loving mates. It’s too obtuse, too “arty”. Yet that doesn’t mean it’s without value. For those willing to view film as poetry, as a means to tell a story via tone, imagery, atmosphere, and emotion rather than prosaic plot and exposition, there’s a lot to enjoy here. At times willfully slow to the point of frustration, nothing much “happens”, and I can see why Oshii’s colleagues and producers at the time were utterly baffled. I would never watch this with my wife, as she’d discount it as “pretentious shite”, which is an absolutely valid viewpoint, and I suspect that will hold true for most people. It’s either Oshii’s deliberate shitpost at the expense of his viewers (I do sometimes envision him giggling mischievously as he cuts together a deliberately utterly incomprehensible movie mainly to fuck with his overly-analytical fans), or an uncompromisingly bleak, yet heartfelt exploration of his very personal obsessions. I’d like to think it’s the latter.
Angel’s Egg (4K)
Director: Mamoru Oshii
Screenplay: Mamoru Oshii
Story: Mamoru Oshii and Yoshitaka Amano
Music: Yoshihiro Kanno
Original Concept: Mamoru Oshii and Yoshitaka Amano
Character Design: Yoshitaka Amano
Animation Production: Studio DEEN
JP distributor: Tokuma Shoten
JP premiere: 15th December 1985 (original version)
US distributor: GKIDS
US Premiere: 27th September 2025 (63rd New York Film Festival)
UK distributor: All the Anime
European premiere: 20th May 2025 (Cannes)
Runtime: 71 minutes
Language: Japanese audio with English subtitles
BBFC rating: 15
Learn more about Mamoru Oshii’s Angel’s Egg 4K Remaster Review — Scotland Loves Anime 2025