Angels' Egg in 4K Anniversary Review: Mamoru Oshii's Post-Apocalyptic Anime Reflects A Broken, Yet Persistent Humanity

A young girl in a candy-pink striped dress runs across the ruins of a lost city, her voluminous white hair seemingly swallowing her small frame, shielding a large egg under her arms. Momentarily, she sets it down amongst the falling bricks of what once was a massive estate, when a young man in a flowing blue cape, holding a massive weapon somewhere between a gun, a sword and a cross, picks it up. “Keep precious things inside you,” he advises her, “or you will lose them.”

Other than an early whisper, this is the first line of Angel’s Egg, the experimental post-apocalyptic anime by iconoclast filmmaker Mamoru Oshii (Ghost in the Shell, The Red Spectacles). It comes about half-way through the 73-minute runtime, as esoteric as this nearly dialogue-free film gets. Like the two protagonists of Alain Resnais’ post-war elegy Hiroshima mon amour (1959), the Man (Jinpachi Nezu) and the Girl (Mako Hyodo) come from nowhere and are headed seemingly anywhere, with memories which flit about and may or may not exist.

Angel’s Egg Is A Masterpiece of Experimental Animation

In the 40 years since Oshii’s audacious first original film debuted, it has only appreciated in value. Ruminations on the end of days are a dime a dozen now, but in 1985, the memories of Hiroshima were more present than the uncertain future of rising fascism in 2025. In 1949, Theodor W. Adorno wrote that “there can be no poetry after Auschwitz,” an invective against art which did not grapple with human atrocity, and, perhaps, Oshii’s film takes up that gauntlet with Angel’s Egg. As opaque as it is wondrously evocative, Angel’s Egg brims with an apocalyptic pall, a reckoning with the world we’ve inherited.

Oshii collaborated with visual artist and animator Yoshitaka Amano to create a film of infinite visual splendor, each frame packed with unusual expressiveness. Culling from a range of inspirations, not least of which seems to be the angular density of the German Expressionists, Amano and Oshii invoke the emptiness of war-ravaged Japan as much as the light-deprived depths of the ocean. In an underwater city with the architectural dimensions of any given European city, the Girl and the Man are the only apparent people who still remain. In direct reference to the Japanese soldiers who would not surrender after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the only other characters are throngs of faceless, colorless, military personnel who do not seem to recognize that the fighting has stopped, and who robotically chase after massive fish which are only rendered in overwhelming shadows.

Plot-wise, there is not much here, which may explain why the bleak anime did not initially do well at the Japanese box office. These two lost souls barely talk except to exchange occasional, highly poetic non sequiturs. The only real exception to this is when the Man, upon reaching a massive tree with curious etchings on the trunk, relays a dream about a massive bird which has laid an egg. Is it the same egg which the Girl carries? She refuses to say what she believes is waiting to hatch, but she protects it with all she can all the same.

The two journey across this strange landscape, with its myriad of broken down buildings, endless bouts of heavy rain, complicated webs of forestry. The first act of the film enacts the dream logic of Maya Deren’s experimental work, the second and third ...-modern cynicism of Andrei Tarkovsky. They seem to bond with each other over the very basic fact of their survival in the rubble. But what awaits them at the end of the journey? Both the fulfilling of a dream and the crushing of the same.

Of all its potential influences, Angel’s Egg is mostly a Biblical allegory. It is both a creation myth and an apocalyptic warning. The sky, billowy and blood-red, the strange, larger-than-life machinery of imbricated satellites and weaponry, all suggest a world that has only continued through the proliferation of its technological advancements. Yet, for all of its undoubtedly dark themes, Angel’s Egg is still a reverie of a film with an ending that suggests the tenacity of humankind to exist beyond certain death. Like in the story of Noah’s Ark, which the Man quotes directly from the Christian Bible, life continues in spite of a disintegrated world.

Angel’s Egg will be re-released in theaters in 4K on November 19th.