‘Angel’s Egg,’ Rehatched

Mamoru Oshii’s 1985 feature Angel’s Egg — technically an Original Video Animation (or OVA) — has made many a cinephile’s list of anime’s greatest works of art, but it’s also been notoriously elusive. Yet that will change with the recent restoration produced by publisher Tokuma Shoten from a new scan of a 35mm negative and released by GKIDS for the film’s first-ever theatrical release in North America in November (with a home entertainment release to follow). This is exciting because Angel’s Egg, despite coming from the director of Ghost in the Shell, arguably one of anime’s biggest crossover hit films outside of Akira, isn’t just tricky to untangle as far as licensing is concerned but also in terms of the content itself. It’s not Oshii’s debut film — that would be Urusei Yatsura: Only You.

That fragmented and dreamlike Urusei Yatsura film in particular set the stage for Angel’s Egg, which doubled down on this sort of atmosphere as it follows an unnamed girl through a desolate city while she carries and protects an egg. Whatever resides in the egg, or where it came from, is unclear. In fact, everything is unclear — from the boundaries between reality, dreams and half-forgotten memories to what actually happened to leave the land in the bleak state it’s in. Its desolate and sometimes hallucinatory setting could have been fairy tale-like in its prime, but has fallen into decay with its abandonment.

The Surreal Truth

It’s easy to only see apocalyptic terror in Angel’s Egg, but the anime historian and speaker Helen McCarthy (A Brief History of Manga) sees some (metaphorical) light amid the shadowy environs. “Oshii’s softer, more mystical and reflective side emerges through its bleakness,” she says. “This is, after all, the man who compared Studio Ghibli to the Kremlin in a famous interview, after years of friendship with [Hayao] Miyazaki. Oshii sees the surreal truth in everything, without rose-tinted glasses.”

This “surreal truth” bleeds into the film’s construction, in the foreboding but delicate art direction from Yoshitaka Amano (best known for creating illustrations for the Final Fantasy video game series). But also in how the pieces fit together, like its elliptical editing and the psychedelic imagery that combines the gothic with the futuristic, including the spires, turrets and statues that protrude from the gigantic UFO at the beginning of the film.

During the making of the film, produced at Studio Deen (known for Urusei Yatsura at the time), even Oshii and Amano themselves were operating more on feeling than a complete understanding of what the work actually meant, as writer Brian Ruh underlined in his book Stray Dog of Anime: The Films of Mamoru Oshii. Today, Ruh notes that the opaqueness of the work made things more difficult for the filmmaker. “Even though Angel’s Egg has come to be acclaimed, it was not a financial success and almost tanked Oshii’s career in the ’80s,” he says.

“Its desolate and sometimes hallucinatory setting could have been as fairy tale-like in its prime but has fallen into decay with its abandonment.”

Even if Oshii and a lot of audiences didn’t quite get Angel’s Egg beyond the fact that it’s mysterious, there is a clear line of influences at play: Ruh, along with Jonathan Clements and Helen McCarthy in their book 500 Essential Anime Movies, notes the overwhelming presence of Christian iconography and symbolism throughout the film. It’s barely subtext: At one point, the Soldier retells the story of Noah’s Ark.

The presentation of such imagery may not have the high-budget polish of Oshii’s later work — of course it doesn’t — but though the sequences aren’t as lavish, what has endured until today is the filmmaker’s sense for visual and physical communication through his characters’ expressions and his emotive framing.

Vision and Reflection

But what makes its remaster and new release noteworthy? Perhaps, it’s the chance for a wider contemporary audience to reassess Angel’s Egg, a film that still stands out in an anime landscape where the average film is designed to leave no room between authorial intent and audience interpretation. There are, of course, still films like Angel’s Egg being made, ones that trust that not every question needs to be answered, but few are as mystifying. Today, Ruh still sees this as part of the ongoing appeal of Angel’s Egg.

“One of the things I love about it is how it rewards multiple interpretations and perspectives and is responsive to what you bring to it,” Ruh reflects. “I first wrote about Angel’s Egg in my early 20s, and I had a particular interpretation of what it meant. Now that I’m in my late 40s, those additional 20 years of life experience mean that I don’t see Angel’s Egg in quite the same way. It’s a movie that grows with the viewer. […] Hopefully a wider release like this will give the film the attention (and money!) it deserves.”

GKIDS will release the restored 4K version of Angel’s Egg in North American theaters on Wednesday, November 19.