A Review of "Angel's Egg"
(10/15/02)

Angel's Egg is the most beautiful anime i've ever seen. I can't imagine a more striking piece of animation. I never really cared for Mamoru Oshii's later works. I really wish he'd return to this style. I find Angel's Egg to be his greatest triumph because it looks so different from all other anime. It's more gothic than Vampire Hunter D. More symbolic than Akira. More cerebral than Miyu. It really falls into a class by itself. The film is more similar to something by Jan Svankmajer than to traditional anime. ....... Angel's Egg is about unique imagination. The type of imagination that makes me proud to run this website. The ideas are uncompromising, meaningful, and deliberate. It is visually stunning. From living machines, to breathing shadows, to water with intention. Everything in this movie appears to be alive. Even the stoic architecture embodies a stern sense of contemplation. You could easily capture any frame of animation from Angel's Egg, and hang it on your wall as a work of art. The musical score is incredible. Dark symphonic orchestras and choirs. Morricone-esque haunting vocals take the place of dialogue. There are very few spoken lines in Angel's Egg. Those that are spoken, are meaningful. Nothing is wasted. In fact, there are only two characters in the movie: Angel and the nameless man. ....... Regarding the meaning of Angel's Egg...nobody other than Oshii is certain, but i'm pretty sure i'm on the right track. The movie is incredibly symbolic. It could not have been made without heartfelt sentiment. I know there is a moral message here to be understood...Perhaps not directly, but in a roundabout way. ANGEL'S EGG IS ABOUT SOMETHING. I believe that it is a film designed to warn us of the dangers of blind faith, and more specifically, blind faith in Christianity. ....... The man is clearly a metaphor for Christ. He carries a cross-shaped weapon on his shoulder and is bandaged at the palms. Angel is a metaphor for innocence. She has apparently lived alone her whole life. Everywhere she goes, she carries her giant egg. She doesn't know what is inside it, but protects it. The egg represents her faith in her self. It is her soul. Her soul is young and underdeveloped, therefore as fragile as an egg's shell. The man is sent to the land from god to befriend Angel, gain her trust, and crush her egg. God is portrayed as a man-made machine-planet. A giant round orb with a large watching eye that arises from the sea and hovers in the sky. God is ornamented with the statues of every human's soul to have lived on the land, each of which looking like typical Roman-Catholic statues. It is important to reflect on the idea of God arising from the sea. I'll explain why later when i talk about the importance of water in this film. The man tells Angel the story of Noah's Ark. He focusses on the time after the flood, when Noah is left on the boat with the animals, waiting to find out if any land is left on the earth. Noah sends a dove to fly to a mountaintop and bring back a portion of the land. In his version of the story, the dove never returns. Noah is unable to determine if the dove grew tired and drowned, or found land and chose to live there alone. He focusses on the never-ending curiosity that Noah had to deal with. The enduring wait for the bird that never returned. In his version of the story, Noah and all of the animals die on the ark. They are "turned to stone" (skeletons). Noah's faith in the dove was his demise. ....... While the only speaking characters are Angel and the man, there are other inhabitants of the land. The city is populated by several hundred identical faceless fisherman. They stand motionless until the fish arrive. The fish are shadows that appear on the walls and streets of the city. The fisherman only come to life when the fish appear and chase after them, throwing their spears at the shadows. Of course their spears have no effect on the shadows. They only break windows, walls, and sidewalks. The spears ravage the city. They cause destruction, and no fish are ever caught. Angel comments, "Even though the fish aren't really anywhere, still they chase after them." The fisherman are a metaphor for the blind followers of Christianity (or any religion). Such people are always looking for new recruits to their religious organization. They see themselves as fisherman of souls. Their conquest for obtaining the intangible (souls) results in the destruction of the tangible (our world). ....... This leads me to talk about the importance of water in Angel's Egg. The final shot in the film shows that the land is actually a small feather floating in a sea of blackness. That everything that happened in the land was microscopic in perspective to the rest of the universe. The land was really just an island floating in an infinite ocean. This means that our existance is only meaningless by perspective if it is allowed to be. It always rains. The sea is always trying to advance onto the land. Everything is wet. The water relentlessly tries to overcome the earth. Angel struggles constantly to contain the never-ending deluge by filling glass jugs with water, and storing them in the cathedral. It is an ongoing struggle that she will not abandon. Because a battle exists between the land/world/earth and the water, the land/world/earth is therefore put in the same predicament as the ark of Noah. Our world IS Noah's Ark: A helpless boat waiting to be overturned by violent waves (*again, helpless to the extent that we allow it to be*). The people of the world (our world) will die (turn to stone) if they remain static...content to float on the water aimlessly...giving their fate to the wings of a small bird. Since their god is synthetic, it would HAVE to live in the sea, because the sea is the unknown infinite. ....... If our destiny is given to such a notion as blind faith, then our bodies, our world, and our souls become as fragile as a bird's feather (or the shell of a broken egg). This is why when Angel's egg is destroyed, it was shown to be empty inside. She allowed the man to be alone with her most prized possession. She trusted him (a charismatic stranger) with her soul. She never knew what was inside the egg (what her destiny would hold) until it was broken. The moral is that if she hadn't placed blind faith in the man (Christ) then her egg would not have been broken and may have hatched into a wonderful creature. The curiosity of what was inside is what had always provoked her undivided attention to the egg. She protected and nurtured the egg as if it was part of her own being. It was. This is healthy selfishness. Blind faith kills selfishness, aspiration, volition, and unrecorded destiny. It turns us to stone. ....... The purpose of Angel's Egg is to warn all of us that we each have an egg to carry. A most valuable and fragile part of ourselves that is in constant danger. We must guard our souls selfishly. We mustn't waste time in the mundane. We mustn't chase shadows. And perhaps most importantly, we mustn't let FEAR, driven by unknown, overcome our earth. Instead, we must conquer it.