Review of Angel’s Egg (1985)
– previously
Oshii Mamoru (director), Suzuki Toshio (producer).
In the blue city, nearly petrified fishermen throw harpoons at enormous shadows of fish that might not really be there. A pale girl protects a large egg. A man steps off an organic battle tank and starts to follow her around, telling her that she cannot learn what an egg contains without breaking it. There are no other people.
The man has bandaged hands, but we see no stigmata. He carries a cross, but it’s not an instrument of punishment or execution; its crossbar is the handlebar of a bicycle. He does quote Genesis (ca. 500–400 BCE), but his Deluge veers off model. What if, instead of bringing back the leaf of an olive tree, Noah’s bird did not come back? The bird could have settled down, or died from exhaustion.
The pale girl survives on jam and pours out wine. The man declines a drink of her water. In the opening shot, her pale hand turns into his darker hand. In the final shot, we zoom out and see the blue city, like a barnacle, on the overturned hull of a great ship.
Japan’s bubble economy was nearing its peak in 1985. Loans were cheap, so investors like Tokuma Yasuyoshi were plentiful and Japanese animation got mature and experimental in films like this one. Legend has it that Tokuma put in the money on Miyazaki Hayao’s recommendation of director Oshii Mamoru, making a direct-to-video feature out of the paintings of independent illustrator Amano Yoshitaka. There isn’t much movement, and the skies are simple wet-on-wet watercolours in multiplane, but it works. The 4K restoration looks good enough for cinema, with only minor slivers of paint outside the lines.
Both Amano’s gorgeous designs and Oshii’s cryptic scripting marry East and West. The Christian emblems are most obvious to a Western audience and include something like a church with stained-glass windows, but the mechanical green sun, which hits the water with a nuclear-sublime bang, reminds me of a portable shrine of Jizō and a thousand tiny figures, owned by the Hōon-ji temple, that I saw at the National Museum of Kyoto in 2023. The quest stretches from the stupidly compressed time frame of the biblical patriarchs toward the scales of Buddhism, Last and First Men (1930), and Jungian psychology. The sentiment is not sincerely religious, but it is existential. I like the symbolism, but the main draw here is not the surrealist myth or the progressive animation. It’s the legendary bubble economy itself.