Angel’s Egg (1985)
First - and I should’ve said this at the beginning of this series - subs over dubs. If you can watch an animated film in its native language, do it.
My youngest son watches a lot of anime, but mostly the Westernized stuff you see on Netflix, like Naruto or whatever else. I don’t watch any anime tv shows and haven’t seen a lot of anime movies. I’ve seen most of the big ones - Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Perfect Blue, all the Miyazakis if that counts. Then again, I’m not entirely clear on what counts as “anime” versus just “an animated film from Japan.”
Picture a primordial world of trees, strange machinery, and a giant mechanical eye looming over ruined buildings. Two unnamed people drift through it: a girl - not named Angel - scavenging a dead city while guarding an egg she’s convinced will hatch into an angel, and a young man who steps off a tank carrying a cross-shaped weapon. She runs from him at first, but he reappears, steals the egg, hands it right back, and she lets him tag along. He wants to crack it open and see what’s inside, and tells her his own version of Noah’s Ark - the dove that flew off never returned, and eventually everyone on the ark forgot the dove, and the old world, ever existed. He starts to wonder if the bird was ever real. She shows him a fossil of one massive enough to settle it.
Then, while she’s asleep, he smashes the egg anyway. She chases him into the water, her last breath surfacing as a swarm of new eggs. He’s left on a beach littered with feathers, watching her - turned to stone now - take her place on a throne among other statues perched on that same big mechanical eye. The film pulls back to reveal the whole setting is balanced on something shaped like the hull of a capsized ship.
When you build a film tied so tightly to a central mystery (What’s in the egg? Who are these two? What the hell is going on?) and there’s not a well orchestrated payoff, it can be a bit frustrating. The film is meant to be more ethereal in nature; you should experience the movie, not watch it. And, truth be told, unlike many other films that squander their premise (not that this necessarily did that), this is a supremely watchable film, with gorgeous imagery and tediously hand-drawn animation. The girl’s hair alone is an incredible achievement. Perhaps I missed something in the narrative (I definitely did). Either way, it’s a beautifully rendered environment these two move through.
That’s probably the right way to leave it, too - not chasing down every symbol, just sitting with the thing. I’ve read enough afterward to know people far more patient than me have mapped the Christian iconography, the Noah’s Ark retelling, the suggestion that the egg and the girl and the bird are all the same idea wearing different shapes. I don’t doubt there’s a coherent skeleton under there if you want to go digging for it. But I went in cold and came out admiring the craft more than understanding the design, and I think that’s a fair way to experience it once.
3 out of 5 Stars
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