Angel’s Egg review – Mamoru Oshii’s dazzling 1985 anime is a bizarre philosophical adventure | film

THis 1985 anime is a true masterpiece: a mysterious and awe-inspiring journey through a hollow landscape told largely in symbolic images. A million miles away from director Mamoru Oshii’s often wordy films (such as his most famous work, Ghost in the Shell from 1995), the film still revolves around many of the philosophical concepts associated with his fascination with Christian theology. But like the egg carried by the film’s nameless heroine, or the shadows of giant fish swimming across city facades, this is Christian theology as if half-remembered thousands of years later, or in the wake of a bad dream.

The Tramp (voiced by Mako Hyoudou) carries this egg under her petticoats, like some prepubescent immaculate conception, as she searches a dark European-style city for water bottles. One day, she is startled to see a skinny prince (Ginpachi Nezu) emerge from a giant mechanical war machine rolling down the street. It explodes but later crashes into him and his strange crusader rifle, which was sitting on a set of steps. She shows him the egg, accepting him, at least temporarily, as her protector in this mysterious city, where groups of fishermen run after the silhouettes of fish. But it is not clear whether it is good. “If the egg is not opened, there is no way to know what it contains,” he says.

O’Shea is certainly cracking some dogmatic eggs and beating them well here. The boy tells a version of the story of Noah’s Ark – but one in which the dove and hope never returned. The long silences and loaded questions indicate that this might be what he’s looking for inside his prize girl. Their encounter may have occurred in the post-Flood period, which explains the ubiquitous presence of water: its dancing reflections, drops and concentric circles are beautifully detailed in a range of dazzling effects.

Concept artist Yoshitaka Amano oversees the artwork for Angel’s Egg and is charming throughout. Stripped down to a pale, near-monochrome color and using far fewer frames than is usual in animation, it packs eeriness and hypnotic poise. The girl, with her cascade of curly locks, resembles something out of an Aubrey Beardsley fantasy. She undergoes something close to a canonization in the film’s final stages — but you’d have to be an extreme catechist, and perhaps a master of Japanese culture as well, to say what it all means. Regardless, this troubling parable contains both biblical summary and ambiguity.