Angel’s Egg review – Mamoru Oshii’s dazzling 1985 anime is an eerie philosophical adventure

Christian theology becomes an unsettling and visually ravishing mystery in early film from the Ghost in the Shell director

T his 1985 anime is a true curio: a furtive, portentous odyssey into a hollowed-out landscape told largely in symbolist images. A million miles away from director Mamoru Oshii’s often-logorrheic films (such as his best-known work, Ghost in the Shell from 1995), it still swills around plenty of philosophical concepts linked to his fascination with Christian theology. But like the egg being lugged around by the film’s nameless female protagonist, or the giant fish shadows swimming across the town facades, this is Christian theology as if half-remembered millennia later, or in the aftermath of a bad dream.

The waif (voiced by Mako Hyōdō) carries this ovum under her petticoats, like some pre-pubescent immaculate conception, while scavenging a dark, mittel-European-style city for flasks of water. One day, she’s startled to see a skinny princeling (Jinpachi Nezu) step out from a giant mechanised war machine trundling down the street. She scarpers, but later runs into him and his weird cruciform gun sitting on a set of steps. Showing him the egg, she accepts him, at least temporarily, as a protector in this shadowy burgh, where bands of fishers run after fish silhouettes. But it’s far from clear if he’s benevolent. “If an egg is not cracked open, there is no way of telling what it contains,” he says.

Oshii certainly breaks a few doctrinal eggs and gives them a good whisking here. The boy recounts a version of the Noah’s ark story – but one in which the dove, and hope, never returned. Long silences and loaded questions suggest this might be what’s he’s looking for inside the girl’s prize. Maybe their encounter is taking place in a post-diluvian period, which would explain the presence of water everywhere: its dancing reflections, drips and concentric circles are lovingly detailed in an array of dazzling effects.

Overseen by conceptual artist Yoshitaka Amano, Angel’s Egg’s artwork is ravishing throughout. Stripped down to a pallid near-monochrome and using far fewer frames than the anime norm, it musters hypnotic eeriness and poise. The girl, with her cascade of tendrilled locks, is like something out of an Aubrey Beardsley fantasia. She undergoes something close to a saintly canonisation in the film’s final stages – but you’d have to be a radical catechist, probably one fluent in Japanese culture, too, to say what it all means. Regardless, this unsettling parable has a scriptural concision and mystery.