Welcome to The Queue — your daily distraction of curated video content sourced from across the web. Today, we’re watching a video on Mamoru Oshii’s 1985 film Angel’s Egg.
Angel’s Egg feels like a kind of half-remembered nightmare. The kind of dream that lingers in the back of your mind for weeks. It is an ink-blot test of religious motifs, existential philosophy, and suggestive world-building that resists divination while remaining hauntingly and inescapably enigmatic.
The film takes place in a dying land where monstrous skeletons slump quietly in bell towers while enormous fish-shaped shadows swirl through the city streets. We follow an unnamed girl as she shepherds an enormous (and mysterious) egg through a decrepit, war-torn city. She meets a young soldier who takes an interest in her…and her precious cargo.
Angel’s Egg was a non-commercial collaboration between the equally legendary animation director Mamoru Oshii and artist Yoshitaka Amano — best known to our readers, perhaps, for his work on the Final Fantasy series. Since it’s cold reception in 1985, the film has been hailed as one of the great artistic achievements of both anime and symbolist filmmaking.
If you haven’t already guessed, the film is somewhat difficult to understand. Prior to the project’s production, Oschii lost his faith. And much of that shaken world-view and fervent search for purpose colors Angel’s Egg. And yet, even Oschii claims to not know what the film is really about.
Ultimately, as the video essay below puts it, even when you dig deeper, Angel’s Egg doesn’t become clearer so much as…bigger. It is a film you can sit with indefinitely, where meaning and understanding are not necessarily the same thing.
Watch “Reality in Angel’s Egg“:
Who made this?
AnimeEverday is a YouTube video essay channel based in the United Kingdom that specializes in — you guessed it! — anime. They are currently out of commission but have a wildly entertaining backlog that you can still pick through. You can subscribe to them on YouTube here. And you can follow them on Twitter here.
More Videos Like This
- Here’s more of AnimeEveryday’s work: an analysis of Oshii’s arguably most popular film: Ghost in the Shell.
- And here’s one more from AnimeEverday: “How Oshii Uses Location.”
- Okay, one more: AnimeEveryday on the use of the color red in Satoshi Kon‘s Perfect Blue.
- Here’s YouTube-based film critic Chris Stuckmann’s analysis of Angel’s Egg, which he considers (correctly!) to be an underrated masterpiece. Stuckmann’s access to a translation of annotated storyboards makes this video well worth the watch for inquiring minds.
- Under The Scope has a great analysis of Oshii’s stunning, political, achingly ambient Patlabor 2 and how the film unpacks the illusion of peace.
- Here is a rare onstage interview from 2014 where Oshii discusses his long and multifaceted career with the folks at TIFF.
Related Topics: Mamoru Oshii, The Queue
