An admission before we get started: films that are made of a procession of surreal images are opaque to me. I haven’t done the kind of work that would let me appreciate them, and something about me is too verbal to get into them without some education. I’m always going: what is that? what is that? what is that?
Angel’s Egg is certainly composed of surreal images, and so I think in many ways I am a poorly suited critic for it, but here we are. Threaded through its imagery is a narrative, however, which I’ll summarize this: a nameless girl carrying an egg wanders a mostly deserted landscape and town, encounters a man with a sword, runs away from him, encounters some fishermen who try and fail to capture shadow fish, is reunited with the man, and listens to him tell the story of Noah’s Ark. She falls asleep and he takes the egg and breaks it. When she wakes up she kills herself. In the process of dying she produces more eggs.
As a series of images, Angel’s Egg is both beautiful and authentically weird. The animation often conveys the sense of being “a moving illustration,” as distinct from “an animated movie.” When the girl runs in an early scene, her hair and her clothes move as if they’re the same weight and she’s also underwater—that’s what I mean. The character designs are done by Yoshitaka Amano, who is probably best known for his Final Fantasy work. However, what one could call “technical limitations” mean that the designs in (for instance) Final Fantasy VI1 are stripped of their strangeness. In Angel’s Egg, however, Amano’s strange, elongated, and detailed figures are preserved.
The movie spends a lot of time on things that don’t seem like they matter—like the girl filling up endless water bottles—but which build to communicate a sense of purpose in this strange world. There’s a lot of stillness and unclear amounts of time going by. The sequence in which the fishermen, who are like the compulsive ghosts of past fishermen, hunt the shadow fish is spectacular. One touch that I particularly liked is that they might even catch one, but since it is not a real fish, their victory is meaningless. But there’s also an idea instilled through this scene that the girl is also trapped in a compulsion to carry her egg that will never hatch. So is the man, who is determined to find out what is in the egg.
All of this works. The problem is the narrative. Since his film is largely abstract and free of dialogue, Oshii has to lean heavily on what we already bring to his images—that is, he has to work in cliches. Angel’s Egg is a story about a young girl who is seduced into trusting a man, is betrayed by him, and then dies in the sense of being a young girl (she becomes an adult woman, who then also dies) and whose agony brings forth some kind of new life. There is a lot of very loaded imagery and even some dialogue that drives this home. The girl tries to get the man to promise not to break her egg; he’s silent. Walking around with the egg makes her look pregnant. When it is broken and she becomes an adult she reaches for her stomach, feels her adult body, and screams. The sequence in which the girl wakes to discover her egg is broken, and of her subsequent devastated cries, is obviously, obviously evoking rape.
Since, however, this violation brings forth something new, since eggs are made to be broken, since children are meant to become adults, this violence was necessary—or that’s the suggestion. I know this story, you know this story; it is a stupid story, particularly since even in this symbolic reading, it’s all really standing for something else, like “creation.” There’s no emotional reality to what happens to these people. And the story is certainly unworthy of the moments of real beauty in the film, like when the girl sees her reflection for perhaps the first time and talks to it as if it is another girl, or the startlingly and almost creepily clear water, or the ambiguously organic machines the man rides into town, or the giant chick sleeping in a transparent egg.
Is this kind of triteness the cost art like Angel’s Egg has to pay, to be as weird as it is in other areas? It’s certainly not the first piece of art I’ve encountered where extreme aesthetic complexities are put at the service of material that feels like it might not be worthy of adults. But I do resist the idea that there’s some sort of set amount of complexity available in narrative art, though I might accept it elsewhere.2
Angel’s Egg is a movie worth watching once, because it is beautiful. Whether or not it’s worth watching twice is a harder call. I did watch it twice, and enjoyed it much more the second time, because I no longer cared about understanding what was happening and just enjoyed the imagery, and I can imagine it becoming sort of a favorite movie to rewatch because there’s something sort of soothing about it. But when I read what I said above, I also still agree with it—there’s something troublesomely shallow about the movie’s use of the girl as the dreamer and the boy as her rude but necessary awakening. Hers is the hand that reaches out in the movie’s opening moments and his is the hand that crushes; I know what this stuff means and I reject it.
A postscript.… Angel’s Egg came to America via New World Pictures, a production company owned by Roger Corman. If you do not know who Corman is, he was a budget movie director and producer who occupied the niche of the genius hack that seems specific to Hollywood.3 New World Pictures did not set out to acquire Oshii’s movie—it came as a package deal—but once they had it they were going to use it somehow.4 That is the Roger Corman thrift principle. So the director, Carl Colpaert, edited the animated footage from Angel’s Egg together with live action footage of some guys in gas masks wandering around what is meant to be a blighted hellscape but is clearly California. The result is a movie called In the Aftermath.
In the first minute or so of In the Aftermath, it feels like you’re watching Oshii’s movie get edited into something with more of an American sense of timing, and hey, it might actually work—but then people start talking, and you’re like well that’s not so good. Then the live action bits start. This movie also has a long musical interlude, during which I will confess my attention began to drift. It might have drifted prior to the musical interlude but it was definitely drifting during and afterward. In the Aftermath really resembles the experience of watching a bunch of video game cut scenes spliced together. In that limited sense, I guess you could call it “ahead of its time.”
People in anime are always ominously quoting the Bible.… Somebody should do an anime where people ominously quote from The Tale of Genji.
At last, my under-eye shadows have been represented in anime:
image from fancaps Angel’s Egg started as a Lupin III movie, according to Oshii: “The girl in Lupin lives in a strange tower which appeared in the middle of 20th century Tokyo. The one who created the tower was an old architect who surpassed Moses and Gaudi and the girl is his granddaughter. The old architect once had 12 disciples and she is served by the remaining four. It seems she spends her life in a wheelchair, without taking one step out of her room. A murder takes place in this tower and photographic evidence shows ‘the white hands of a young girl’. Lupin decides to tackle this mystery and sneaks into the tower. As he advances towards the interior, he discovers white feathers scattered on the ground and the corpses of small animals. According to Fujiko’s investigation, it turns out the girl wasn’t the old architect’s granddaughter. Then who in the world was she? She was actually an ‘angel’, who mocked humans and killed them. In my mind, the tower itself was based on Dante’s Inferno, while the strange girl was Beatrice.”
Lots to say about that Lupin III concept, among them: Oshii, did you think Beatrice killed people? (She does definitely make fun of Dante.) (We love her.)
Angel’s Egg almost destroyed Oshii’s career but he remains fond of it: “This work is like a pitiful daughter that I couldn’t properly introduce to the world. If this opportunity allows even one more person to see it, there is no greater happiness for me as a director. I would like to express my gratitude once again to the staff who endured the painstakingly detailed work.” Perhaps you can only truly love your failchildren.
this is the only video game i care about
A long time ago I swear I read Stravinsky saying you can be rhythmically complex but then you can’t be melodically complex, or something, but I’ve never been able to find this quote. If he said it, I think he was talking about The Rite of Spring.
This was very enjoyable to read and combined many of my favorite Notebook things, including discovering a deep cut shared interest (well, my only video game that matters / is any good is Final Fantasy IV, but close enough)
Not sure if I'll be watching Angel's Egg, though...
First of all I've gotta say: the scene in the enormous theater gave me the chills!!
I saw the whole thing in terms of the Noah's Ark story (but with a time-loop??). The setting is after The Flood -- here an unspecified apocalypse. Mankind (the ghostly fishermen) has been adrift on the water for ages and the dove they sent to find land (salvation) has yet to return. Because a capricious angel -- the little girl -- has waylaid the bird and imprisoned it in an egg which she jealously guards. Perhaps she's even ignorant of mankind's plight... as she endlessly fills vases of water. The Swordsman must trick or force the girl into relinquishing the egg, breaking the cycle and allowing mankind deliverance back to land.
I'm sure there are all kinds of holes in my theory and it definitely made more sense in my head immediately after watching Angel's Egg than it does now. But I remember being pleasantly surprised that it had more going for it than "just" the (incredible!) visuals. Amano!!!