Angel's Egg — A Girl. A Jar of Water. An Egg She Will Not Put Down.
Mamoru Oshii and Yoshitaka Amano built a 1985 film that hands you almost no plot and still leaves you carrying something heavy.
1985 · movie · Studio DEEN, Tokuma Shoten
The premise — Almost nothing happens
A desolate world full of shadows. A little girl who collects water in jars and guards a large egg she carries everywhere. Then a mysterious man arrives, and the two of them talk about the world around them. That is the whole engine. Everything else the film does, it does through image, pace and silence.
Why it works — Atmosphere as plot
Most films use mood to decorate a story. This one puts mood where the story usually goes. Strip out incident and what is left still reads clearly as grief, as faith, as doubt about both. My reading: the egg works because Oshii never explains it. You are asked to sit with an object someone loves and cannot open.
The craft — Amano in motion
Yoshitaka Amano designed the characters, and the film is one of the rare places his line survives contact with animation instead of being simplified into a model sheet. Yoshihiro Kanno's score behaves less like accompaniment than like weather, something the images are standing out in. Studio DEEN and Tokuma Shoten produced it in 1985.
The authorship — Two names, no committee
Look at the credits. Oshii takes director, screenplay, story and original concept. Amano takes original concept, story and character design. That is a two-person film in an era of production-by-consensus, and it shows in how little the picture bends toward being liked.
Who it is for — Patient viewers only
If you want a plot you can summarise to a friend, this will frustrate you, and that is a fair response rather than a failure of taste. If you like films that trust an image to hold for longer than is comfortable, it rewards a second sitting more than most things at this length.
The verdict — A fable without a moral
Angel's Egg is a drama and a fantasy that refuses to resolve into either, filed under psychological and openly interested in religion without offering a doctrine. It is not difficult for the sake of it. It is simply built out of the parts most anime treats as background, and it holds.
Filed under drama, fantasy, psychological.
In the shop
Anime Crush carries apparel, figures and accessories across more than a hundred anime. Browse the shop.