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Angel's Egg (Japanese: 天使のたまご, Hepburn: Tenshi no Tamago) is a Japanese art film original video animation (OVA) written and directed by Mamoru Oshii.[2] Released by Tokuma Shoten on 15 December 1985,[3] the film was a collaboration between artist Yoshitaka Amano and Oshii. It features very little spoken dialogue and a story that is strongly allegorical which has led to many viewers confused by the film's supposed meaning.[2]
Angel's Egg | |
天使のたまご (Tenshi no Tamago) | |
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Genre | Science fantasy[1] |
Created by | Mamoru Oshii Yoshitaka Amano |
Original video animation | |
Directed by | Mamoru Oshii |
Produced by |
|
Written by | Mamoru Oshii |
Music by | Yoshihiro Kanno |
Studio | Studio Deen |
Released | 15 December 1985 |
Runtime | 71 minutes |
A young girl scavenges a desolate city while protecting a large egg. She encounters a boy who questions her about what the egg contains and suggests breaking it, leading to their brief bonding. The boy recounts a story that sounds like an alternate version of Noah's Ark in which the bird never returned and never existed and the ship kept sailing. The girl tells the boy that the bird did exist, and brings him to a fossil of an angel. Later, the boy smashes the girl's egg while she sleeps, prompting her to look for him and ultimately fall into a body of water, where a large number of eggs appear. After this, the world shown in the film is revealed to have been on top of a shape that looks like the hull of an overturned ship.
Nezu worked with Oshii once again in Patlabor 2: The Movie[4] and Mako Hyōdō played a supporting role in The Sky Crawlers.[5]
"I really liked the Bible when I was a little boy. And when I was a student, at one point I was planning to enter a seminary, but I didn't. Even now, though, I read the Bible sometimes" – Mamoro Oshii in 1996[2]
Many of the themes and elements in Angel's Egg were originally from Oshii's cancelled Lupin the 3rd film.[6] However, only the angel fossil remains unchanged from its planned appearance.[7]
Oshii said that he wanted to remove a narrative as much as possible, and keep the film simple, using animation as an expression to draw out a story,[8] and fill it with symbolic expressions and metaphors "like Jung's archetypes and collective unconscious".[9]
Angel's Egg touches on themes that are common in Oshii's films, including references to the Christian Bible, the symbolism of dreams, as well as the intersection of dreams and reality. Some of these themes appear in his other works, such as 1984's Beautiful Dreamer.[2] Although some publications have indicated that the film is built on director Oshii's supposed loss of faith in Christianity,[10] Oshii himself has stated otherwise in saying that he was not a Christian, but that he thought quotes from the Bible were cool and had a friend who was Christian.[11] The misconception that Oshii was a man of faith has its origins in an interview that was likely mistranslated, in which Oshii is reported to say. " I planned to enter a seminary at one point, but didn't." Which is then followed up by the interviewer asking. "Are you a Christian, or do you just like the Bible for its philosophy?" To which Oshii replies. "For its philosophy." In the same Animerica interview Oshii also said. "I'm not a Christian, but I've been reading the Bible since my student days".[2]
In a 1996 interview with the magazine Animerica, Oshii stated that he made the film because it had elements that intrigued him, such as "Ruins; I like ruins; I like museums; I like fish; I like birds; I like water... and I like girls." He also stated that ruins appear to him in his dreams.[2]
Oshii said in a 1985 interview with Animage that the contents of the egg are supposed to represent dreams and hopes, something that may or may not exist, and that while the girl believed in what was in it, by breaking the egg, the boy showed that what she believed in did not exist.[12] Regarding the bird the boy talks about, though the girl shows the boy an angel fossil in order to convince him that the bird does exist, Oshii has stated that the angel is not the bird.[13] Oshii also said that the ending was one with salvation for the girl, but he did not want it to be shown in a straightforward way, and made it hard to understand.[14]
The angel fossil was later reused alongside other elements from Oshii's cancelled Lupin film in 009 RE:CYBORG, which Oshii was initially supposed to direct and participated in the script for, and was eventually directed by Kenji Kamiyama, a student of Oshii. [15] Kamiyama describes this version of the angel fossil as indication of a god, but not of any particular religion.[16] The angel fossil was also used in the tenth episode of Lupin the 3rd Part 6 which Oshii wrote the script for[17] "Darwin's Bird"[18][19][20] In this episode Fujiko Mine is hired by the archangel Michael to steal the angel fossil, which is actually that of the fallen angel Lucifer, on behalf of his master.[21]
Angel's Egg was a collaboration between Oshii and Amano.[22] The two were originally going to collaborate on Oshii's cancelled Lupin film, which anime critic Ryota Fujitsu says makes it obvious that Angel's Egg was inherited from Lupin.[23]
Oshii originally intended on making a comedy film, with film starting with the girl with the egg first getting off a flying ark in front of a Japanese convenience store, but changed his mind and decided to make it a pure fantasy film after seeing Amano's art.[24][25]
The animation was produced by Studio DEEN, with Hiroshi Hasegawa, Masao Kobayashi, Mitsunori Miura, and Yutaka Wada working as producers.[citation needed] Oshii and Amano collaborated on the script,[citation needed] and Yoshihiro Kanno composed the music.
The documentation for the project was written in one night by Toshio Suzuki (producer) but Oshii was displeased with it and did not use it. However, the title of the film, "天使のたまご" (Tenshi no Tamago/Angel's Egg) was from Suzuki, where Oshii's original title was "水棲都市" (Suisei Toshi/Aquatic City).[26][27]
Angel's Egg was released in the direct-to-video format on 15 December 1985 by Tokuma Shoten.[28] The 71-minute OVA would later be used as the skeleton for the 1987 live-action independent film In the Aftermath directed by Carl Colpaert. Colpaert's movie occasionally intercuts with footage from Oshii's Angel's Egg with dubbed over dialogue, which does not appear in Oshii's film.
Angel's Egg repurposes ideas that Oshii developed for a cancelled Lupin the Third film. Both concepts feature the theme of questioning existence (Lupin's existence in the cancelled film, and the bird from Noah's ark in Angel's Egg), and involve the fossil of an angel[29] Oshii himself said that Angel's Egg was another attempt at the idea[30] and anime critic Ryota Fujitsu has said that Angel's Egg (and the first Patlabor movie) would not have existed if Oshii had gotten to make the Lupin film.[31] Oshii has also stated that the entire angel fossil concept used in Angel's Egg was directly taken from Lupin,[32] and compares the relationship between the boy and girl to that in The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams.[33]
Angel's Egg did not do well with critics on its release, and Oshii stated that "it kept him from getting work for years".[34] However, it is considered "one of the highlights of 'artistic' anime and [his] career as a director."[22] The allegory and symbolism of the film, as well as the ending, have been cited by critics as a source of confusion for viewers.[35][2] The 1986 edition of Genkosha's Animation Video Collectors Guide commented, "This is animated art rather than story. It could be brought to a Soho gallery theater."[2] Brian Ruh, a critical analyst of Japanese popular culture, stated that it was "one of the most beautiful and lyric films in the animated medium."[36]
Critics note that the film is difficult to understand, with visuals and narrative that is both cryptic, convoluted, and allegorical.[37][35] Jason Thompson writing in Viz Media's online magazine J-pop compared the film's style to Night on the Galactic Railroad while noting that the meaning of the film may be elusive, stating "ANGEL'S EGG stands as an evocation of a mood and world which is powerful in spite of -- perhaps because of -- not being consciously understood."[35]
Helen McCarthy called it "an early masterpiece of symbolic film-making", stating that "its surreal beauty and slow pace created a Zen-like atmosphere, unlike any other anime".[38] In his book Horror and Science Fiction Film IV, Donald C Willis described the film as "a haunting, poetic melancholic science-fantasy film, and–for non-Japanese-speaking viewers at least–a very cryptic one."[1] Willis also included the film in his list of most memorable films from 1987 to 1997.[39]
In an article in Senses of Cinema on Oshii, Richard Suchenski stated that the film was Oshii's "purest distillation of both Oshii's visual mythology and his formal style". The review noted that "Patlabor 2 is more sophisticated, Ghost in the Shell is more important, and Avalon is more mythically complex but the low-tech, hand-drawn Angel's Egg remains Oshii's most personal film."[10]