Review: Angel’s Egg
The watery apocalypse of Mamoru Oshii’s masterpiece
Angel’s Egg, the 1985 OVA by Mamoru Oshii, is perhaps the greatest work in the director’s legendary career. The vast majority of people (myself included) would give almost anything for even one all-time classic, revered work to their name, or one that changed everything forever, or even the rare bird that somehow manages to do both. But Oshii has multiple to his name.
His work on the anime adaptation of Urusei Yatsura changed TV anime forever, helping to kickstart the otaku generation and laying a blueprint that still informs what it looks and feels like to this day. The moody, dreamlike film follow-up Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer stands as a meditation on the lingering bitterness of growing older that is as heartfelt in 2026 as when it came out. His work adapting Mobile Police Patlabor is rightly revered, and the institutional apathy and militarism at the centre of Patlabor 2: The Movie is, sadly, more prescient with each passing year. But his most important work is inarguably Ghost in the Shell. It is impossible to overstate its effect on culture around the world, a rare watershed moment where nothing would ever be the same again. And all of these are just the big hits; it doesn’t even cover the less well-known titles in his catalogue like Blood+ or Gatchaman or Dallos (which we here at Ani-Gamers covered once), or Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, a personal favorite of mine.
And yet, even in that breathtaking resume, Angel’s Egg manages to stand out as a singularly unique masterpiece. Typically Oshii excels at adaptation, taking other people’s work and refining it into animated form. Time and time again he has demonstrated a deep understanding of themes and ideas, while also not being afraid to make big, substantive changes. Any number of anime otaku have had the shock of going from the Ghost in the Shell film to the tonally very different original manga, a work that’s often an ecchi comedy with spider tanks. But it is that skill at adaptation that makes most of Oshii’s work more approachable, providing a solid foundation for his explorations of philosophy and society. By contrast, Angel’s Egg lacks such a foundation, and as such is often considered a difficult work. It is deeply, deeply surreal, consequently very open to interpretation and, in stark contrast to the dialogue in a lot of Oshii’s work, contains very little speaking between the two unnamed characters.
Angel’s Egg being so open to interpretation also makes it difficult to discuss. A plot summary doesn’t really tell you anything meaningful about the film, and it remains divisive to this day. My screening had people walk out of it immensely dissatisfied, an experience which Ani-Gamers’ own Evan Minto and Patrick Sutton also had at their screening, a world away in the United States of America. It speaks to the cinema being a less-than-ideal environment to enjoy something: certainly, most of the important pieces of media in my lifetime were alone in my room at the computer, or on a sofa at a friend’s house with all the lights on. Inspiring this reaction is also nothing new for Oshii. Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer also had a mixed reception in its day, being sadder and less silly fun than the TV anime a generation of high school kids in the late 70s and early 80s grew up on, but emotionally honest about that high school experience in a way that reflects that sharpness of Takahashi Rumiko’s writing.
Indeed, this is a work that could only ever really be made during the Bubble Economy, that magical era where the burgeoning home video market demanded media to put on VHS–and, of course, a single plot of land in Japan was valued more than all of the real estate in the state of California, really and truly forever and ever (and definitely won’t not plunge the country into economic malaise that persists to this day). Oshii has said several times that its financial failure affected his ability to get work before Patlabor, and whilst it is true that he didn’t have a major project for a while, he was working in TV anime before, during and after it released, and I can’t help but feel it was a very different economic reality to what animation faces in the 2020s.
The film has always struck a deep chord with me, from the first time I saw it all the way up until seeing it this year. Its vision of expansive, empty wastes where two unhappy characters fail to make a connection is uncomfortable, wonderfully so. The trauma, all of the terrible things that happened are all hinted at and left unsaid: instead, you feel them. A lot of works of this time are about the death of the shiny space Utopianism of the space race ’50s and ’60s, where the miracle of spreading out across the stars only enhances our problems, not solves them. It is as much science fiction as it is anything else, sharing DNA with the senseless violence of the Zentraedi effortlessly destroying earth in Super Dimension Fortress Macross, or the famous colony drop of Mobile Suit Gundam. It is the abstraction of science fiction taken to an extreme: the FTL drive is always a box that says MAGIC! on it, and in Angel’s Egg that box is the entirety of it, composing not just the technical or narrative details but the entire mood and feel of it.
To project a little, it feels like Oshii’s bifurcated feelings playing out between the two characters, his cynicism and his hope. Seeing the revolution not materialize in the wake of the Anpo protests (in which Oshii himself participated), everyone just going back to what they were doing beforehand, might be more explicit in Dallos but the unconquerable misery of it is most clearly felt here. I’m fond of saying “I contain multitudes” because I think we all do, and I’ve never seen this reflected so clearly as in Angel’s Egg. Often, I feel like the unnamed girl, desperately clinging to hope long after the end has already happened, trying to carry it with me and protect it as best I can, because it’s important in a way that’s impossible to express in words. Often, I feel like the unnamed soldier, jaded and quietly cynical at a world that has failed me over and over, the only voice of reason with no blinders on, who is able to see the world for what it actually is — and how bad things are. The repeated question at the heart of the film, “Who are you?”, is something I often ask myself, as I often feel like I’ve put on so many masks over the years, for work, for friends, for family, that my sense of self ceased to exist.
That projection, placing your own feelings on a work so very intent on not providing clear answers, is probably the difference maker between loving Angel’s Egg and leaving the screening unsatisfied. I often caution people against what I call “A equals B” readings of any work, where one element can be used as a substitution cipher for a completely normal narrative or thematic point. To the degree that anything in the film is meant to “mean” or “represent” anything about the intention of its creators, it matters less as a riddle for you to solve and more as something you can imbue with meaning. When the soldier destroys the egg the girl is protecting with the crucifix-shaped object he carries throughout the film (one of the few moments that provoked a response at my screening), he does so for no reason the film cares to make explicit, inviting you to project onto him the reasons why you think he did it.
Above all else, Angel’s Egg is deeply, sublimely sad, in a way that feels more and more real with each passing year. In the 1980s, everyone envisioned the end of the world as a giant ball of nuclear fire. By contrast, the apocalypse of Angel’s Egg is one of water, precious and dangerous in equal measure. While there is no doubt in my mind that they did not intend to make a film about climate change, it still manages to evoke deep climate dread like no other work I’ve ever experienced. Fire consumes, dissipates, and eventually ends, but water is inexorable. The wet, baroque European cityscapes are completely empty, and the deployed flesh-tanks find no obstacles and no enemies to fight. The soldiers throw their harpoon fishing rods at shadows (which are clearly coelacanth, often called “living fossils”), seemingly oblivious to the fact that they’re not really there. It’s clear whatever happened here was over a very long time ago. It feels exactly like watching climate change slowly, inexorably destroy the planet, and the film’s non-resolution of its themes is what it feels like to try and explain to my parents why I try to avoid driving a car, why I always say I don’t have much hope for the future.
The cinema I saw Angel’s Egg at is, by virtue of historical accident, in a pretty upscale area, the kind of place that was considered a rough-and-tumble working class neighborhood decades before I was born, but now is the kind of neighborhood you can only afford to live in if you have access to generational wealth. It has that particular combination of popular nightlife and yesteryear’s narrow streets, the kind not designed for more than one or two carts, and certainly not the voluminous internal combustion engine automobile traffic it now gets. One of the local shops even has the horse cart they used to deliver from proudly on display now out the front. All of which is to say, people who place their personal status in expensive cars often drive through the streets, revving loudly enough to be heard in the cinema. This occurred multiple times when I was watching the film, the ugly, cacophonous death rattle of an idling petroleum engine rising to a roar as soon as the lights change, a thing I couldn’t see but knew from the context of the noise. I saw the film and am writing this during the global petroleum crisis beginning in March 2026, and every time I heard those engines it reminded me of the soldiers in the film, haplessly throwing their harpoons at shadows. It’s already over: you just haven’t realized it yet.
A great work will always be there for you when you need it most, and in 2026 Angel’s Egg is even more resonant for me than when I first saw it many years ago. I don’t necessarily recommend seeing it in the cinema, even though I’m glad I went, but I’m convinced being around other people doesn’t enhance it. And, for what it’s worth, its reputation as a divisive work is earned. If you haven’t seen it, you probably already know from my description whether it’s your specific cup of tea or not. But they will be doing ’80s nostalgia long after I and everyone I know are dead, and it will never, ever be the version of the 80s in Angel’s Egg.