THE film Angel’s Egg (Cert. 12A) may well leave you lost for words. There aren’t, actually, many in the movie itself, suggesting whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. This largely ignored 1985 Japanese animation was made by the acclaimed director Mamoru Oshii, known for Ghost in the Shell. His screenplay was matched with Yoshitaka Amano’s heartbreakingly powerful ink paintings. There is now a 4K digital restoration.
A young girl cradles a large egg, believing that it contains an embryonic angel. A boy with bandaged hands appears, bearing what looks like a cross. We may speculate inconclusively if the youth is Jesus. He seeks a bird that he saw in his dream. Searching is a primary motif in the film, raising many theological/philosophical questions. In seeking God, we may already have found him, or vice versa when a huge orb (the eye of God?) dominates the screen.
It is pertinent that Oshii has a great interest in Christianity and continues reading the Bible. The film features various religious images. They tend to be remnants of past faith, no longer apparently relevant — old stained-glass windows, statues of saints, or biblical stories like that of Noah. The Flood narrative is paralleled in Angel’s Egg with a dystopian landscape of ruined dwellings which the girl visits every day. Is she hoping, like Noah, to discover amid the desolation a bird (perhaps as in the boy’s dream), returning with an olive leaf indicating life beyond the travail, a fresh start? Or will reassurance that all shall be well only come if an angel is hatched?
The girl refuses to tell her companion what the egg contains, even after he takes possession of it for a while. On returning it to her, he says: “You must keep what you treasure inside your belly or you will lose it,” implying that faith is an internal phenomenon, something too deep for words, which would be like clipping an angel’s wings.
Some of Amano’s illustrations recall the artist Zdzislaw Beksinski’s nightmarish pictures depicting urban decay and loss. Even so, this is a film keeping its options open. Is the girl’s faith in God, even if misbegotten, a myth that we cannot do without, and preferable to the boy’s need for ready answers? She protects something potentially life-changing without fully understanding what it is. The male may not be a Christ-figure at all; for he comes from a world where might is right, possibly using the cross by way of justification. He is constantly in danger of destroying something beautiful, a representative of values not to be trusted.
Pretty much all that I have written is my reading of the piece; for the film relies on its visuals and Yoshihiro Kanno’s plangent music to take us on a journey rich in emotional and spiritual endeavour. One may quibble that the world isn’t as bleak as is supposed, but there is no mistaking that this is a masterpiece. Oshii has lead the way with work that other films, such as The Matrix, humbly follow. He may not be a barrel of laughs, but there is an underlying cheerfulness seeking, if not always finding, truth.