The trailer for Mamoru Oshii's 1985 film
Angel's Egg released for the first time in UK cinemas as of yesterday, 17th June.
It was one of Oshii’s earliest feature length films (after two of the Urusei Yatsura features and Dallos) and is a fascinating alternate fantasy world parable that has Biblical connotations but mixed together with a distinctly Japanese approach to a narrative about angels, fate and the cycle of life. It has Japanese dialogue (the longest is one of the characters recounting a Biblical parable in the middle of the film), but to such a minimal extent that the film could mostly work as a silent film, with a succession of obscurantist, yet loaded with symbolism, images that are left up to the audience to divine deeper meaning from.
The plot involves a girl looking after an egg that could contain a creature that portends either the destruction or re-birth of the world, and we follow the journey through the streets of a gothic, empty, water-logged city collecting glass vials to fill. A young man comes to the city both via a kind of descending eyeball spaceship (which becomes a cathedral at the climax) and is associated with a returned soldier motif. He meets and then follows the girl through the city, and through their conversations about the nature of the world, the egg and what it contains, and what it all could mean, becomes almost a bigger brother protector figure (especially during the stunning ‘hunt’ sequence, in which the shadows of the city become floating fish with fishermen hunting them down – literally chasing at shadows of long extinct animals. It makes me want to know what Mark Jenkin would make of the film!). But it can only end in tragedy…
This film contains of lot of material within it that would continue onwards into Oshii’s later films Patlabor: The Mobile Police (the Biblical references) and Ghost In The Shell (the imagery of diving and reflections in particular); and the live action Polish language Avalon (the young girl guardian angel figure) and the film also contains artwork by Yoshitaku Amano, who would go on to create imagery for Final Fantasy and whose imagery influenced the Dark Souls video game series.
Although Angel’s Egg did appear in some fashion in the UK before this theatrical release, as we got a rather strange situation in the late 80s when the film was bought and intercut with live action inserts to create the 1988 American film, In The Aftermath: Angels Never Sleep, which was released straight to video in the UK and got occasional late night television showings on ITV in the early 1990s. In The Aftermath is a fascinating piece of work in its own right, which changes the meaning of the original work into something entirely different, mashing together the girl's protectorship of the egg with turning the young man literally into her brother in the dubbing, and combining it together with a post-apocalyptic, Stalker-mixed with-Mad Max inspired live action tone of bleak desolation in the live action sections, which feels
really like the briefly glimpsed girl in a white dress skipping through the rubble of the war zone in Oshii's later Avalon! I guess you can cut up and transform the meaning of a film more easily when the original film is mostly silent and full of potent but gnomic imagery! If you want to know a bit about that version of the film, I wrote that up on when
In The Aftermath: Angels Never Sleep received a surprise Blu-ray release from Arrow a few years back.
