English Dub Review: Angel’s Egg

We’re going back to the eighties this week as we discuss the cult classic OVA, Angel’s Egg, 1985. This film, a scant seventy one minutes, was released on home video and directed by the legendary anime director Mamoru Oshii, known for other movies like Patlabor 2, Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade, and the original Ghost in the Shell film. All ambient, immersive, and at times tonally cold movies, though none compare to Angel’s Egg in that regard, mainly because it’s so ambiguous about where it’s set, who the characters are, or even what it’s really about. The story follows a nameless girl in a ruined city, who wanders around for water all while carrying an egg of unknown origin with her at nearly all times. One day, she encounters a soldier who begins following her around and questioning what’s in the egg, leading to the two discussing whether the bird in the egg ever existed at all. And by the end of the film, which has an incredibly ambiguous ending, it can be hard to say what even happened at all, which seems to be the intent of the director. The egg, the boy, the girl, and just about everything else in it don’t seem tied down to any one meaning, though it feels more like they are representations of philosophy than actual characters, for better or worse.

As Angel’s Egg is several decades old at this point, there is naturally a long archive of fan interpretations, as well as director interviews as to what it all means or even could mean. It’s a story that could be interpreted numerous ways with almost none of them being in the wrong. It’s easy to apply a religious lens to it, mostly because the boy specifically brings up the tale of Noah’s Ark, and then by extension that the egg is the girl’s belief in God that the boy questions, but you could also remove that analogy entirely and interpret it as a belief in the future. It’s a movie that begs for discussion and differing perspectives, as it did with the group I saw the movie with. Plus, as an old, hand drawn anime of yesteryear, it’s great to finally be able to watch on a big screen and see the animation in crisp detail, and the fact that it has an English dub (despite there being very minimal dialogue) means I get to talk about it here! There is an official rerelease coming next month, but if you know the right places, this is easy enough to watch online right now, and I wholeheartedly suggest you do if you like trippy old anime.