Moo's Review of Angel’s Egg: Why Is It So Miserable and Why Do I Like It So Much?
Spoilers to Angel's Egg up ahead.
Also a little background: Mamoru Oshii is the director, who I refer to in this article. Many talented people worked on the movie but he is the decision guy so, I blame him for all the problems I have with it.
OMG. I know he like, gives as much as space for you to interpret his movies but I can’t help but feel like they’ve got this doom and gloom feeling about them all. By all I just mean, Angel's Egg and Jin-Roh, and a little bit of Beautiful Dreamer. I had not been able to make it through Oshii's other works, so far. It's a crime to expect anyone to stay awake through a bunch of monotone people talking bureaucracy in an anime. I feel like he’s constantly saying “This is bad. Isn’t this bad? Too bad isn’t it? This is fucked up, isn’t it? Look at how fucked up this all is. You’re living a life based on fucked up stuff, you know.” And to that, I say “Enough already! I know it’s bad, but are you telling me I can’t do anything about it? Shouldn't we have a little bit of hope, too?”
His movies are something though. Well, some of them are. I don’t get these movies, but I always feel myself gravitate toward them, even if I don’t agree with their messages. But it’s not the messages that I disagree with. It’s perhaps, the attitude? I like so many things about them except there's something important that I don't like. I think it's the attitude. But everything is made with that attitude so, I can’t really get rid of it. I think the art is really amazing. It’s so well done and so atmospheric and I love being in that atmosphere for a while. But I always walk away with a heavy feeling, and then I’m not sure if it was a good thing or a bad thing.
Take Angel’s Egg for instance, I consider this one of my favourite movies I’d seen all year. And I almost didn't see it! I don't know what drew me in. I think it must be because I see myself in the girl. I would totally wear her outfit. I already walk around the city with a bewildered look in my eye so I'm half there already. She's supposed to be some kind of symbol but I find her totally relatable. We're both emotionally stunted for our age, and we've both got lots of premature white hair. Aside from that. The movie is super, super gorgeous and it made me think so much. But I have major, major issues with it! I feel like Oshii is on one hand trying to say something very true about society, but on the other hand, he's totally undermining his own point. He has these very sensitive and very accurate observations about life, specifically about machine vs nature, masculine vs feminine, the power imbalance of it all. But on the other hand, he makes it seem like things are just destined to be bad for eternity. Especially if you consider all the “eternal” elements in the movie like angel statues and stone buildings and lines like “I had a dream like this before”, it gives this sort of preachy quality. He's stretched the human qualities to their extremes, making the girl the most delusional hopeful person ever, and the boy the most nihilistic person ever. It's not like he's calling out the weird dynamics to ridicule them but rather, just stating them like it's the law. And it's all said while hypnotizing us in a daze. In other words, I have a hard time telling if he's simply showing the world as how he sees it, or telling us that things are like this, and will be like this forever and ever, with no hope. The same kind of thing happens in one of the other movies he worked on, Jin-Roh, where the guy and the girl also end up in another situation where they have no choice but a doomed ending. To be fair, this is a general pattern of a lot of anime movies made in the late 80s and 90s. I feel like they are made with so much care and precision, but they all seem to follow this pattern of doom, and it also feels like the director says “this is how it is, deal with it”.
This girl turns into a statue, statues aren’t alive, no matter how you interpret it. Some people think it’s a miracle. Well, I don’t think it matters that much at this point. Because she’s dead. And this boy is not okay after that. He lost his one friend he had as a companion in this lonely damp world made out of creepy hallways and rivers and giant eye stuff. It’s a tragedy. It’s not a miracle. Is there hope? I’m not sure. I don’t really think so? I can’t help but feel like well maybe there’s hope for you (the boy) but there’s no hope for her (the girl). Maybe there’s only hope for you because there’s no hope for her. I might be feeling that way because of the whole not women-friendly way the current society seems to be going at the moment.
Everything about Angel’s Egg is so thought-provoking. The boy’s name is “Shounen”, which in Kanji-using countries (Japan, China, Korea and others) it means “Young boy/man somewhere between age 10 and 18”. The girl’s name is “Shoujo”, which means “young woman/girl somewhere between 10 and 18”. Yet this is SO odd to me. Because she is clearly at the lowest range of her age bracket? I get this is an anime so their height is exaggerated but… this is absurd. At first, you only see her sitting down, her dress is voluminous so maybe she’s sitting with her knees bent so maybe she’s only that height when she’s condensed like that. Maybe actually she has secret Conan O’brien legs that will furl out once she stands? But when she stands up, she gets hardly taller at all. This girl doesn’t make any sense anatomically, she should be a two year old, not a “young girl”. Why? Why do this? And what is up with him? Why is he SO much taller and bigger than her? Is he just the tallest guy they found in the world or what? Why make this choice? Why put them both in the same age bracket if one is visually much older than the other? It’s so uncomfortable. I makes me think of how Asia has a history of guys like Sun Yat-sen* asking a thirteen year old girl to marry him. Ugh! It gives me goose-bumps. But that's because it’s life…
The girl reminds me of the term “Bai Shou You” in Chinese, which means “Pale, Skinny, Infantile”. It means that you have pale skin, you are skinny, and your face looks like a baby's with eyes wide apart and a tiny nose and a tiny mouth. Pretty much, you look like this girl in Angel’s Egg. “Bai Shou You” is viewed as the ideal of feminine beauty in many places in Asia. And this is not some outdated thing of the centuries past, this is currently still a thing in 2026. Many girls and women try to achieve this thing. Not because they are stupid but, because they are just trying to survive in a fucked up world where they're most valued by their looks. Ugh I know it’s really sad and gross. But it is what it is.
The Young Boy character is very wide-shouldered and darker skinned for some reason, and carrying what looks to me like a weapon. Maybe it’s a cross. It's a weapon-cross. That somehow also has tree branches on it.
There is a creepy dynamic between them. The boy walks behind the girl, like she’s some prey he’s stalking. She resists him at first, runs away and hides. But eventually she kind of just accepts him. After all, they are the only two people living here, on this weird planet, world, space, whatever it is. She might as well have a friend to hang out with. He never asks her if it’s okay to follow her around. And she never says “Yes” because he’s never asked. This kind of reminds me of my own interactions with boys when I was younger. Which is disturbing. This girl says “Don’t come near my egg”, but you never hear him say “Okay, I won't”. What is he, mute? He hardly communicates at all in this whole movie. This just makes me think he’s after her egg this whole time. He just wants to see inside of it. It’s like he’s driven by some machine-like urge.
The girl hugs the egg and says “it’s a bird, it’s flapping its wings. “ The boy shoots her down and says “no, that’s just the sound of the wind outside”. Then she says “it's got a heartbeat, I can hear it beating”, and the boy says “That's your own heart beat.” He's pretty much cramping on all of her hopes and dreams. I don't know why he's so cruel. He could just be nice, there's only two of them! He insists that there's nothing in the egg. I feel like he's jealous of her that she is so careful about this egg, he can't help but want to destroy it a little. Plus he thinks it's empty. But what if he's wrong, what if it's not empty, then he gets to see a miracle, right? There is a chance I'm missing a big chunk of information here because I only watched the Japanese version and my Japanese got clunky around the time when the boy started saying stuff.
There was a scene that took FOREVER. The girl is sleeping, and the boy is standing there. The egg is left unguarded. They’re so still that I thought my screen froze. And then all of a sudden he smashes down on the egg with his giant cross-weapon thing!
I would like to think that the boy struggled and he was really trying to resist those urges. Because that would just be too cruel, to have been calculating this entire time just to find the perfect moment to strike? Geez. Then he really would be a predator. Anyway, the girl wakes up for a moment, she looks pretty happy, not realizing she’s not holding the egg. But then quickly realizes the egg is missing, she steps on the broken shell, in a daze. The camera cuts to wall and you just hear this chilling, sad, most devastating scream you’d ever heard in your life. The girl chases the boy because she is filled with rage. How dare he do this? How dare he break this egg she’d been trying to protect for God knows how long? This egg is everything she has, and she trusted him! What a bastard! And then by total accident, she falls off a cliff. She falls into this river that has a reflection of herself on the other side. Except the reflection is actually a grown-up version of her. Strangely, their faces meet and they kiss, and the young girl disappears and the young woman remains, but then shortly after that, she disappears, too! And then a thousand eggs pop up from the ocean, and a thousand statues of women and girls rise out of the sea, one of them is the young girl.
The boy, egg-stabber, is left on the shore all by himself. He looks kind of sad. It’s hard to tell, maybe it’s just the angle of the shadow and he’s not actually sad. Who the heck knows. But I think he’s sad. That young woman version of Girl that came from the sea was very pretty and they could've actually been cute together, instead of creepy. Did he even see her? There’s a giant coffee-bean shaped thing in the distance. There’s a giant eye ball surrounded by a whole lot of stuff on it, rising up to look at him. There’s a bunch of trees with fetuses inside of them. And then the movie ends. I don't remember these bits very well.
So! My conclusion is, I think Jin-Roh and Angel’s Egg are closely connected. Oshii believes men and women are doomed for each-other. Men will never understand women and women will never understand men. One of them will die and it’s likely the women. This is.... too pessimistic of a view. I feel like maybe he doesn't actually support this and the movie is just showing how uncomfortable it all is. But I just don't understand, why make it so nice then? Why spend SO much time perfecting it? But, on the bright side, at least, you can say he isn't partaking in the exploitation of women. At least it's not creepy in that way? At least, the girls here aren't here made just for “male gaze” type of stuff. And he also doesn't hold women on some sort of pedestal, like Miyazaki does (I totally think so but that's for another time). But you can't possibly be surprised that his daughter, a little girl at the time, did not enjoy Angel’s Egg.
I think, I actually really do like Oshii’s work. Because for someone who doesn’t like it, I sure as hell spend a lot of time watching it and thinking about it. Sometimes I even think this man and I must be soulmates, he just gets the experience of what it's like to be a girl so completely! I feel totally seen! But then, he does something totally off the rails and opposite of what I want and has her fall off a cliff. It's like I'm the girl in Angel's Egg and he's the boy who smashes the egg. You're not quite sure if we've reached some kind of nirvana because of all this or, we're just dead actually. Maybe it doesn't matter. I don’t think it’s really for me but I still appreciate Angel's Egg.
*Sun Yat-sen is one of those history guys in Chinese history. He's a house-hold name I grew up hearing. But if you asked me what he did, I can't tell you. But, I did retain the knowledge that he had at least three wives and, one of them is a young Japanese girl who he met when she was just thirteen. He was a grown man. And he abandoned her and the kid he had with her. Ahh... I don't know which is darker, that story or Angel's Egg.
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