Event

Anime Sunrise: ANGEL'S EGG

"Oshii's most ambitious and metaphysical masterpiece has become, in my book, the best anime feature ever conceived and brought to life. Playing with haunting Gothic and postapocalyptic scenery, we see Bible allegories being interpreted through confused minds so that these entities can construct a coherent meaning to their environment. Shadows hunting shadows, angels being reborn and humanity contemplating its doomed destiny perhaps from eternal flames of darkness, waiting for an impossible, new Genesis, the intoxicating world that ANGEL'S EGG creates goes beyond any reasonable description. A tremendous piece of art." - Edgar Cochran

An apocalyptic pall hangs over an unnamed land and one girl lurches forward in the shadows. Her spaghetti hair is knotted and overtakes her frail body, tattered oversized clothing covers her alabaster flesh, and she's hiding something. An oval of adoration. A piece of life in a land that has none. A future in a world devoid of such things. She continuously walks, seemingly reaching towards some sort of peace, cradling a singular egg that could be the only thing worth fighting for left in this world of overbearing darkness.
Mamoru Oshii's ANGEL'S EGG is coloured by tragedy, and exists as a post World War II picture in the lens of Japan. The setting is never explicitly named, but something has been taken from wherever this ragged fairy tale is set. Elaborately painted backgrounds convey a world on the edge of total destruction. All that is left are fragments of nature and ghosts of buildings that once stood tall. Cracked ceramics and broken childhood toys are furniture. This sense of loss is so exquisitely manufactured through landscape imagery that as purely a reaction to the devastation caused by the atomic bombs this would be an undeniable example of anti-war cinema, but there is more present here than that. A maternal cinema that captures a primal need within some to give birth, in this case metaphorically, to a new world. (Willow Maclay)