Angel’s Egg Review: A Lost Anime Still Hides Its Meaning

What happens to a symbol if you strip it of its inherent meaning? That’s the biggest question to spin out of Angel’s Egg, the “lost” anime from writer/director Mamoru Oshii. The 1985 feature – a bust at the time, never released internationally, and now granted a director-approved 4K restoration – is quietly loaded with Biblical imagery, but Oshii rewrites their purpose and meaning to his own ends. What he created is gorgeous and engrossing, but almost intractably enigmatic.

The imagery begins with his own twist on the Virgin Birth, with a young girl (voiced by Mako Hyōdō in the original version and Brianna Knickerbocker in the English language dub) stuffing a large bird’s egg up her dress in a pretense of pregnancy. She then flees a gigantic, ark-like ship before walking into a deserted town. What this has to do with the Gothic biomechanical spaceship, covered in statues of humans, that has descended for the skies is a puzzle to be solved. Or maybe not. Oshii’s intent seems to be more instinctual than intellectual, designed to drop stones into the pool of the viewer’s mind and let them examine the ripples.

Seemingly under the influence of Moebius and August Beardsley, art director Yoshitaka Amano’s bizarre designs are not as plainly ghoulish as his career-defining work on Vampire Hunter D. Instead, there’s a mournfulness, a sense that the world is not just empty but fading. Even the girl’s purple and pink Victorian dress would seem washed out of it wasn’t for the fact that the cityscape through which she walks is a sullen, grey mass – a limbo of sorts. The only other color seems to come from a stranger (Jinpachi Nezu/Justice Slocum), who appears on a tank with a more-penile-than-normal cannon, bearing a sword/gun combo weapon that looks suspiciously like a hand-hewn crucifix. Reciting the Book of Genesis in the belly of what looks like Jonah’s whale, surrounded by the fossilized remains of dragons and strange beasts, he becomes her guardian.

It’s astonishing to think that Angel’s Egg sprung from a rejected script for crime caper series Lupin III (although it’s not at all astonishing to think that it was rejected). Oshii crafted a work that is arcane, esoteric, and basically impenetrable. He’s almost testing the audience’s patience: Even though the narrative is barely over an hour, he’s prepared to hold a single shot of the unnamed boy and girl merely sleeping for almost two minutes. It’s a film to be absorbed, its mysteries floating over you like the flying shadows of giant fish being hunted by mechanical fishermen.

But in those tests of patience, Oshii puts the audience in a place where they are shrouded in the same cloud of unknowing as the girl and the boy. In this strange realm, faith without clarity is purpose enough. To discern whether an egg contains an angel or a bird, or if the giant eye that floats above is a clockwork contraption or Heaven itself is an impossible test, one that demands knowing the mind of the great creator – which, in this case, is Oshii.

Oshii did finally sneak some of this imagery into the much jauntier Lupin III, as he wrote what might be an angel’s skeleton when he came back to the series in 2021. But that moment felt like closing the chapter for him, which is the opposite of what Angel’s Egg achieved. Its open-ended nature, its calm ambiguity, and its captivating, self-contained world all come together to give a clear view into Oshii’s creative and spiritual obsessions – even if that view doesn’t really provide much insight.

This article appears in November 14 • 2025.