1/26/26. The day I watched my first film of 2026. I've had some stuff going on, the winter storm, finished the first third of the Marvel Ultraman comics (once I finish Trials and X Avengers I'll drop a triple review) and I had to think long and hard on which film to be my first this year.
Mechagodzilla 2 (Heisei), Terror of Mechagodzilla, The X from Outer Space, the usual. But then I had an idea.
I like this dsbm band called Wounded Masquerade. And one of their music vids used footage from the film "Angel's Egg" now I knew of the film prior to this, of course, but it reminded me of it and it's been on my mind stewing. So I decided I'd watch it. And like Oshii's other work, Ghost in the Shell, I'll try to keep the spoilers light.
The film revolves around a Girl and a Boy. They live in this weird Bloodborne like world with Victorian buildings and a large mechanical sun that comes out of the ocean. The girl carries around an egg and lives in a large castle and collects water and large jugs. The boy, tall and lanky, carries around a hollow mechanical cross with a red gem in the middle, and follows the Girl around.
The Girl, understandably, is untrustworthy of the Boy at first, running off everytime he comes near until she trusts and semi befriends him. Taking him to her castle and having a talk about the Egg, Noah's Ark, and a bird.
The story, spoiler-free wise, ends here. As all I just described took place in roughly 40 minutes. It's an awfully short film, being only an hour and ten minutes long.
There is, unlike Oshii's other works, little to no dialogue that caps to about four minutes across two conversations with the two protagonists. It's a quick film, only a couple hundred cuts and they reuse the same shots a couple times from what I could tell.
This film, due to it's intentionally ambigious nature and mixed with my obtuse intelligence, is confusing to me. Now, I won't be like the critics before me and say that the confusion is a bad thing, it's not. It's a film that makes you think, a film that'll stand out in your mind for a long time to come, where you sit down and are like "Man. What the hell was that film?"
Now, due to the lack of the stuff I can talk about on it, I'll go into the background of the film. A radical divergence from my usual style.
This film was a collaboration between Mamoru Oshii, who did Jin-Roh and Ghost in the Shell later in his career, and Yoshitaka Amano. Who did work for Final Fantasy, and Gatchaman and Tekkaman and some other stuff.
Originally, Oshii wanted to do a comedy film, but when he saw Amano's artwork he decided to do a fantasy film. The title, originally "Aquatic City", had changed to Angel's Egg by Ghibli co-founder Toshio Suzuki.
Oshii planned on doing Lupin the Third, a film about the famous Japanese thief, but he couldn't and he repurposed a load of ideas from his concept into Angel's Egg. Most notably he reused the concept of questioning existence from that film to here.
Lastly, Yoshihiro Kanno did the music for the film. It's a semi haunting orchestral that rarely plays, only popping in once roughly every ten minutes, per my estimate.
This film was a famed cult classic, years after doing poorly financially on release, I personally really liked it. I saw and understood the aforementioned biblical references pretty well. The film's ambiguity and experimentation were done really good, it's why I sought this film out. I like films that make me sit down and think about what I just watched.
In an extreme act of my laziness, it took me three nearly four hours to finish this film despite barely pushing the 70 minute mark. Objectively, it's around an 8/10 if not 9/10 film. But personally, I give it an 8.5/10. The only thing that I could wish for was actual subtitles.
In the Aftermath: Angel's Never Sleep, is a live action film loosely based on Angel's Egg. And intertwines itself with footage used of the animated film. I do plan on watching it in the future, if I can track it down.
And for the future of the year, I plan on watching some other stuff that caught my eye. Mainly the live action Doomed Megalopolis films, as I cannot trust myself to finish the four episodes that make up the anime, considering I only made it to episode 3 out of 10 of Kamen Rider Black Sun. I also intend on watching Takashi Miike's 2005 The Great Yokai War, as the guy from the former films makes an appearance in that film too.