“Angel’s Egg” (part 1)

This review was commissioned by @zenos14.


I've heard of this one before, but only in very broad generalities. It's an experimental anime movie from 1985, and features a girl transporting a giant egg through a hazardous, post-apocalyptic landscape. Poking around at the production history a bit more, it apparently was the brainchild of the same guy who wrote the "Ghost In the Shell" movie. I remember the GitS movie being a lot more self-serious and hard to get into than other media in its franchise, but still pretty enjoyable. So, mostly positive expectations going into this, even if I expect it to also confuse and frustrate me at least a little - it is an art film after all.

So, let's check it out.


We open on a hand forming a weird kind of fist against a black background. Suddenly there's a noise that might be meant to suggest bones breaking, the hand clenches into an even weirder posture, and then suddenly we're looking at this:

Some extremely unsettling gothic horror music plays as the stormclouds shift furtively behind the egg. It conveys a very strong sense that whatever that fetal avionoid is supposed to be, its gestation is a threat, and its birth will bring catastrophe.

That feeling only intensifies when the camera zooms in closer, and the music evokes a mounting, urgent sense of dread as the fetus' eyelids twitch and it looks like it might be preparing to open them.

While the creature is obviously birdlike, the transparent egg with its almost hyphae-like rooting structure makes me think of squid or nautilus eggs. The big, bulbous eyes and stubby beak also kind of give me slightly cephalopodic vibes. Enough to communicate that this is not just some familiar animal. If this is an angel egg, then you don't want to meet an angel.

After this eerie prologue, the film opens on a ruined, red-skied landscape. Mountains of brachiated, vaguely clockpunk-looking raygun gothic machinery rise into the crimson sky, while the ground around their roots is a mix of parched desert and...black and white tile flooring. Like, kitchen floor pattern. It's a weird juxtaposition, but somehow it works.

Poised amidst all this whacky looking desolation is a white haired young man with a weird looking tool or weapon or something held over his shoulder. He looks exhausted, but still determined.

As he stands on the great open linoleum and stares at the horizon, an ominous rumbling noise echoes from the sky above. Something about the rumbling seems reminiscent of the creepy music from the egg-intro. The rumbling is followed by a screeching of strong winds running through the machinery around and above him, and then by movement in the murky red clouds. A vast alien...thing...lowers itself down through the atmosphere and slowly approaches the ground outside of the tile grid. It's round, dark gunmetal grey, covered in irregular spines that suggest the protein coat of a virus. Near its center mass, an array of glowing blue panels makes up the outline of a glowering, half-lidded eye.

The boy faces the alien object. Expectantly, or perhaps warily. The distance makes it hard to tell if the arrival is large building sized, or city sized. It really could be either.

A close up of the object as it descends reveals it to be covered in statues of a female figure with sort of a Greek goddess look to her. Some of the statues seem to be armed and armored, like Athena in her warrior aspect (albeit with weird art deco rings around their helmets). Others are poised more thoughtfully and clothed more loosely.

It's hard to tell if the object is only covered in these statues, or actually made of them. The giant electrical compound eye suggests a more mechanical core, but I don't think that kind of logic necessarily applies to this film.

When the arrival reaches a certain proximity to the ground, it trips some sort of alarm. The big mountain of weird machinery that the boy is standing near releases hundreds of steam gusts from ports all over its branches, creating the sound of a thousand overlapping train whistles. The object conjures a bright light under itself, and then releases a retrorocket-ish blast to balance its landing that sends up catastrophic plumes of smoke as the shockwave rips across the desert.

The boy faces the blast, his expression growing more trepidatious and world-weary. Then, suddenly, a female voiceover asks "Who are you?" It's not clear if this is the boy's inner monologue (in which case I don't think they're actually a boy), or someone else who just arrived on the statue-ship addressing him.

Jump to another character, who may or may not be the one asking the question. Although if so, then we're a little temporally disjointed, because she appears to be just now waking up from a deep sleep. The distant sound of the train whistle sirens seems to have been what awoke her, and she's still wincing at their screeches as she rubs the sleep from her eyes and slowly gets to her feet.

Also, she's monochrome.

She seems to have been asleep either inside of the mechanical steam tower thing, or inside of the statue-covered spaceship thing. It's hard to tell which at this point.

There's a white, vestal bed that she pulls herself off of, gathering her shawl around herself as she rises. The bed clashes with the rest of the aesthetics around itself, but then so does the girl herself. As she leaves the bed, her receding shawl reveals the egg that was laying on there beside her. It's not a fucked up alien egg like the one in the intro, or at least, not obviously so. It looks like any large bird egg. The positioning, as if she's been brooding it, suggests that she might have laid the egg herself.

Or maybe they are the same egg, it just looked more transparent and spooky and tangled up in tubes when it was...idk...inside of her?

She reaches a circular opening in whatever structure - the machine mountain or the space virus - she's inside of, and looks out over cracked soil and ruined cities under a roiling red sky. Bracing herself against the wind. She stares, morose. Haunting music plays. This continues for some time. Then it fades to black. And stays black, while the haunting piano music and choral vocals continue. This also continues for some time. Then the title card appears, in handwritten white text against the black background.

...

The music sounds like it might have been an inspiration for the Ghost Song soundtrack. Anyone here played that demo? Listen to this side by side with GS's menu theme, it's very similar.

EDIT: just asked the devs. Apparently not. But, it turns out that visually this movie was an influence on Hollow Knight, and Hollow Knight in turn had some influence on Ghost Song, so there is still a roundabout connection even if not the one I thought.~

...

The blackness gives way to a brief montage of Mindy Monochrome putting on some heavier clothes, bundling her egg (which she is much more visibly treating as if it were her baby now) up to her front, and then - by nightfall - finally departing overland. The music gets increasingly choral, but less spooky as this occurs.

So, "angel's egg." Egg laid by (or at least belonging to) an angel, which would mean that that's what Mindy is? Egg from which an angel will hatch? Egg entrusted to her by an angel? All possibilities.

Not mutually exclusive possibilities, either.

After all, angels only hatch from angel eggs, and angel eggs or only laid by angels. To propose otherwise would be silliness of the highest order.

Anyway, Mindy departs! She carries her egg along night-time seashores, over the roots and branches of salt-encrusted mangrove swamps, and through landscapes that defy easy description. Eventually, she makes it to a more earthlike looking little area of rolling hills, and rests and washes her feet in a stream.

And then also does this with some of the water:

Somehow. I don't know if she had that flask hidden somewhere, if she magically hardened the water itself to form it, or if the egg transformed into it. It's a pretty similar size and shape to the egg, so that last one might actually be what the story is trying to suggest. Oh wait, no, a minute later we see her drinking from the mystery flask, and the egg is clearly still bundled up inside of her shirt. Okay, yeah, no idea where the flask came from then.

Also the facial animations are notably weaker than any other aspect of the visuals. This shot isn't the only rough patch, but it's probably the most extreme. She looks like bad fanart of someone else in this frame, and it looks even worse in motion.

She tucks in her head and appears to be going to sleep, but we don't see her sleeping. Just a montage of creepy imagery and creepy music from the brook and trees around her. Water plants and reflections of branches wriggling in the water, suggesting tentacles. Dead trees laying half in the water seem to become alien corpses in the deep shadows. Music gets spoopy again.

This continues for some time.

Then, Mindy starts sinking into the dark, starlit water, her face still and corpselike as she descends.

Her hair spreads out under the water, and begins creeping over her face like tentacles trying to grab her. Everything looks like tentacles around this place tonight, it seems.

She drifts under the water entirely, the stream turning out to be quite a bit deeper than I would have assumed. Then again, assuming anything about anything in this movie is sort of a risky proposition, so that's on me. Pondweed and algae clouds in around her, more tendrils spreading in front of her and combining with her hair into one massive, consuming network of filaments. As if her body and the river are colluding to devour her in her sleep.

Then suddenly a strong wind hits her face, shocking her awake. She's still sitting on the riverbank, apparently having zoned out and had a bad dream. Or perhaps her soul was partially sucked out of her body and into the river for a bit, and she just barely made her will save now. One or the other. Anyway, this spurs her to pack up her egg and move on.

On she moves. Along the river, until it becomes an artificial canal, which she then follows into an abandoned city. She wanders the serene ruins for a while and then eventually finds a fountain that appears to still be working. She leaves her mystery flask under it while she takes her egg to go search elsewhere for...I guess other supplies or food or something.

Also, I begin to see the Hollow Knight inspiration now.

It's a lot more overt than I'd been led to expect, honestly. Interesting.

There's lots of long, foreboding shots of her peaking in windows, and dissonantly scary music when she finds them to be full of hats and coats and empty containers and stuff. It's as if she's looking for something specific and sinister, or trying to hide from something specific while she searches.

She finds some red stuff that seems to be food of some kind. As well as another weird flask similar to the one she already has, which she promptly washes out and prepares to add to her collection. A clock striking midnight startles her, and she runs away to regroup all her belongings and then eat a meal out of scavenged stuff. Then, she gets startled again by another weird noise, but this one actually precipitates the appearance of a thing.

lt's a...train? Tank? Factory component? Not sure.

Whatever this rust coloured thingamajig is, it's soon accomponied by half a dozen others like it. Looks like they're all chained to some kind of pole that just rose out of the ground, and its swinging them all around on those chains like a diesalpunk carousel ride. She stands in place, seemingly afraid to run while they're flailing all around her. Then, finally, most of them withdraw, with one just lowering itself to the ground, its tubes and pipes flailing like octopus tentacles. It falls (mostly) still, and the boy from the beginning climbs out. Still holding that stafflike tool/weapon of his, though he's keeping it at his side now.

Some sensitive piano keys play as the two stare at each other. This goes on for some time. Then, after making up her mind, Mindy decides to deal with this situation the same way she deals with most situations.

After fleeing from engineer spear boi in much the same manner that she flees from everything else, Mindy finds a ruined temple type thing to shelter in and sits down to eat and drink what she's scavenged. She then takes out her egg, inspects it carefully, and spreads her coat over it to sleep over and brood it like a literal bird again.

Eventually, dawn comes, finding her leaning over a reflective pool at the edge of the ruins while the customary spooky music plays. This continues for some time. When it's gotten a little bit brighter, she walks back through the temple and sees Boi slouched dejectedly on the outer steps. Looks like he didn't take her fleeing from him very well.

Apparently he doesn't have an air conditioned digging machine cockpit to sleep in. Perhaps that, rather than Mindy's rejection, accounts for most of his foul mood. Only perhaps. Mindy's poorly-drawn expression suggests that she's feeling remorseful, though, so she at least thinks that this might be her fault. She slowly approaches him, cautious, but with conciliatory intent.

Then, suddenly, she realizes that her egg is missing. I'm not sure how the hell she could have failed to notice this until now, with it being bigger than her own head, but I guess somehow she didn't. She looks like she's about to start panicking, but then Boi stands up and hands it to her with these words.

Yeah, he has a point Mindy. You really ought to catch up with the placental mammals, there's a reason we stopped gestating that shit externally.

I guess he stole it while she was asleep? Or it just teleported out from under her shirt and into his a second ago? If it's the latter, then I guess Mindy's flesh blocks teleportation, for his advice to make sense.

They stare at each other silently as he offers the egg back to her. Staring takes place. It happens for a while. Then, she cautiously takes the egg back with the air of a bird not being sure if it should take back a fallen hatchling that got human scent on it. I'm starting to think that Mindy is literally a bird in a human body, moreso than any kind of "angel." Unless angels were actually a type of bird all along. Mind blown. Anyway, she takes it back, clutches it protectively, and then stares at him. An increment of time is dedicated to them staring at each other. A nonzero number of frames. Then he asks her what's inside of it, and she gets even more defensive, telling him that she can't tell him that, especially when she doesn't even know who he is. This prompts him to suggest that she break it open to find out what it contains.

I'm not sure what reaction he was expecting. To all appearances, that egg is - either literally or at least just effectively - her baby. You don't just tell a mother to crack her baby open. Babies crack themselves open when they're ready to begin the free living stage of their life cycles. Premature baby cracking is unlikely to yield good results, assuming you want the baby, which she does as evidenced by her bothering to carry it.

She runs away from him. He looks...not despondent this time, but just sort of longsuffering. She makes it down the stairs and across the courtyard before stopping and looking back at him. She asks him who he even is, anyway.

Instead of showing his answer, it just jumps to this shot of the two of them standing next to each other along a crumbling roadway.

Wistful music plays as they stand still, staring at each other in silhouette. This continues for some time. More than "some," honestly. A large amount of time.

She tells him not to follow her, and continues on her way. He follows her. She freaks out and tries to outrun him, but eventually gives up and just sort of tolerates him trudging after her from that point on. The music goes from creepy to sort of Gregorian chant-y.

I really wish we'd gotten to see his answer to her question, about who he is. It seems to have changed their relationship in some way, even if I'm not quite sure how. She allowed him to get close to her at least one more time after that, at least.

At one point, while they're crossing a mostly open, well-lit boulevard, we get an overhead shot that finally makes it clear what that thing Boi has been carrying is. It's not a weapon or tool like I thought.

So, she's carrying an egg. New life. He's carrying a cross. Blood sacrifice. True, this crucifix is a little small to actually hang someone from, but this is such basic bitch Christian symbolism that the logistics don't need to add up for it to be recognizable. Putting it together, along with him almost literally saying that you can't make an omelette without cracking eggs, I think he's going to have to sacrifice himself in order to make the egg hatch and allow life to return to this dying world.

Is the entire movie a Christian metaphor, or is it just dipping into exotic western mysticism a bit as anime often does? Too early to tell. The bird motif that Mindy has going on doesn't quite fit anything in the Jesus story particularly, but it does fit some other biblical narratives. Now, what was up with the spaceship virus thing she arrived on, or the floor tile radar tower mountain that he was waiting at, in that religious framework? Hmm.

As he pursues her through the shifting shadows and choral music, she seems to be making secretive little smiles in his direction when he can't see. As if she's starting to enjoy his presence, despite herself. Her hair also drifts around in the air and gets all feathery-looking for a bit, so we're really going for maximum birb with Mindy. They stop to eat and drink, and then continue. The city they're moving through is a large one, as they seem to be spending at least several hours passing through it. Although...actually, wait, it was around dawn when they departed, so maybe it actually hasn't been any time at all since they've left. I don't know, maybe day and night just stopped working a few hours after Mindy's ship landed.

Well, however long it's been, it eventually starts raining. Boi offers to let Mindy shelter under his coat, but she literally turns up her nose at him.

Also, I didn't realize the size difference until just now. Either she's a small child (or at least the size of one), or he's ten feet tall.

She endures the rain on her own, but then quickly changes her tune when a bunch of semi-transluscent soldiers carrying weird compound polearms start charging around the corner. These are the first people we've seen in the movie besides Mindy and Boi, and while they look like they might be ghosts or spirits or something this is still a very attention-getting development. Mindy hides under Boi's offered coat and hugs his waist in fear as the soldiers hurry past. The phantoms either can't see them or just aren't interested in them, but Mindy seems to fear them nonetheless.

It's not just because they're strange and armed and potentially hostile, though. She apparently knows much more than the audience does about these guys. At least enough to explain to Boi that they're hunting for the fish who sometimes prowl these lands. Uh...huh. From the way she says it, it seems like she's more afraid of the fish than she is of these soldiers. Boi just seems confused, which surprises me; until now, he seemed to be the one who knew his shit around this place.

The music picks up and becomes a dramatic gothic fight theme. More soldiers spill out of every alleyway and large building, looking more tangible and less ghostly than before. Huh, maybe this city was never actually as abandoned as it looked. Also, it's clear now that those "polearms" I thought they were carrying are in fact fishing poles.

Some of them seem to have harpoons as well, but it's mostly fishing poles.

And then, before I can ask the obvious question, a baffling answer presents itself in the form of a gigantic shadow-fish that comes slithering up a main street.

I thought it was the shadow of a giant flying fish overhead, but nope. It's just a shadow. These fish that everyone is determined to fight off are two dimensional shadow beasts. The framing suggests that they're dangerous, but it isn't at all clear how.

Weird looking fish, also. I thought it was an angel shark at first, but then we see one in profile as it "swims" over a building front, and now I'm pretty sure these are coelacanths. Interesting choice. Living fossil. More closely related to the land animal side of Tetrapoda than to any other modern fish. Highly elusive. The symbolism they're being picked for here could relate to any, all, or none of these famous traits.

There's an exciting, tense action sequence of the army of fishermen attacking the shadow-fish with their razor sharp fishing poles and armor-piercing harpoons that punch half a foot into stone and cement. Nothing really seems to be working on the umbral ceolacanths though, on account of them literally being two dimensional shadows that just slide over things. Also, despite Mindy expressing fear of them, the fish don't really appear to be fighting back (and really, why should they?). It's pretty dramatic regardless, though.

This scene is basically a Fantasia sequence.

Meanwhile, Boi and Mindy have moved away from the violence of dubious efficaciousness, and found themselves a building that...hmm. The stained glass ceilings say cathedral. The movie theater-ish rows of individual seats say auditorium. The grimacing statue of an axolotl over the door outside says what the fuck. As Boi waits outside, Mindy goes inside and stares at the stained glass windows while an a Capella church chorus sings.

This continues for some time.

Eventually, she gets tired of this and finds a particularly reflective window pane at mezzanine level to look at herself in. She examines her and her egg's reflections, and seems pleased with what she sees. Meanwhile, just on the other side of the window, an umbral coelocanth swims over the wall of the building while Boi watches warily.

The music gets scary again as we flash between the heedless, happy Mindy looking at herself in the mirror, and horror movie close-ups of the shadow fish sliding across the wall. Boi watches the fish's movement with increasing consternation while fisherman-soldiers charge by on the street behind him hurrying after other targets.

The fishermen throw their spears and cast their lines, but nothing they do has any effect, because, once again, the fish are literally just shadows. They break windows and shatter streetlamps with their stray shots in their frenzy to hit the coelacanths, but, well, hitting them isn't the problem. It continues being Fantasia for a while until Boi finally goes in to collect Mindy, and the two of them leave the city behind them. I thought maybe the umbral coelacanths were going to pose some kind of threat to Mindy, due to all the musical and visual cues, but I guess not.

As they leave, Boi gives the city a tired, disapproving look over his shoulder. It's unclear if its the shadow fish infestation he disapproves of, or the local (ghosts'?) overreaction to it.

After looking wearily at them for a while, he moves on across the rocky wasteland. This time, it's Mindy who follows him rather than the reverse. I guess they're friends now or something.

After walking a bit, she stops and asks him to promise not to do anything to her egg. He doesn't answer, just stares at her meaningfully. Then, the next thing we know, they're just walking on ahead together as if there's no source of friction. This is the second time that it seems like the film has skipped over Boi's answer to one of Mindy's questions. Strange storytelling choice, that. It probably means something about how faith is a personal experience that must be sought by each soul individually or whatever.

Eventually, they reach a pond that sits in the basin of...either a very weird looking cave system, or the insides of a giant fossilized creature. Actually, come to think of it, it looks more like a cave with a giant fossilized skeleton in it.

They wander through the calcified bones for a while, and come to a cave wall with a strange, treelike carving on it. Very large. Sort of Peruvian looking, in terms of style. It doesn't mean much to Mindy, but Boi stops and examines it. It reminds him of something. He's pretty sure that he's seen a tree like the one being depicted here.

He reaches out and touches the carving, calling attention to the fact that he has bandages over what appears to be stigmata.

Wait a minute, if he's already been crucified, why is he carrying a cross around? I'm sorry, but this just shatters the internal logic of the movie and brings the verisimilitude crumbling all the way down. Angel's Egg is shit, 0/10.

Anyway, he recounts where he saw a tree like this, and it really seems like he's talking about his intro scene with the metal techno-tower and the giant virus ship. It sounds like the "tree" he's talking about is the steam filled techno-mountain-tower-thing (and indeed, the carving does look like it now that he points it out). He adds some context though. The tree was "sucking the life out of the land," he says. So that techno-tower was responsible for the desolation, or at least he thinks it was. He also describes the giant statue-covered virus spaceship as an egg laid by a titanic bird that flew by overhead through the noisy clouds. The tree of metal reached up like a hand, he says, and tried to seize the egg as it approached the ground...but then he doesn't remember anything after that. Just that there is another bird within that egg, and it must be protected from the tree or forces associated with it.

Mindy asks him if he knows where the mother bird went after depositing the egg onto the landscape. He doesn't. But he knows that the one inside of the egg is still gestating. Alive. Asleep. Dreaming.

Mindy asks what it's dreaming about. Boi turns to give her a meaningful look, and asks her, once again, what is inside of that egg she's carrying. She doesn't answer.

...

Okay, so she's the embryo. The eldritch bird monster thing we saw at the very beginning. That thing is in the core of the spaceship-egg, and it's dreaming about being a humanoid girlchild. In the dreamworld, the egg that she's carrying represents the one she's inside of; cracking it open like Boi wants her to will trigger her awakening, and her birth.

How this relates to the Christian imagery, well...the guy is a Jesus stand-in, obviously. Which means that the industrial techno-tree that killed the world with its pollution is probably supposed to be original sin. The tree of Eden and so forth. Going into the gnostic side of Christianity's heritage, the mortal world is an illusion; a dream. Redemption via the blood of Christ and ascension to heaven, in this version of the religion, is really a process of waking up from the illusion that our corruption has trapped us in. So, Jesus Boi here is diving into her dreamworld to wake her up and restore both her celestial birdly state and bring, via her presence, life back to the landscape of the universe.

What the shadow fish are all about, I'm much less sure. Something about Plato's Cave maybe? Fish are usually a symbol of life in Abrahamic iconography (and an ancient, elusive species like the coelacanth would fit that particularly well I think), so maybe the fishermen are trying to get immortality by chasing the shadows of it but are unable to succeed without Christ. Maybe? Like I said, this is much less clear to me. Likewise, the framing of the fish as antagonistic (even though they don't do anything) is hard to square with that reading. I guess we'll see.

...

The two of them move on through the cave, which increasingly seems to have artificial spaces carved into its fossil-encrusted depths. Eventually, they climb a staircase made from petrified ribs, and that has a row of old dusty bottles similar to Mindy's flask arranged along it. And man, Hollow Knight's visual lineage really is clear. We already had the City of Tears, and now here's the Howling Peaks too.

I'm half expecting to see a labyrinth made of living mushrooms before the end of the movie, at this point.

As pictured above, the arranged flasks continue along the hallway after they finish climbing the staircase. Eventually, they get to the end of the lined bottles, where Mindy places her own.

Boi asks if she placed ALL of these bottles here. She claims that she hasn't, or at least, that she doesn't remember doing so. She doesn't seem to remember much of anything at all about where she came from. Boi claims that neither does he. Which, I mean. Dream. That makes sense. For her, if not for him.

Then he speaks up again, and begins a long, biblical monologue that definitely should go in the next post. So, I'll stop it here for now.

This movie is very, very itself.