Movies & TV Angel’s Egg Anime Cult Classic Angel’s Egg Spins a Gorgeous, Meditative Fable Unsurprisingly, a collaboration between Mamoru Oshii and Yoshitako Amano is haunting and beautiful — and is playing in select theaters now By Leah Schnelbach | Published on November 19, 2025 Credit: GKIDS Films Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: GKIDS Films Angel’s Egg is an iconic work of anime, long unreleased in the U.S. I was fortunate enough to catch two screenings during the New York Film Festival back in September; the film is finally receiving a wider U.S. release through GKids starting Wednesday, November 19th. The movie is a collaboration between writer/director Mamoru Oshii (Ghost in the Shell) and artist Yoshitaka Amano (Vampire Hunter D, Final Fantasy), and was originally envisioned as a comedic fantasy before Oshii saw Amano’s art for the project, and decided to take it in a more serious direction. The film was originally released in Japan in 1985, and didn’t do too well at the box office, probably because it’s an elliptical, meditative portrait of grief and fate more than a typical story with a plot. Over the decades, Angel’s Egg has come to be seen as a cult classic, and an early example of the kind of work Oshii and Amano would do throughout their careers. The story is… well. I’m still not sure? I have seen this movie twice now and if you dangled me over an erupting volcano I couldn’t tell you what the hell it’s about; you should see it in a theater if at all possible. A girl protects an Egg. She sleeps with it under a blanket at night, and, during her waking hours, clutches it to her chest most of the time. She lives in what seems to be a post-apocalyptic landscape. One day she ventures into a nearby city to forage food, and it’s there that she meets the only other real, human character: a boy who carries a giant sword. Credit: GKIDS Films Neither of them seem to know their own names, where they came from, or where they’re going. Are they allies? Are they enemies? Have they met before? What’s in the Egg? The film slowly, quietly explores these questions. But I want to make it clear: there are no real answers here—Angel’s Egg isn’t for that. If you come to this film, know that you’ve come for the mystery. This is the kind of movie where we watch a girl gaze at an abandoned city skyline for long minutes, and then maybe—maybe—we’ll watch her walk to that city. We sit on one side of a room watching, as one character slowwwwlyyyyy drops off to sleep. We watch a person watch a fire die. People don’t speak often. The longest speech in the film is a lengthy quote from a version of the story of Noah’s Ark. The animation is extraordinary. Absolutely beautiful, mid-‘80s anime, full of intricate detail and gorgeous use of light and shadow. The whole film is washed in blues, greys, and greens, our two characters standing out with shocks of white-blond hair and pale skin. And then there’s the Egg, glowing with portent. It looks like an ordinary, large, egg, like an ostrich’s—but what is it, really? Who left it, and how did the unnamed girl find it? Why does she think she’s meant to be its protector? I’ll delve into a few spoilers here—if you want to go into this film cold, turn away now. The girl fears the boy. He follows her, and she comes to trust him. This might be a mistake, or it might be fate—either way she ends up taking him to her home. She leads him through spiraling staircases. He sees an etching of a tree that seems to be something he remembers seeing in life—a tree that reached up and grasped the sky, and held a bird. There are skeletons—enormous, gargantuan skeletons, embedded in the walls, jutting out of the floors. The girl doesn’t point them out or seem to find them unusual. One looks like an archaeopteryx. As they walk, he notices her endless collection of glass bottles. Finally, she takes him to see the secret she’s been keeping. In a dripping room that felt strongly reminiscent of The Room in Tarkovsky’s Stalker, she shows hims a wall with a preserved skeleton. A humanoid skeleton, except that it has two lush wings, featherprints also embedded in the wall. And it seems to be holding a humanoid skull. An angel? A bird? Credit: GKIDS Films Whatever it is, the girl believes that that’s what lurks inside her Egg. And the boy, for the first time in the film, shows a genuine emotion on his face, and it’s one of shock and horror. That night he waits for her to sleep, and destroys the egg. Is it a dream? Is one of them God? Are they on the underside of the Ark, and the boy prevents the egg from hatching into a bird that would fly up and tell the people that it’s safe to disembark? Is this the remnants of the Ark, the skeletons of the creatures God planned to save, decayed away in a ship that never found a harbor? Is the angel a dove? Or is this an alternate universe where God changed their mind, said fuck them kids, and left everyone on the Ark to starve/dehydrate to death after the rains stopped? (I mean, given how things are going, fair.) Is that why all the bottles? Was it a hoard of fresh rainwater that finally ran out? The religious imagery is interesting because it’s kind of chopped up. At one point the boy recites the story of the Flood in a dispassionate way, but with a slightly altered ending from the one in our version of the Book of Genesis. There is an implication that these people are either enacting roles from that story, or maybe trying to rewrite the ending? I don’t know! But it’s fucking cool. Credit: GKIDS Films This is anime from the old days, when the images were beautiful and things didn’t always make logical sense. It’s also worth noting, I think, that the idea for this film spun out from an idea that Oshii was going to use for a Lupin III movie that got cancelled, and Oshii did use one of the images again in a script for an utterly batshit episode of Lupin III Part 6 in 2021. The idea that this beautiful, obscure piece of art was almost part of the Lupin-verse makes every part of my brain sing. I’s so glad I got to experience this in a theater, and that a lot of new fans are finally getting that chance, too.[end-mark] The post Anime Cult Classic <i>Angel’s Egg</i> Spins a Gorgeous, Meditative Fable appeared first on Reactor.