Chris
Steve, it happened again. Thanksgiving is here, and the only thing I have to bring to the family dinner is a gross of eggs.

Steve
A gross? Inthis economy? Boy, I sure hope you didn't have to shell out for a movie ticket recently on top of that.

Trips to the movies are apparently a regular part of many people's Thanksgiving weekends with the family, though I don't know if they always involve a hefty dose of...whatever there is to be had inAngel's Egg. We'll get into it.

Yes, as wealluded to last week, we here at TWIA were all too excited to get out to the 4K theatrical release ofMamoru Oshii'sAngel's Egg...and it turns out we weren't the only ones! The timelines and Discord servers have been a veritable carton of Egg discussion, which is kinda remarkably wonderful for a weird old legend like this.

Indeed. I guess my immediate and trite observation is just how buckwild it is that this 40-year-old art film from another country received anything close to a wide theatrical release. And it did well to boot!It was the fourth highest-grossing film on the Wednesday and Thursday of this past week. BelowPredator: Badlands and just aboveNuremberg. The little Egg that could.

I heard anecdotes from others about some theaters even being full for their showings! I get the impression there's a healthy crossover between nerds of both film and anime for this. That's heartening, since for one thing, it's well-documented how getting current anime fans to watch anything considered "old" can be like pulling teeth.

Never mind that my first reaction upon seeing it for the first time was that I was delightedly shocked they gave this a U.S. theatrical release at all! Let alone adub.

Right? Granted, there's maybe 10 minutes' worth of dialogue across its 70-minute runtime, so it's not like it would be a difficult movie todub. But by the same token, it took four decades for an American licensor to do it, so I don't want to sound dismissive ofGKIDS' effort.

My theater, for what it's worth, wasn't anywhere close to being full. But it was also pretty far removed from any major metropolitan centers, plus it was a 9 pm showing, plus I opted for thedub, so I was frankly surprised to see anybody else there.

I opted for the earlier showing with the sub, and my theater wasn't full, but at least had more people than the matinee showing I caught ofFrankenstein a week earlier. Which, uh,Angel's Egghandily outperformed.

Which is more of a call-out onNetflix's handling ofFrankenstein than anything else. Great movie in a theater! Which, it turns out,Angel's Egg also is! Cannot recommend time-traveling back to last week and experiencing it that way if you didn't!

Big time. And funnily enough, this was actually my second time seeingAngel's Egg on the silver screen. Do you wanna know how I managed that? (It doesn't involve time travel.)

I'm sure we'll be discussing even wilder things as we crack deeper into this egg, so yeah, I'm curious.

Sheer dumb luck! A few years ago, a completely different local theater (that will go unnamed to protect the innocent and/or guilty) hosted a series of anime films, and one month, the feature wasAngel's Egg. Now, to be clear, this wasn't an above-board showing. Someone definitely threw a .mkv onto the projector. Also, the subtitles were formatted incorrectly, so they only appeared on the screen about half the time. But even in this busted, bootleg form, it was a mesmerizing experience (and a pretty packed crowd).

Amazing. As already mentioned, it's not like there are even a ton of subtitles to go around inAngel's Egg. That's honestly the kind of indulgence I hope for from a local theater. And it also gives me cause for the second week in a row to bring up the time almost a decade ago whenDawn "Bunnycartoon" H. noted that Tokyopop had uploaded their own unlicensed version ofAngel's Egg toYouTube.

Would you believe neither of those is even the weirdest westside releaseAngel's Egg has had? There's just something about this movie—something I can echo your old, mesmerized reaction with my own upon finally seeing it for myself.

God, theTokyo Pop egg debacle is still hilarious—a top 10 American anime fandom moment. But more to your point, Western audiences first got to knowAngel's Egg as the animated component of the filmIn the Aftermath. Because the anime licensing scene really used to be the wild west.

It's funny to think that the originalAngel's Egg is now probably more widely known than this is.

Yeah, it's deeply ironic that people pullingIn the Aftermath outIn the Aftermath ofAngel's Egg's new release was the first I'd heard of this thing.

For those like me who didn't know until now,In the Aftermath was alleged to beRoger Corman protégéCarl Colpaert's attempt to make his own movie version ofAngel's Egg by combining new live-action footage with repurposed footage from the actual film. The results are uuuhhhhhhh...

we have the girl from angels egg at home!!

the girl from angels egg at home:

[image or embed]

—Mike Toole (@miketoole.com)November 20, 2025 at 10:37 AM

This got aBlu-ray release from Arrow Video in 2019, which feels deeply unfair to the realAngel's Egg. But as I said, time has already chosen the true victor.

I learned aboutIn the Aftermath as a bit of trivia when I first heard aboutAngel's Egg back in college. But yeah, never had any desire to seek it out. Maybe one day, out of curiosity.

Regardless, the original film was far more my college-aged self's speed. Slow. Quiet. Ponderous. Even pretentious. I was (and, to be fair, still am) all about that stuff. I can't imagine that whatever video file I found back in the day did the film justice, but it did give me a whole lot of desktop backgrounds to choose from.

Oh yeah, one of my main thoughts upon seeing this for the first time was just going "Ooh, that'd make a sick desktop background" roughly every thirty seconds.More to the point, as someone who's always embraced so-called "pretentious" stories, I also foundAngel's Egg to be exactly my speed! It's funny because despite all its pretense, it still feels welcoming, in a way. Inviting audiences to bring their own reads on it, as so many of the best stories of this ilk do. That's probably a reason the chatter around it got so strong after a huge chunk of the population saw it for the first time last week!

It's a singular piece of art. And, to marry those two points, I think a lot of that sense of welcoming comes down to how drop-dead gorgeous it is.Mamoru Oshii andYoshitaka Amano deserve credit for that, of course, but I don't think you can have that full conversation without mentioning art directorShichirō Kobayashi. His backgrounds are essentially characters, and it's so vital to the film's gothic tone and atmosphere.

This is how I now know that Kobayashi's similarly surreal work on Adolescence ofUtena would also go insanely hard on the big screen. Seriously, I hope someone is looking into a 4K remaster of all this. It'll make millions. Trust me.

It's been one of the many mini-subjects spinning out of this Egg-cellent adventure, but I agree with the takes, hoping that this spawns a rush of theatrical releases of wild old anime in 4K. Seriously,GKIDS, the people yearn forCalifornia Crisis andDragon's Heaven in theaters!

You're right that the look ofAngel's Egg is part and parcel to its appeal, given how much time is spentlooking at it. And I can't overstate what justice this new transfer does to that look, appropriately given that they took pains to advertise how Oshii himself approved it! You can see the individual strokes on the blacks on the background of this release, it is a wonder!

To me, it seriously embodies how much of the physical creation of an experimental film like this is part of its appeal.

It's a film that, through its minimal dialogue, invites you to pay close attention and carefully scrutinize what's on screen. So yeah, that extra level of detail from a proper restoration feels all the more rewarding to notice. The world ofAngel's Egg is a construct, but one nevertheless suffused with purpose.

I mean, between Kobayashi's art and having Yoshitaka friggin' Amano on design, I would never doubt that level of purpose.

I've seen ink spilled over questioning whether this movie orVampire Hunter D from the same year does a better job of adapting Amano's distinctive (pre-Final Fantasy!) art. What's really important is that pairing that art with Oshii's sensibilities results in something entirely its own.

Things like how the girl carries herself, visibly reacts in her expressions, that's inherent to how it's conveyed in the animated medium and makesAngel's Egg that much more special as itself, let alone when you can see the ink on each strand of her wispy Amano hair.

I dare you to find another movie with hair this hypnotizing. I don't even want to think about how long it took to draw each frame of each strand. Except I do like thinking about it, because it's one of many small, meticulous details you could pull apart in an attempt to unravel the movie.

Part of my personal thesis on this movie revolves around its existence as something that actually had to be made—crafted—in the real world, so you bet I appreciate a release that highlights the raw physicality of putting ink to paper to make it.

And naturally, that big question—what isAngel's Egg about?—has driven a lot of theOVA's notoriety across the decades since its debut. It's a fascinating melange of influences and images: Christianity and biblical storytelling, war, innocence, existence, cool tanks (thanks Oshii), gender, purpose, and plenty of other symbols or lenses through which you could interpret its themes.

People doubling back to "What thehell was that about?!" was absolutely a theme of a lot of the postings I saw the past week about it. In an earnest, entertaining, endearing way, to be sure.

For example, I love the fishermen as a very young child's interpretation of what soldiers would look like, with their fishing rods standing in for rifles that a child's eye might not otherwise recognize. Is that correct, or is it the only way you can unwrap that? Of course not. But it's an interesting place to start if we're thinking about how the specter of war fits intoAngel's Egg's desolate setting.

The fishermen are only part of one (very big, very memorable) segment of the movie, but they reflect so much of how it lays out its ideas. The egg the girl is devoting herself to is nebulous in its contents, but at least it's a tangible object compared to the literal shadows the fisherman are chasing!

There are takes onAngel's Egg as a read on faith, particularly through a Christian lens, and the imagery of fish and making fishers of men absolutely jibes with that. I don't know how entirely I feel that's what's being analyzed, but the way people interface with what they believe in and what they hope for in desolate, hopeless situations is pretty definitively part of this.The fishermen end up destroying parts of a church in their mad frenzy to catch that which cannot be obtained! It ain't subtle!

The Flood imagery is also everywhere—water, arks, birds, etc. The soldier literally recites the story of Noah on top of that. Notably, though, the clouds never part, and there isn't a rainbow to be seen. Just an ominous biomechanical eye that bookends the story.

I also like thinking about the girl's actions. Because she doesn't just guard her egg. What does she fill all those flasks with water for? Is it a meaningless Sisyphean task? Is it her attempt to contain the Flood? Is it a ritual we're not privy to? Are they substitutes for the egg? Companions? Decoys? Or does the water just taste as good as it looks when she sips it out of a big spherical glass?

I talked to other people about this, and there's absolutely a take that the water in the jugs represents hope, in a deliciously literal "glass half full" sort of way. To say nothing of how the girl takes moments to see how the world looks through her glasses of hope, er, water.

But she also makes a point of not confirming for the boy soldier that the bottles represent all her time spent where she's been. It reads to me as a response to busywork, a routine done primarily to keep yourself going out of sheer inertia in a hopeless situation. But as with any Sisyphean tasks and/or regular jobs, it can't be the sole indicator of what you've accomplished, or you'll start to friggin' lose it. To put it another way, in a phrase I started repeating to myself after it came up in the movie: "You can't measure your time spent in bottles."

Of particular note to the theatrical release, her scream upon finding the broken egg pierced through the surround sound in a deeply unsettling way. The egg was certainly another container of hope, and her horror and grief at losing it resonated throughout that entire theater. This is why going to the cinema is still so important. Nicole Kidman knows what she's talking about.

I'm glad you mentioned it, because this gives us a good place to mention that thesound on the theatrical release ofAngel's Egg was another outstanding reason to see it in this format. That scream you mentioned made me and others absolutely jump in the theater, but the whole discordant soundscape of a score byYoshihiro Kanno sings terrifyingly within those walls. It's all tense strings and upsettingly blasting tones that expertly run the whole gamut of volume levels.

And yeah, that scream is probably gonna stick with me as one of my lifelong film memories. I didn't see thedub, so I don't know howBrianna Knickerbocker matchedMako Hyōdō's iconic intonation, but I hope she nailed it.

Thedub was good! Appropriately understated and a worthy companion to my memories of the originalseiyuu. Plus, it was nice to be able to devote my eyes fully to the images on screen this time. I will be eager to compare the dubs more directly when the Blu-ray arrives.As for the soundtrack, it's unforgettable. Again, with so few words at its disposal,Angel's Egg relies heavily on music to convey its tone, and Kanno succeeds with a beautiful melancholy that echoes contemplative sacred music. You can listen to some of it here if you want to get a feel for it.

And, to sound like a broken record, hearing those choral parts in a theater was a near-spiritual experience.

It's almost auditory overstimulation with all the whistles coming out of the prototypical Eye of Vogler at the beginning there. It certainly sets the stage for any unfamiliar folks (i.e., me), unsure of what an intense experience this is going to be.

I'm gladGKIDS has since confirmed they'll be giving this a home video release, though I do feel bad for reiterating how outstanding the theatrical release was for those who didn't catch it. Part of me hopes that this new licensing and print ofAngel's Egg means it can keep making some rounds at the kinds of theaters that would show it for those who want to watch it.

I won't be surprised if it becomes a mainstay on the independent/art theater circuit. And hey, if you're reading this on Tuesday the 25th and you happen to live in or close to NYC,the Metrograph has showings today and tomorrow.

Incidentally, the Metrograph is also where I saw another experimental anime art film classic:Belladonna of Sadness.

I can't prove this, but I'm like 90% certainMichael Cera was in the audience with me.

At least the second anime-adjacent Sadness thatMichael Cera has been involved with.

As we mentioned earlier, getting the broader anime-watching public to talk about an old, weird release likeAngel's Egg is, overall, a win for something like this. Least of all in the discussion of Oshii himself. Some of his wildest, most distinctive works, likeUrusei Yatsura: Beautiful Dreamer andGhost in the Shell 2: Innocence are, as of this writing, not available for stream. And they still aren't as opaque asAngel's Egg, so maybe this opens a path back to public viewing and conversation.

True that. Moreover, I hope the increased visibility and availability ofAngel's Egg inspires more artists to push the envelope and put themselves out there. You can say a lot of things aboutAngel's Egg, but it was most assuredly not made to be an easily digestible commercial work. It's baroque, chewy, and abstruse. And people are still talking about it, analyzing it, and loving it. Oshii, Amano, and the rest of the staff made a work of art that's uncompromising and authentic, and I think every artist can and should aspire to do the same. You never know whom you might affect.

To circle back to my earlier allusion, a huge part of my take onAngel's Egg is that it's about the creative process and finding yourself as an artist. Getting to see a version of this story where you can thus see every brushstroke and feel every uncomfortable vibration of the sound embodies that.

And I'm with you on analysis and inspiration. This movie itself is a lot like the egg: what's actually inside of it doesn't matter as much as what it means to those who find and carry it with them.

I mean, you said you bought a gross of eggs, and I think there are at least that many, if not magnitudes more ways of thinking about and reacting to whatAngel's Egg puts out there. The film looks different to me now than it did a few years ago, and even more different than it did when I was in college. Having open and curious minds will reward us all so long as people continue to pour their souls into works likeAngel's Egg. And I hope we can elevate those, too, as we find them.Because if there's one thingAngel's Egg teaches us, it's that we shouldn't put all of our eggs in one basket.

We're always egging on this kind of creativity. And we're not yolking.

You crack me up.