Angel's Egg

Angel's Egg (Tenshi no Tamago in Japanese) is a surreal 1985 animated film which was directed by Mamoru Oshii and featured art designs by Yoshitaka Amano. The film centers around a young girl protecting an egg in an abandoned gothic city who meets a mysterious man with a cross-shaped rifle. The rest is...a bit harder to describe, but it's extremely beautiful nonetheless.


 * As the Good Book Says...
 * Beautiful Void
 * Creepy Cool Crosses
 * Dark-Skinned Blond
 * Doing It for the Art: Oshii admits that because this film bombed at the box office, he couldn't get any animation work for the next four years until he revived his career with Patlabor.
 * Egg McGuffin
 * Faceless Eye
 * Le Film Artistique
 * Flying Seafood Special: Giant flying coelacanth shadows, to be exact.
 * Gainax Ending
 * Ghost City
 * Have You Seen My God?: The real theme of this movie.
 * Importation Expansion: When it was brought to the US, 45 minutes of live action footage was added in an attempt to release it as a post-apocalyptic thriller. This version, called In The Aftermath: Angels Never Sleep has since been almost completely forgotten.
 * Leave the Camera Running
 * Minimalist Cast
 * No Name Given
 * Our Angels Are Different: Apparently, they lay eggs. Or destroy them, or something.
 * The Reveal: At the end of the movie, the camera pulls out slowly to show that
 * Rule of Symbolism
 * Silence Is Golden: There's less than a page of dialogue, and most of it is in one scene. The second line of dialogue is said a full 24 minutes into a 71 minute film
 * Taken for Granite
 * White-Haired Pretty Boy
 * White-Haired Pretty Girl
 * World of Symbolism