Angel's Egg (1985)

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL: ANGEL’S EGG 🥚 天使のたまご

This year marks the 40th anniversary of highly acclaimed director Mamoru Oshii’s gothic fairy tale ANGEL’S EGG, and the Cannes Film Festival honoured the film by hosting the first-ever 4K restoration screening at the Cinéma de la Plage.

Oshii’s work has always been a source of intrigue for me, which started after I first saw his cyberpunk action thriller Ghost in the Shell (1995), so to find out he was having one of his more obscure, harder-to-find projects see the light of day, I had to give it a watch.

ANGEL’S EGG was hard to latch on to narratively; its existence is like a fleeting whimsy that has meaning at its core, but that depth is hard to reach unless you know exactly what you’re looking for. Luckily the animation stylings of illustrator Yoshitaka Amano (Vampire Hunter D) struck a chord in me that made this dark fantasy an inescapable dreamlike experience that I was simultaneously confused by and immersed in.

The story follows a girl carrying an oversized egg she’s trying to protect while she unwillingly allows a quiet soldier to follow her every move.

This was allegedly a story that was meant to be a Lupin the Third movie but became repurposed for what we now know it as today. A lot of that had to do with Amano’s visualization of the premise, which Oshii found to be worth existing on its own without extra plot points to bog down what was represented on screen.

I echo Oshii’s sentiment; it’s the same way I felt about Vampire Hunter D (2000), where the dark, gothic, desolate world and the ominous designs of the characters within it hold a lot of weight in comparison to the surface-level story that is hard to engage with. Each second of this film is a piece of art within itself. Honestly, you pause this movie at any second, and you get a still image that is exuding the energy of this dreary yet imaginative wandering escapade. When you see people online clamouring for the days of hand-drawn animation in anime, this is a prime example of why.

ANGEL’S EGG is a drifting abyss of poetic wonder that may not grab your attention with its story, but it will capture your imagination with its spirited mystery.  

Enjoy!

6.3/10 🍿 🎥

Runtime: 1hr15mins
Where: The 2025 Cannes Film Festival.

Angel's Egg Review (1985) The Richmond Reviewer -  June 5th, 2025.
天使のたまご |  Tenshi no tamago

#Anime #Animation #Cannes #MovieReview #Movie #Gothic #Horror #CannesFilmFestival