Angel’s Egg

Movie Overview

Angel’s Egg (Tenshi no Tamago / 天使のたまご) is an original anime movie from 1985 by Studio Deen. The genre tags for the movie are dementia, drama, and fantasy, and I think those are pretty fitting — especially the dementia tag.

Now, I want to start off this review by mentioning that I ended up really enjoying Angel’s Egg. I went into it knowing nothing about it, and honestly, for the first half of the movie I wasn’t very interested. But once the “twist” (it’s not really a twist) came, I was suddenly way more invested than I ever expected to be.

The story follows a girl who carries around a large egg tucked under her dress. Her daily routine involves exploring a desolate city in search of food and water. But one day, an older boy appears and begins inquiring about the egg.

I don’t want to say too much about the actual content of the movie in this section because I think it’s something that should be experienced. But, I do have some warnings for anyone who’s interested enough to watch before getting spoiled by the later portions of this review.

First, the movie has barely any dialogue. Considering this movie is an hour and 11 minutes long, I know that’s going to be an issue for some viewers. And going along with that, I wouldn’t really recommend this movie to anyone who isn’t interested in more “artistic” anime.

By that, I don’t mean that this anime is especially stylized or anything. More that it’s artistic in how it tells and depicts its story. I haven’t watched too many anime like this, but Puparia is one that I’d say is similar, albeit much shorter.

So, just know what you’re getting into before starting Angel’s Egg.

What’s in the Egg?

This is the part of the review in which spoilers are going to begin. However, I’m not going to break down and actually explain what Angel’s Egg is all about until the next section. With that said, I’d still recommend watching the movie before proceeding if you’re interested in it.

The big question of the movie is “What’s in the egg?” But before I answer that, I’d like to point out that the contents of the egg aren’t the real mystery of the movie. Yes, the egg is strange and important, but the real mystery is the world in which the girl and the boy inhabit.

Aside from the girl and the boy, there are a bunch of faceless fishermen who hunt the ghosts of long-gone fish with harpoons, which I’ll get to later. And there are biomechanical tanks that roll down the street, which I honestly don’t have an explanation for.

Now that I’ve pointed out how strange the world the girl and the boy inhabit is, what’s in the egg? We’re told it’s a giant bird — and in fact, we saw a giant bird-like creature in an egg at the start of the movie. But there’s actually something stranger within it, an angel.

How do we know this? Because the girl shows the boy the fossil of a previous angel and claims that a new one is what’s inside the egg. This angel seems more like a monster than an angel based on its bones, to me, though. It’s a giant, human-bird hybrid.

What’s also interesting is that the fossilized angel isn’t the only fossil we see in the movie. Remember those fishermen from earlier? The shadowy fish they were hunting resemble Coelacanths, so-called “living fossils.” And on the way to the angel fossil, we can see the fossils of a whole bunch of other giant creatures embedded in the walls and floor.

Angel’s Egg Explained

The explanation of Angel’s Egg actually comes from the boy in the movie. He tells the girl the story of Noah’s Ark, however, his version of the story doesn’t end in the same way. And it’s that difference that explains the mystery of the world.

In the real story, the bird comes back with an olive leaf, signifying that the flood has begun to recede and land exists. But in Angel’s Egg, the bird never comes back. What does this mean? That the flood never receded and the bird ended up dying.

And since the flood never receded, everything else eventually died as well. That’s what the fossils depicted throughout the movie represent. All that’s left are the girl and the boy who have been alone in this world for as long as they can remember.

Basically, this story is about a different “history.” Rather than a world that was cleansed by a giant flood so that it could start over, this world was destroyed by a giant flood and never had the chance to start anew.

There’s also one more, massive piece of evidence for this. At the end of the movie, the camera zooms out into the air, and what do we see? We see that the events of the movie take place on what looks like an island in the middle of a vast ocean. But if you look closer, the island is actually the hull of a capsized ship — the ark.

There are still plenty of things about this movie that I can’t explain. But based on what I can, this movie seems to be about the destruction of religion. The angels are dead, the world never recovered after the flood, and the last remnants of humanity are living on the underside of the ark that their God claimed would save them.

Conclusion

Angel’s Egg is a 7/10. During the first half of the movie when nothing was really happening, I was thinking that it was going to be a 3/10. But once everything came together in the second half, I appreciated the movie as a whole much more.

Not everything about the movie needs to be explicitly explained. But, there were a few things from the first half that I would have liked more context for. I think if that portion was a bit more engaging, Angel’s Egg could have been an 8/10.

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