Retrospective: Angel's Egg (Patreon)

A decade before he revolutionized cyberpunk and cracked an armada of eggs with Ghost in the Shell, Mamoru Oshii made a film about a different sort of egg. Oshii's Angel's Egg is perhaps his finest work: a beautifully oppressive depiction of a world ravaged by cataclysm. Its characters are so overwhelmed by the endless biblical catastrophe that they've forgotten where they came from or why they're here. It is possibly Oshii's finest work, and incredibly difficult to watch.

The protagonist, a nameless girl, carries an egg she believes will hatch and release an angel. She transports her cargo across desolate landscapes, past ruins that may or may not have once housed people, dodging cadres of armed soldiers. Angel's Egg is redolent of early Werner Herzog films, with its mostly silent protagonist wandering through lands that look like Central Europe in search of something ineffable. The egg she carries is the only hope she knows; perhaps it's the only thing worth living for.

Her companion, a boy who may or may not be a soldier, has no such hope. He retells the story of Noah's Ark, whose true ending has been expurgated or warped by memory and the ravages of the wasteland. In his telling of the story, the dove does not return to the ark, and Noah's people forget they ever deployed it. The film is relentlessly bleak yet tender, and intensely atmospheric but ultimately character-driven. One of the finest feature-length pieces of anime you can find.