Angel's Egg

i'm not former-christian enough for this movie oh yeah here was my anilist note. i might delete later so at least itll be saved here I'm still currently synthesising my thoughts on this piece into a coherent whole. Indeed, this film is very much a Rorschach Test of sorts so I will share what I saw on the ink. I find it hard to see redness of the sky that the boy first gazes into to be anything other than that of hell or an underworld. The blue-red dichotomy of the film is striking because of it. The boy is undoubtebly a Christ-like figure, from his bandages and cross, but there are real perversions of Christian imagery throughout the entire film. The boy's cross is not wooden, but mechanical, a weapon, and the eye in the sky - typically a symbol of God - is a mechanical sun too. Perhaps an image of the man-made nature of Gods we worship. The mechanical sun is contrasted in the next scene by the shot of the girl's head as a crescent moon, immediately establishing yet another dichotomy between the two. From the blueness of her residence she looks out into the red sky. As she walks, she drops down. Perhaps a descension into hell, or, at least, a blurring of the lines between heaven, earth and hell. The shot of her running from the arc with olive leaves falling off her immediately establishes her as a symbol for the dove in Noah's ark, but here, she runs away from the ark with the leaves as opposed to back to it. Her baptism in the water is a dream, indeed even during that dream she may have been dreaming of something else, as she wakes up dry and untouched by water. She gazes into the bottle filled with water. Maybe she is gazing into the world, or maybe we are seeing the distortion of the trees through her lens. She eats some red substance and drinks the blue water. The water, by now, may be a symbol of purity, as well as her. She appears to be cradling the egg as a pregnant mother would, but, when she puts it down, she is sitting on it - as a bird would - indeed, she is the symbol of the dove. As she gets up, she raises her arms and her cloak follows her. Maybe that is just another symbol of her as the dove, or maybe it is her as an angel. The movie is called "Tenshi no Tamago" which could be either Egg of the Angel or Angel's Egg. I would believe that this double meaning was intentional. While Oshii has said in interviews that he just chose the protagonist to be a girl at random, and a girl is typically a symbol of purity, it's hard to imagine that his separation from his daughter during the time that he made this film had no part to play in it. The words "Who are you?" become a motif and they are introspective as they are curious. The boy tells the girl that she must "keep precious things inside of her, or else [she] will lose them" is perhaps a message that faith is best when naive and unchecked with the harshness of reality. I think that Oshii definitely doesn't think too bad of religion, despite his resignation of his beliefs - this film, at times, could be advocating for the power of the placebo, even though the ending could suggest the opposite of that. The fish are undoubtedly a God-like figure of this world, with the churches being enshrined with stain-glass windows of them. Perhaps the reason they are as such is because the fish have the ability to leave the boat and traverse the flooded Earth. The bottom stain-glass fish window is very reminiscent of a chrysalis. The fisherman do significant damage to the urban environment in which they live in their search for the fish. A political statement on religion, perhaps? The fish are shadows that move on their own, perhaps they are controlled by God itself - or even are God itself - a pantheist perspective making the most sense. For a film so strongly about the loss of faith, the existence of the supernatural appears very, very present. Perhaps there was conflict between Oshii's changing beliefs. The boy and girl both have some lost memory, and, while he is certainly a symbol of Jesus on this Earth, I don't think it's beyond the realms of possibility to suggest that he could be Noah, considering his memory of the story and the fact that he saw the dove originally. The dreaming motif repeats again. The human with wings is not the dove, but a perverted figure of an angel. Maybe even a devil. I am most unsure about this part. The perversion of Christianity returns again, with Jesus using his man-made cross to destroy the symbol of faith. There is something very cyclical about the way the girl wakes up in the same place that she first did - the pantheism of the universe's cycle seems to make the most sense here. The common interpretation here seems to be that the girl killed herself with that drop, but, in my eyes, it could just as easily have been that she falls, unaware, after chasing the boy. The eggs that the elder form of the girl exhales are effervescent, hollow in nature, like her own - but this is something that could go either way. Regardless, it is very cyclic. The girl joins the mechanical sun, some supernatural martyrdom after death. Perhaps religion gives the sense that one is immortalised beyond death, but we cannot experience it in our own life, and thus it is void. Perhaps the boy looking up at her has looked up at every individual part of God's eye before, and has done this for every time they have gone up there, an unchanging fate to the universe. Yet, perhaps she is different as she is the dove. It is unclear to me as to whether the many bird-like creatures in the egg have only spawned there as a result of her or that they have always been there. Either alternative changes the meaning of the film, and perhaps the ambiguity is what makes it so intriguing. It is because this film is so beautiful, is so vivid in its imagery, and does provide such a fascinating and already thought-provoking canvas for one to imprint their own impressions onto that I cannot say that this film is anything less than great, regardless of what my own vision of it is.