This Week in Anime

Who Would Buy Angel's Eggs in This Economy?

Chris
Steve, it happened again. Thanksgiving is here, and the only thing I have to bring to the family dinner is a gross of eggs.

Trips to the movies are apparently a regular part of many people's Thanksgiving weekends with the family, though I don't know if they always involve a hefty dose of...whatever there is to be had in Angel's Egg. We'll get into it.

Yes, as we alluded to last week, we here at TWIA were all too excited to get out to the 4K theatrical release of Mamoru Oshii's Angel's Egg...and it turns out we weren't the only ones! The timelines and Discord servers have been a veritable carton of Egg discussion, which is kinda remarkably wonderful for a weird old legend like this.

I heard anecdotes from others about some theaters even being full for their showings! I get the impression there's a healthy crossover between nerds of both film and anime for this. That's heartening, since for one thing, it's well-documented how getting current anime fans to watch anything considered "old" can be like pulling teeth.

Never mind that my first reaction upon seeing it for the first time was that I was delightedly shocked they gave this a U.S. theatrical release at all! Let alone a dub.

I opted for the earlier showing with the sub, and my theater wasn't full, but at least had more people than the matinee showing I caught of Frankenstein a week earlier. Which, uh, Angel's Egg handily outperformed.

Which is more of a call-out on Netflix's handling of Frankenstein than anything else. Great movie in a theater! Which, it turns out, Angel's Egg also is! Cannot recommend time-traveling back to last week and experiencing it that way if you didn't!

I'm sure we'll be discussing even wilder things as we crack deeper into this egg, so yeah, I'm curious.

Amazing. As already mentioned, it's not like there are even a ton of subtitles to go around in Angel's Egg. That's honestly the kind of indulgence I hope for from a local theater. And it also gives me cause for the second week in a row to bring up the time almost a decade ago when Dawn "Bunnycartoon" H. noted that Tokyopop had uploaded their own unlicensed version of Angel's Egg to YouTube.

Would you believe neither of those is even the weirdest westside release Angel's Egg has had? There's just something about this movie—something I can echo your old, mesmerized reaction with my own upon finally seeing it for myself.

Yeah, it's deeply ironic that people pulling In the Aftermath out In the Aftermath of Angel's Egg's new release was the first I'd heard of this thing.

For those like me who didn't know until now, In the Aftermath was alleged to be Roger Corman protégé Carl Colpaert's attempt to make his own movie version of Angel's Egg by combining new live-action footage with repurposed footage from the actual film. The results are uuuhhhhhhh...

we have the girl from angels egg at home!!

the girl from angels egg at home:

[image or embed]

— Mike Toole (@miketoole.com) November 20, 2025 at 10:37 AM

This got a Blu-ray release from Arrow Video in 2019, which feels deeply unfair to the real Angel's Egg. But as I said, time has already chosen the true victor.

Oh yeah, one of my main thoughts upon seeing this for the first time was just going "Ooh, that'd make a sick desktop background" roughly every thirty seconds. More to the point, as someone who's always embraced so-called "pretentious" stories, I also found Angel's Egg to be exactly my speed! It's funny because despite all its pretense, it still feels welcoming, in a way. Inviting audiences to bring their own reads on it, as so many of the best stories of this ilk do. That's probably a reason the chatter around it got so strong after a huge chunk of the population saw it for the first time last week!

It's been one of the many mini-subjects spinning out of this Egg-cellent adventure, but I agree with the takes, hoping that this spawns a rush of theatrical releases of wild old anime in 4K. Seriously, GKIDS, the people yearn for California Crisis and Dragon's Heaven in theaters!

You're right that the look of Angel's Egg is part and parcel to its appeal, given how much time is spent looking at it. And I can't overstate what justice this new transfer does to that look, appropriately given that they took pains to advertise how Oshii himself approved it! You can see the individual strokes on the blacks on the background of this release, it is a wonder!

To me, it seriously embodies how much of the physical creation of an experimental film like this is part of its appeal.

I mean, between Kobayashi's art and having Yoshitaka friggin' Amano on design, I would never doubt that level of purpose.

I've seen ink spilled over questioning whether this movie or Vampire Hunter D from the same year does a better job of adapting Amano's distinctive (pre-Final Fantasy!) art. What's really important is that pairing that art with Oshii's sensibilities results in something entirely its own.

Things like how the girl carries herself, visibly reacts in her expressions, that's inherent to how it's conveyed in the animated medium and makes Angel's Egg that much more special as itself, let alone when you can see the ink on each strand of her wispy Amano hair.

Part of my personal thesis on this movie revolves around its existence as something that actually had to be made—crafted—in the real world, so you bet I appreciate a release that highlights the raw physicality of putting ink to paper to make it.

People doubling back to "What the hell was that about?!" was absolutely a theme of a lot of the postings I saw the past week about it. In an earnest, entertaining, endearing way, to be sure.

The fishermen are only part of one (very big, very memorable) segment of the movie, but they reflect so much of how it lays out its ideas. The egg the girl is devoting herself to is nebulous in its contents, but at least it's a tangible object compared to the literal shadows the fisherman are chasing!

There are takes on Angel's Egg as a read on faith, particularly through a Christian lens, and the imagery of fish and making fishers of men absolutely jibes with that. I don't know how entirely I feel that's what's being analyzed, but the way people interface with what they believe in and what they hope for in desolate, hopeless situations is pretty definitively part of this. The fishermen end up destroying parts of a church in their mad frenzy to catch that which cannot be obtained! It ain't subtle!

I talked to other people about this, and there's absolutely a take that the water in the jugs represents hope, in a deliciously literal "glass half full" sort of way. To say nothing of how the girl takes moments to see how the world looks through her glasses of hope, er, water.

But she also makes a point of not confirming for the boy soldier that the bottles represent all her time spent where she's been. It reads to me as a response to busywork, a routine done primarily to keep yourself going out of sheer inertia in a hopeless situation. But as with any Sisyphean tasks and/or regular jobs, it can't be the sole indicator of what you've accomplished, or you'll start to friggin' lose it. To put it another way, in a phrase I started repeating to myself after it came up in the movie: "You can't measure your time spent in bottles."

I'm glad you mentioned it, because this gives us a good place to mention that the sound on the theatrical release of Angel's Egg was another outstanding reason to see it in this format. That scream you mentioned made me and others absolutely jump in the theater, but the whole discordant soundscape of a score by Yoshihiro Kanno sings terrifyingly within those walls. It's all tense strings and upsettingly blasting tones that expertly run the whole gamut of volume levels.

And yeah, that scream is probably gonna stick with me as one of my lifelong film memories. I didn't see the dub, so I don't know how Brianna Knickerbocker matched Mako Hyōdō's iconic intonation, but I hope she nailed it.

It's almost auditory overstimulation with all the whistles coming out of the prototypical Eye of Vogler at the beginning there. It certainly sets the stage for any unfamiliar folks (i.e., me), unsure of what an intense experience this is going to be.

I'm glad GKIDS has since confirmed they'll be giving this a home video release, though I do feel bad for reiterating how outstanding the theatrical release was for those who didn't catch it. Part of me hopes that this new licensing and print of Angel's Egg means it can keep making some rounds at the kinds of theaters that would show it for those who want to watch it.

At least the second anime-adjacent Sadness that Michael Cera has been involved with.

As we mentioned earlier, getting the broader anime-watching public to talk about an old, weird release like Angel's Egg is, overall, a win for something like this. Least of all in the discussion of Oshii himself. Some of his wildest, most distinctive works, like Urusei Yatsura: Beautiful Dreamer and Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence are, as of this writing, not available for stream. And they still aren't as opaque as Angel's Egg, so maybe this opens a path back to public viewing and conversation.

To circle back to my earlier allusion, a huge part of my take on Angel's Egg is that it's about the creative process and finding yourself as an artist. Getting to see a version of this story where you can thus see every brushstroke and feel every uncomfortable vibration of the sound embodies that.

And I'm with you on analysis and inspiration. This movie itself is a lot like the egg: what's actually inside of it doesn't matter as much as what it means to those who find and carry it with them.

We're always egging on this kind of creativity. And we're not yolking.