Angel's Egg
Angel's Egg (Tenshi no Tamago in Japanese) is a surreal 1985 animated film which was directed by Mamoru Oshii and featured art designs by Yoshitaka Amano. The film centers around a young girl protecting an egg in an abandoned gothic city who meets a mysterious man with a cross-shaped rifle. The rest is...a bit harder to describe, but it's extremely beautiful nonetheless.
Tropes used in Angel's Egg include:
- As the Good Book Says...[context?]
- Beautiful Void
- Creepy Cool Crosses
- Dark-Skinned Blond
- Doing It for the Art: Oshii admits that because this film bombed at the box office, he couldn't get any animation work for the next four years until he revived his career with Patlabor.
- Egg McGuffin
- Faceless Eye
- Le Film Artistique
- Flying Seafood Special: Giant flying coelacanth shadows, to be exact.
- Gainax Ending
- Ghost City
- Have You Seen My God?: The real theme of this movie.
- Importation Expansion: When it was brought to the US, 45 minutes of live action footage was added in an attempt to release it as a post-apocalyptic thriller. This version, called In The Aftermath: Angels Never Sleep has since been almost completely forgotten.
- Leave the Camera Running
- Minimalist Cast
- No Name Given
- Our Angels Are Different: Apparently, they lay eggs. Or destroy them, or something.
- The Reveal: At the end of the movie, the camera pulls out slowly to show that the city is built on the capsized hull of Noah's Ark.
- Rule of Symbolism
- Silence Is Golden: There's less than a page of dialogue, and most of it is in one scene. The second line of dialogue is said a full 24 minutes into a 71 minute film
- Taken for Granite
- White-Haired Pretty Boy
- White-Haired Pretty Girl
- World of Symbolism