An Introduction For Angel's Egg (1985)

From http://guriguriblog.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/untitled-1.jpg

Dir. Mamoru Oshii

[Note = This was originally an introduction for a project I'm part of on the forums for MUBI, which is why its tone may be a bit different. I hope you all can get something of interest from it though.]

Angel's Egg is now an even rare type of creation in the Japanese animation industry. Experimental anime still exists, even in pulpier areas, but with the economic issues taking place globally many industries are playing it safe and drawing back away from areas of bolder creation. Hollywood even went away from the mid-budget hard boiled action and crime films that were part of its bread-and-butter at one point, so how could another Angel's Egg be made in anime now unless it was a suicidal risk? In the eighties, with an economic boom, so many anime works were commissioned even though they were just made to let someone experiment or to try any idea out. Mostly these works were made for the new, and at times higher budgeted, straight-to-video market, with creations like California Crisis: Gun Salvo (1986) and Cosmos Pink Shock (1986) examples of the most obscure of the obscure I've at least seen myself, usually up to a mere forty minutes or so long, one off pieces with no original source material or follow-on, and only available now thanks to Western anime fans who have acquired Japanese VHS tapes and put up digital copies online. Angel's Egg is more significant in this area because it's a completely abstract film that was made to be shown in Japanese cinemas. It didn't do well, understandably despite wishing for a perfect world of the opposite, but it has built up a reputation. A lot of it is to do with two key men who created it. Director Mamoru Oshii, who would go on to make entries for the Patlabor franchise, the two Ghost in The Shell films, Avalon (2001) and The Sky Crawlers (2008), a chequered career in cerebral, acclaimed animation and live action experiments. The other is artist Yashitaka Amano, known most for his illustrations for the Vampire Hunter D  novels and his work for the Final Fantasy videogame series. But the film has gained a lot of status by itself for a lot of good reasons.

From http://johnnywestmusic.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/angels-egg.png

It's an incredibly surreal film. Even on this viewing, things in it do not make rational sense for me, more dreamlike and felt than connected together into a full conventional tale. But there is a clear through line within it. The world depicted is a dying one, desolate, destroyed, with remnants of a war still going on. A young girl wanders through an empty town keeping herself alive and carrying a giant egg, the egg incredibly precious to her that she guards it all the time. (The odd, accidental or purposeful, pregnancy motif when she carries it under her dress is either saying a lot about my own though process, or something to dig into another time with another person). A soldier encounters her, adamant to find out what's in the egg, following her with the possible intent of breaking it just to answer his questions. It's here that a very important piece of information about Oshii has to be taken into account. Oshii has been documented as being a Christian at some point, whether he is still or not unknown, to the point of considering entering a seminary. The drastic change, in the path of his life, that would lead him to instead become a celebrated auteur of anime cannot be ignored when viewing a film like this with its choice of Christian symbolism. Anime is notorious for its vague uses of this type of Christian-Judean religious symbolism, especially since the TV series Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995) became a leviathan of a work that brought more people to anime but made a hodgepodge said symbolism haphazardly with its real intellectual meat.  But Oshii's use of any symbolism, quotation or reference, even if you have difficulty with it, has always been done with some clear purpose, even in a film like this that is also clearly abstract.

From http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v178/brngrofdeth/tnt1.png

The soldier, with bandages on his hands and carrying a staff/weapon shaped like a cross, doubts his existence and the meaning of it. His interpretation of the story of Noah and the Ark, in a key monologue in a film mostly without dialogue, is a very disillusioned one. He even questions whether he actually exists. The girl believes devoutly in her egg being something of importance, maybe even an egg of an actual angel, but he wants to break it open to see if this is true or prove his disillusionment forcibly on another person. There is also a group of fishermen in the town, but their prey are giant shadows of fish, which their spears merely pass through and damage their surroundings. It is missing the point to say the film is about blind faith in a "fictitious" God. Atheism is a religious belief in itself, just one where there is no God and the Holy Book is of natural science with no suggestion of it coexisting with a spiritual entity, and disillusionment with one's beliefs can be encountered in any person like it did for Mamoru Oshii. The soldier is trying to find himself, while at the same time he is just as questionable in letting his nihilism cloud his judgement and bully a young girl. In a destroyed world, one would ask if God actually exists. Even in our own world, November 2013 as I write this, the situation of the world with its centuries of war, religious conflict and disillusionment, and the wider realisation of the atrocities committed globally has made the issue of the existence of a God (or Gods), and the question of the existence of evil, more pertinent. Even whether one truly exists could be up to debate, as the soldier suggests to the girl they are being dreamt by another, such an ironic idea when said by a character hand drawn and made to breath and be alive through another person's hands. Even those who stayed faithful to the belief in a Christian God can suffer as well; a term, "the dark night of the soul", was coined in the sixteenth century to describe a rare sensation where certain Christians felt they were completely alone, that God was completely absent in existence and their beliefs may have been wrong. In the New Testament itself, Jesus Christ, said to be part of God Himself as well as His Son, screamed while on the Cross why he has been forsaken for a brief moment. The crisis Angel's Egg depicts is that of the loss of a surface to even place one's foundations, one's feet, on. Oshii in his career would explore these themes in different areas, asking what makes us human, with the "soul" against technology in the Ghost In The Shell films, and in the plot events of The Sky Crawlers.

From http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_hLY9DmXXlH4/S76jjGnwoHI/AAAAAAAABu8/
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The film looks beautiful. Painstakingly animated in ways rarely done now if ever. It looks legitimately ethereal in tone and look through Amano's character designs. It sounds beautiful and mysterious in its score by Yoshihiro Kanno. Its paced slowly, so slowly time seems to abruptly holt at one point with a character just sitting there in the dark. Unfortunately this kind of anime is not being made available. This film is not available commercially in the West, and other inventive works like Belladonna of Sadness (1973) aren't either. As much as anime at its best, in its pulpiest genre based material, can be so brave and creative in its aesthetics and ideas, films like Angel's Egg have been left stranded. The key target audiences of anime are young teenagers who haven't been given an opportunity to grasp slow paced, cerebral work that is not punctuated by Facebook links. Or adult geeks of both genders that, stereotypically but honestly at times, are more interested in alarming sexual fetishes involving fictional school girls or boys, or want to stay in their adolescences permanently, considering what is mostly being made now in anime, not something like this film about the existence of God. An audience needs to be built for Angel's Egg so it can be finally released. It's the strongest piece so far for me in Mamoru Oshii's filmography, and one of the most potent works made in this medium.

From https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSPbsRBytjbbKL2BNIdzsXQX5t3PhgU1FtrNQ6Fj_xWLibRPUW_aNsa2NvAu7qiBPEI6oUjfx2jlfA7tUoHfmNn3L2rlU9CykR1RnuKUwWYvQjNFOLTi0Y3Lo__kHmz5wgqcJQvo8ggPn3/s1600/angel1.jpg

The Sky Crawlers (Dir. Mamoru Oshii, 2008)

For October, I intend to follow what many other film fans/bloggers/podcasters have done and watch 31 films for all 31 days of the month to celebrate Halloween, writing short reviews of them as soon as possible after the viewings. Realising the lack of experience I have to partake in attempting this, I decided to ‘train’ for it. This review was more successful in that it was planned and completed the day after viewing the film. It may be a little messier and stream of conscious in nature, but it was great to write it especially when the film reviewed has changed for me on this viewing of it after probably a year or more. If there are any technical mistakes about the film in this let me know and they will be corrected.

From  http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/aa/The_Sky_Crawlers_Cover.jpg 

Set in an alternative world of conflict, this anime film by Mamoru Oshii (director of Ghost In the Shell (1995), Patlabor I and II (1989 and 1993), and the criminally unavailable Angel’s Egg (1985)) portrays a war involving modernised bi-planes and perpetually teenage pilots known as Kildren, who cannot age and take to the skies to fight the opposite side in dogfights.  Enter Yūichi Kannami (Ryō Kase), a transfer pilot who becomes obsessed by the absence of another pilot who existed at his new base before him, leading him to his higher up Suito Kusanagi (Rinko Kikuchi, who Western film fans may know from her performances in films like Babel (2006) and Rian Johnson's The Brothers Bloom (2008)), a female Kildren who has seen the aerial battlefield far more than the others and has gained personal baggage more complex than her perpetually tween appearance shows. Dogfights take place, but like his most famous film Ghost in the Shell, Oshii is a cerebral filmmaker who concentrates on long, moderately paced scenes that allow you to ponder the themes and complex ideas. Fittingly, without seeing more than a sliver of his work myself, his personal history is as complex. Originally destined to become a Catholic minister, his crisis of faith channelled into the minimalist post apocalypse film Angel’s Egg, he started as a well regarded director of comedies before Ghost in the Shell solidified and engulf the rest of his career as a serious minded director who scrutinised grand themes, as evidenced by the fact that I have not seen any of his ‘funnies’ from his early period and that they are not available in the UK to see.

The mystery of the plot is blatantly spoken aloud by a character at the end, probably too much information on my part but something that needs to be said first time viewers, is obvious if you actually think about it, and is flimsy as the main draw of the film on a second or multiple viewing when the clues are as vague as water is wet. The concern for Oshii and screenwriter Chihiro Itō, based on a novel by Hiroshi Mori, is the unending dirge of the present the Kildren have to go through and how it is a metaphor about war. Stuck in a never ending conflict which they may die in, facing by an enemy which includes a mysterious pilot called the Teacher who decimates anyone who crosses him, and stuck in bodies that never age, the Kildren are unable to do anything else except fight to the death in the skies and casually past their times between said mission, their youth masking the minds of adults who have nothing else. They are puppets in a war that may have no real purpose to it, and in one scene, they and their whole base is gawked at by tourists as if it’s all a game. That they are teenagers is contrasted by the fact that they drink, smoke, and have open sexual relationships with each other and sex workers, their child bodies somewhat of a sick joke when they have seen more of the world through conflict then the physically adult people around them. In one of the only comedic moments in the film are seen two Kildren on ride-on aeroplanes you would find outside supermarkets to occupy toddlers and small children, the contrast perfectly summing their situation in its ridiculousness. This is personified by Kusanagi, a young teenage girl who, with her guarded demeanour and constant smoking, has lived longer than the others and has both become wise from it and psychologically scarred. With actress Rinko Kikuchi twisting her voice between a young girl’s and an adult’s depending on how scenes play out, she is a battle hardened women, late 30s or early 40s, who would be promoted to giving the pilots their orders rather than fight in the planes, stuck inside the skin of a teenager between twelve and fifteen, not taking into account the sides of her that are revealed in the plot.

It’s a blatant war analogy, but in contrast to Ghost in the Shell’s constant pontifications between its sci-fi action sequences, this has the ideas expressed through the characters’ mindsets and sequences of complete silence bar a few lines of dialogue and plot expedition that, rather push a conventional narrative film forward, lines down further bread crumbs for viewers to consider the ideas more. It will not be for someone in a mindset for action the night they put it into their DVD player, far from the ‘beer and curry’ anime that Manga Entertainment, who released the film in the UK, once pushed that were about guns, explosions, and for the period when they pushed anime as ‘adult’, bloody violence and sex. The combat scenes are elaborate in the short amount of time they take of the film, and can be quite bloody in brief moments, but their mix and exhilaration and chaos are needed to depict the endless war that the Kildren are faced with and are done well in idea. The story itself cannot help me but think of my minuscule knowledge of Japanese history in World War II and the American Occupation afterwards, and how the painful stagnation and endless violence the populous must have felt can be compared to the mood of The Sky Crawlers. With its mix of languages, settings and the bi-planes however I cannot help as well but think of the Battle of Britain, as an Englishman taught it in college history, in which British planes like the Spitfire fought the German Luftwaffe in the same war for air dominance, especially the massive aerial campaign that takes place in the centre of the film and introduces another female character, pilot Midori Mitsuya (Chiaki Kuriyama, who will be known by many for Kill Bill Volume 1 (2003) and Battle Royale (2000)), who becomes the horrified spectator of the Kildren’s existence. I also think of World War I, bloody battles between countries in the centre of Europe where hundreds of soldiers on both sides died in the trenches only for little progression to take place except one’s trench capturing a small piece of land forward or retreating back by a few yards.

It took another viewing of the film, but it does show that Oshii, despite the apparent flack he has taken for the pretentiousness of his later work, which I’ve yet to see,  is still able to take obvious ideas but give immense depth to them, helped here by a good script and quality animation. Only the fact that the dogfight sequences are CGI is a potential issue. It was amazing, after seeing much older hand drawn anime recently, how it has changed now digital software is used. You do not need to know about the technical aspects of animation to see this, and can be shown to you if you take a film like The Sky Crawlers made after the introduction of digital assisted animation in the late 1990s and hand drawn animation from before it. Some shows and films are still hand drawn in Japan but they are rare, and while the dogfights work in their content, their CGI nature against the rest of the film does detract technically from them. Oshii was unable to find animators who could hand animate aerial combat sequences, which has been openly discussed in additional materials for the film, leading him to having to use computers. It’s disconcerting for the anime industry to know this, but thankful despite the technical flaw of this, they still work regardless and are still a small piece of a superior animated film, one which seems criminally forgotten despite not being that old. One fears the dogfights tricked people into thinking this would be another action film, or that it would be another Ghost in the Shell, when in fact it’s an interesting gem who has to be watched in its own considered pace. Like the character Kusanagi, she is a methodically paced film who shows moments of combat when needed but sits back to ruminate the damage done around her.