Production
Angel's Egg repurposes ideas that Oshii developed for a cancelled Lupin the Third film. Both concepts feature the theme of questioning existence (Lupin's existence in the cancelled film, and the bird from Noah's ark in Angel's Egg), and involve the fossil of an angel[8] Oshii himself said that Angel's Egg was another attempt at the idea[9] and anime critic Ryota Fujitsu has said that Angel's Egg (and the first Patlabor movie) would not have existed if Oshii had made the Lupin film.[10] Oshii has also stated that the entire angel fossil concept used in Angel's Egg was directly taken from Lupin,[11] and compares the relationship between the boy and girl to that in The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams.[12]
Many of the themes and elements in Angel's Egg were originally from Oshii's cancelled Lupin the 3rd film.[13] However, only the angel fossil remains unchanged from its planned appearance.[14]
The film is a collaboration between Amano and Oshii.[4] Oshii originally intended on making a comedy film, starting with the girl first getting off a flying ark in front of a Japanese convenience store, but changed his mind and decided to make it a pure fantasy film after seeing Amano's art.[15][16] Oshii said that he wanted to remove a narrative as much as possible, and keep the film simple, using animation as an expression to draw out a story,[17] and fill it with symbolic expressions and metaphors "like Jung's archetypes and collective unconscious".[18]
The documentation for the project was written in one night by Toshio Suzuki (producer) but Oshii was displeased with it and did not use it. However, the title of the film, Angel's Egg (天使のたまご), was from Suzuki, where Oshii's original title was Aquatic City (水棲都市).[19][20]
Oshii began writing the script with the main theme of a dream seen by a girl, continuing from Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer, but thinking that a script alone would not be enough to get the project approved, invited Amano to make image boards for the proposal. He also showed the image boards to the animators to get ideas from them.[21] There was no definitive script, but rather a collection of ideas noted down like "annunciation" "ark" "setting sun" "a boy holding a cross riding a tank" which were immediately turned into storyboards, and then fitted together, which Oshii says had the intention of making a film without clear drama, made out of visual expressions, like one by Andrei Tarkovsky.[22]
Amano had initially been slated to work on Oshii's cancelled Lupin film, which anime critic Ryota Fujitsu says makes it obvious that Angel's Egg was inherited from Lupin.[23] While Amano was originally invited to work on character designs, Oshii liked his art enough that he ended up in the role of art direction, also designing image boards, and other things such as posters.[24]
The angel fossil was later reused alongside other elements from Oshii's cancelled Lupin film in 009 RE:CYBORG, which Oshii was initially supposed to direct and participated in the script for, and was eventually directed by Kenji Kamiyama, a student of Oshii.[25] Kamiyama describes this version of the angel fossil as indication of a god, but not of any particular religion.[26] The angel fossil was also used in the tenth episode of Lupin the 3rd Part 6 which Oshii wrote the script for[27] "Darwin's Bird"[28][29][30] In this episode Fujiko Mine is hired by the archangel Michael to steal the angel fossil, which is actually that of the fallen angel Lucifer, on behalf of his master.[31]
Nezu worked with Oshii once again in Patlabor 2: The Movie[32] and Mako Hyōdō played a supporting role in The Sky Crawlers.[33]
