GkidsUntil 2025, Mamoru Oshii was best known — at least outside of Japan — as the director of Ghost in the Shell. But while the movie that introduced the world to Major Motoko Kusanagi is undoubtedly a genre-defining cyberpunk classic and a majorly influential work of science fiction, it isn’t the movie that’s closest to its co-creator’s heart. That film is Angel’s Egg, a hand-drawn passion project that Oshii once described as the “poor daughter” who never moved out of the house.An original work of OVA (direct to video) animation, Angel’s Egg marked a major turning point in the future anime legend’s style. While he wrote some episodes of the accompanying anime, Oshii’s first two films were both adapted from a manga, Urusei Yatsura, created by Inuyasha and Ranma ½ artist Rumiko Takahashi. Angel’s Egg, meanwhile, sprung from Oshii’s subconscious, seemingly fully formed. Combining elements from Oshii’s unrealized dream project — a film adaptation of Lupin III — with his lifelong fascination with Christianity and Christian imagery, the result is a film that’s dense with meaning, even if that meaning can be elusive. If you’ve seen the film, it might seem hard to believe, but Angel’s Egg was originally supposed to be a comedy, peppered with the big-picture philosophy Oshii brought to Urusei Yatsuya 2: Beautiful Dreamer. It only took on its final, vaguely ominous form after Oshii saw concept art created by Yoshitaka Amano. Amano’s designs draw from fantasy archetypes — appropriate, given that he would later help design the look of the Final Fantasy series — and their influence on the story was significant enough that he’s credited as the co-creator on the film.Amano’s characters move within a world of abandoned cities and bombed-out cathedrals, spaces where the laws of gravity work differently and the air ripples like water. There are only two characters: An unnamed girl protecting a gigantic egg she carries under her dress, making her appear pregnant, and a boy bearing a cross-shaped weapon who follows her as she carries her fragile charge to an unknown destination. There’s a gigantic floating mechanical eye that may or may not be the eye of God, and a host of stone angels who watch the events with unfeeling detachment. Despite its reputation for being cryptic, Angel’s Egg isn’t that difficult to understand — you just have to let the details go and focus on the big picture. (That being said, you can absolutely delve into the details as well, as a quick search for Angel’s Egg explainers on YouTube reveals.) Many have described it as an allegory for losing faith, an interpretation with which Oshii doesn’t disagree. (That’s about as specific as he’ll get about what the movie actually “means.”) It was completely different from anything Oshii had done before, and a total anomaly in the world of mid-’80s anime, prioritizing stillness and subtlety over bright colors and juvenile humor. Maybe that’s why the movie barely made any money. In a career-retrospective interview at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival, Oshii claimed that Angel’s Egg didn’t just flop. It almost killed his career. “After that, nobody gave me jobs for three years,” he said. He went on to compare the movie to the child who never manages to make anything of themselves, who still lives at home while their siblings are getting jobs and starting families of their own. And that was accurate, for a while. Angel’s Egg was released on Blu-ray in Japan in 2013, but was unavailable abroad until 2024, when GKIDS bought the North American rights to Oshii’s forgotten masterpiece. A new 4K restoration of the film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2025, and traveled to festivals around the world before receiving a theatrical release last November. The first time around, journalists abroad claimed that they didn’t understand the movie. But when they revisited it 40 years later, they hailed it as a masterpiece. What difference did those decades make? The film has remained the same, but Western concepts of what anime is — and, more importantly, can be — have evolved since the mid-’80s. No longer a niche interest, it’s finally being recognized as a medium with the potential to tell all kinds of stories in all kinds of ways. Forty-one years after it was first released, Angel’s Egg is finally finding audiences who understand it. Angel’s Egg is now streaming on HBO Max.