Angel’s Egg, an anime you probably haven’t heard of from the director of Ghost in the Shell and OG Final Fantasy character designer, is getting a 4K remaster.
Before joining Square to work on Final Fantasy in the late ’90s, Yoshitaka Amano was an established artist in his own right. He was the illustrator behind the classic series Vampire Hunter D, and perhaps less notably, he was also the character designer for a film called Angel’s Egg. Released in 1985, Angel’s Egg was an anime OVA directed by Ghost in the Shell’s Mamoru Oshii, and to be possibly reductive about it, it was weird as hell. The film never actually made it over to the west, not technically anyway, and there’s still no confirmation of a release over here, but to celebrate its 40th anniversary, there is some good news: it’s getting a 4K remaster.
Announced during the early hours of this morning (at least in my timezone), an official Twitter was set up to confirm that the new version of the film is in the works for its 40th anniversary in 2025. Oshii himself is also apparently supervising the remaster, though details on how it will be shown, whether that be through a theatrical release or via DVD and Blu-ray, hasn’t been confirmed just yet. The remaster will apparently be done through a new scan of a 35mm print of the film, so it should come out looking really good as long as it isn’t botched in any way (and as long as no AI upscaling is used either, as so far that’s not gone very well for modern releases of older anime).
Angel’s Egg is a bit of a hard film to explain – at a screening of the film hosted by The Japan Society last year, the group described it as “Taking place in a seemingly quiescent time, two nameless strangers—a girl bearing a mystical egg and a man with a cruciate cane—journey across a primordial realm of decadent ruins, primitive fish and fossilized relics. An allegorical fantasy enriched by symbolism and biblical allusion, Oshii’s beautifully melancholic OVA ruminates on the tragic underpinnings of existence in a world untouched by God.”
As mentioned above, it technically never received a release in the west, though the production company New World International had acquired the rights to it in a distribution bundle. Rather than release the film, though, it handed it over to director Carl Colpaert, who found the film incomprehensible, opting to interweave parts of it with live-action scenes to supposedly help it make more sense, resulting in a film called In The Aftermath. I haven’t see In The Aftermath, but I have seen Angel’s Egg, and while I wouldn’t say it makes sense, I would say I’m excited to potentially see this remaster of it, as the vibes are second to none.