Is alright, crazy emperor, lots of sex, impressive set design. 6/10.

I have no idea what I just watched.

Amazing non-traditional soundtrack consisting of chants with classical and ambient elements. It doesn’t follow the modern anime style; instead, it has a unique look, which I appreciate. The color palette is also worth noting. It’s extremely cold, with many dark tones and shades. Only a few things in the movie have warmer colors, like the heroine and her companion. The movie feels very desolate and lonely—the streets of the city are empty and abandoned. When we do see other people, they resemble stone statues, more automata than human. 7/10.

EDIT 1: Because of this Inerpretation “Angles Egg as Religious Crisis” up the score to 8/10.

EDIT 2: Another interpretation. Very roughly, the movie can be interpreted through the lens of the central question in Kierkegaard’s Either/Or: faith and reason are fundamentally incompatible, and one must ultimately choose between them. The girl takes a leap of faith and chooses to believe. The boy, faced with a desolate world and the apparent absence or abandonment of God, chooses reason instead. A bit more symbolically, the fishermen running around the city with their harpoons, chasing a giant fish, represent people attempting to use reason to pursue faith and God. But this is a hopeless task—faith that relies on reason ceases to be true faith, and so they drown. The egg symbolizes the hope of faith in God and the coming of Jesus. In the final scene, when the girl falls from the cliff, it represents her taking the ultimate leap of faith. In her death, many more eggs appear, signifying the spreading of hope and belief. In the final scene, we see that all the people who believed, including the girl, are saved by God—leaving the boy behind. 9/10.

EDIT 3: This can also be understood in light of Paul Tillich’s Dynamics of Faith, in which Tillich offers a definition of faith not as a low-probability belief, not as a purely intellectual activity, but also not as a mere emotion or feeling. It contains both. Just as in Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy the artist unites the Apollonian and the Dionysian, and just as in Buddhism during meditation the objective and subjective become one, so in Tillich’s account of faith the rational and the emotional come together: certainty and uncertainty. Faith needs to have both.

If we now apply this to the movie: the boy represents the rational side of faith, skepticism, doubt, and uncertainty, and shows how being purely rational leads to being left behind, because one cannot relate to anything. The ultimate skeptic who is certain of nothing is condemned to wander the world forever, never finding something he can call home.

On the other side, the girl represents the purely emotional side: pure feeling and absolute certainty, the dogmatic “I know the egg will hatch an angel.” The movie shows how this certainty, driven entirely by emotion, can lead one to the wrong places, because in the end the eggs do not produce angels but birds of death. She is not saved by an invigorating, life-affirming God, but by a lifeless machine. In the final scene, God ascends into the air along with all the believers, recall that all the belivers are literally made of stone. Is this the God we wish for?

In this way, the movie demonstrates how both extremes, absolute certainty and absolute uncertainty, pure emotion and pure rationality, fail. Only by incorporating both, by uniting them, can something great be achieved.

Very dynamic camera and interesting angles. Oftentimes, inconspicuous things are in focus—the back of a head, the shoes on the floor, the back of a person, and so on. 6/10.