It is the rare animated film that possesses qualities as strange and provocative as Mamoru Oshii’s Angel’s Egg. This film does not merely tell a story; it titillates the senses like a dream the viewer cannot explain but cannot forget.
It is full of surreal pictures and vague stories, which pull one into such a space that it begins to feel more like the inside of someone’s mind than a conventional narrative. It is the sort of film that compels one to consider the things lurking in the corners of one’s own brain: fears, desires, and questions that are not constantly confronted.
Indeed, it is like witnessing Freud’s and Lacan’s theories about the subconscious and dreams come alive on the screen. That is to say that dreams can be strange but meaningful, just as one plunges into eerie landscapes in Angel’s Egg, introduced to this hauntingly quiet girl and playfully teased of the enigma of the egg she guards.
Every detail feels as if it whispers something significant about the human emotional spectrum or the hidden layers of our thoughts. If we go digging into the film with Freud’s and Lacan’s words in our ears, it is wild where it goes.
Angel’s Egg is a Japanese animated 1985 film directed by Mamoru Oshii, a man who has endlessly engraved his name into making classics by fusing deep and philosophical ideas into sweet honey visuals. This critical acclaim does not hold back for his films. They are always weird and beautiful, and they are never like any other film experience one would ever have. The theme revolves around this almost adolescent girl wandering in a world with the dream drift of fading memories.
It is eerily silent and starkly empty. In the dreamlike film, the girl constantly grasps this egg and guards it as if she clings to her life but never tells us why. That is really what Angel’s Egg is all about: what we make of it. There is barely any dialogue; instead, it leaves things more undefined and utilizes haunting imagery and ambient sounds to journey through weighty ideas like loneliness, faith, and looking for meaning in what appears to be a pointless world.
Somewhere in this world lies a girl who happens to meet a strange boy whose existence is as mysterious as the peaceful world enveloping them. He is not just a mate; he turns out to be something like a mirror and a supplement to the vexations in their lives. Their communication and actions raise ground-shaking questions about who we are, what we believe, and whether or not things matter.
It is as if Oshii tied existential philosophy around an artsy riddle, letting us figure it out or not. Each frame is a surrealistic painting, painstakingly detailed; the atmosphere is so foreign that we almost forget we are watching a film. Instead, it seems like the strangest hollowness takes us to a dream where we are unsure about anything but feel everything is significant. If we are up for it, Angel’s Egg dares us to delve deep and ponder the things we usually pay little attention to.
The visuals of this film are genuinely eye-popping; each scene is constructed to engage in a dreamlike reality. Sometimes, bare and eerily silent landscapes belong to a completely different world. There is a beauty in their emptiness, but it is unsettling, too—like walking through a vast, abandoned space where everything seems out of place.
One haunting scene shows the girl walking through an open landscape of crumbling stone structures surrounding her in dark fog and shadows stretching across the terrain. The scale of these empty spaces gives an isolating feeling. However, there is something beautiful in how light filters through the mist and casts an ethereal glow over the ruins. The world is alive and dead, in suspension in a reverie.
Another scene is the girl walking along a vast, dark ocean, where the horizon seems limitless, and the water is still. An apparent void becomes the sea because there seems to be no wave movement inside. It is just that kind of place that awes and terrifies. It has obvious beauty in its unnerving silence.
The combination of haunting desolation and haunting beauty resonates with the grand themes of the film, which are searching through life in a world that feels very emotionally barren. The egg she treasures so well fits into this scene, but it is fragile when held in her hands and planted against this great emptiness. The egg becomes the example of potential life and that a person must live with the weight of what it means to hold onto something that may never truly live up to one’s expectations.
On her journey through this world, the girl encounters the boy, which complicates her. While subtle, their interactions are tense, for the boy’s actions question her ideas. Like the landscapes that surround her, the boy is as much a fascination as he is of fear.
He draws her close while threatening the fragile world she clings to. So the landscapes become more than mere backdrops but living agents in the story, symbolic of and shaping the emotional turmoil that the girl must face as she travels through a world that seems impossibly beautiful and endangeringly indifferent.
The egg is a symbol that keeps giving and is strongly tied to the girl’s emotional progression through the film—the hopes, dreams, and heaviness of all she is afraid to lose. One of the most affecting moments comes with the egg when the girl holds it close to her chest in a tender yet almost desperate way. Her expression is a maze, almost like she clutches onto this fragile thing that could be her salvation but also disappears into the air with her breath.
It gives a hushed to the whole scene, walking through this empty, fog-laden vacuum world, while the egg is the only thing that gives it any meaning. However, it is infused with something more derogative in her grip. It is like feeling insecure seeping through her protective actions in case letting go for a second might cause the foundation to collapse on everything she is built around the egg.
It is uncanny and strange: the boy adds to the complication of this whole thing by being in the scene. He is like a mirror to this girl and draws attention while having something to do with her weakness or vulnerability. He is watching her; however, he still determines her quest for the egg, although he senses it is vital.
Their interactions have an edge of quiet unease—the girl appears both intrigued and guarded against him. She fears that the moment she lets go too much or lets anyone close, her fragile sense of herself and the protective shell she has created surrounding her dreams will be torn apart.
The egg becomes more than an object: it becomes a metaphor for her frail, precious, and vulnerable world. The girl suffers against this fine, surreal, desolate background but can find meaning in an indifferent world.
At the same time, it terrifies her that in trying to protect self-definition, she is stacking barriers that weigh it down more than anything else. The egg and the boy are the constants in this emotional tug-of-war; they force her to face the reality of her fears but still promise that she will find a way through it all.
To better understand the psychological aspects of Angel’s Egg, it becomes necessary to incorporate some of Freud’s notions about the mind into the discourse. Freud argued that the mind is not a heterogeneous blob of feelings and thoughts. He divided the mind into three parts: the id, the ego, and the superego.
The id is like that wild, instinctual part of us, all pleasure-seeking and wanting without rules or consequences; this is the “I want it now” part of the brain. Underneath this is the ego, which tries to balance what is in the personal psyche with what is possible in the real world.
Right at the top should come the puritanical superego, our internalized moral compass, constantly reminding us of what is “right” and “wrong.” Freud’s idea was an iceberg, with a large part at the bottom, a mass called the unconscious area of the psyche, filling itself with all the things not actively placed in thought but which affect us—the thoughts, memories, and most buried desires. In the Freudian mind, dreams are a gateway to this vast, unconscious part of ourselves; they bring repressed feelings and wishes up to the surface in supposedly allegorical, even ambiguous ways.
In Angel’s Egg, those dreamlike sequences plunge deep into the psyche, almost like a visualization of unconsciousness, an open portal to the world inside the mind. This quest of lonely, unused landscapes represents every bit as much an individual path to self-discovery for the girl as Freudian theories describe the ego trying to figure out what id (raw desires, impulses) and superego (the “voice” in one’s head that distinguishes right and wrong) are doing at any given moment.
The egg she carries around can be seen as symbolic of all the things she longs for, hopes and dreams she has tied up, but also her fears. It is like she is protecting a fragile, intricate piece of herself but pretty full of potential it bears along with so much uncertainty. The spaces she strolls through—harsh yet hauntingly beautiful—exhibit that yearning and dread mainly Freud talked about; perhaps this girl is even more struck by wanting and then the fear of losing it all along with this definition.
This “inner conflict” is demonstrated quite figuratively through surreal imagery. It draws us into the girl’s emotional state. Instead of boring us to tears with the dialogue, the images have this creepy quality, making it impossible not to confront her struggles on a far more subconscious scale.
Without dialogue, the audience can fill in those blanks—almost tapping into one’s unconscious thoughts and feelings while trying to understand the girl’s journey. For example, this is where Oshii has taken us in the dream. As Freud believed, symbols and feelings take precedence over verbal symbols, so all our repressed desires could surface in dreams (even if in ways that we do not fully understand but feel intensely).
Take, for instance, the girl regarding her egg. She seems to be obsessed with it; she holds it so tightly that it seems not to belong to her as much as it belongs to a piece of her soul. At one point, it stands for everything she hopes for, the capacity for something more significant, the dreams she wants to keep protected from the world. On the other, it bears almost quite a life load, representing the weight of all the fears and worries that bring her out. It is as if she is holding something she feels defines her.
However, it might also have been the source of the tension she felt. Such tension reminds one very much of Freud’s idea of the unconscious, where our desires and fears do not occur in separate corners of our minds. Instead, they constantly wound each other on their ground, usually without our knowledge. Herein lies the tension of such a girl: She calls forth hope when clinging to an egg, but it also reminds her of the burden she cannot help but carry.
The emotional tug-of-war has only intensified since those landscapes started taking shape around her. When she wanders alone within this desolate, empty land, it proves too evident that she is physically and emotionally isolated. It is like the outside world reflects the inside world, each in its isolation, confusion, and hidden significance. As we watch, it becomes clearer that this journey will be found somewhere in those inner contortions. The surreal world she dwells in becomes an exterior reflection of her psyche.
The film has that surreal quality in which things are not entirely grounded within reality, and consideration of Freudian theory makes sense. According to Freud, dreams are how our unconscious mind shows things we cannot see when awake: messy and full of symbolism. In Angel’s Egg, that kind of atmosphere turns the real experience into hallucination, and the duality makes us revive the girl’s inner world and force her into realizing those unconscious impulses and wishes even if we have not accepted them so clearly our own lives.
This particular egg is not only an object in Angel’s Egg but carries all its meanings, mainly through Freud’s psychoanalytic premise. Throughout Freud, and even from the earliest of times, he associates symbols with primal instincts: the egg, the symbol of woman as much as the potential for creation. It is fragile, vulnerable, and has the promise of life. It is also easy to break when it is unattended.
Therein lies a lot of what the girl is going through: her insecurity concerning her identity and purpose. The egg is put under, and she protects it as though it were the most important thing in her life, which, in many aspects, “is” the most important thing because it represents all her hopes and fears about herself and her future.
The egg becomes the hold of the girl’s emotions as she travels along the film. It is the one thing she could have as a holding device, yet it serves as a reminder of how fragile she feels. Carrying such an object, we can nearly feel the internal conflict building up in her. While she wants to be understood and connected with others, the surrounding world would appear too isolated. She would have liked to try and hold on to some degree of control within a world beyond her grasp.
Hence, the egg might be interpreted as one of her attempts to do so. Freud asserts that this is the duality of the egg as the symbol of creation and destruction, as well as desire and fear, which represent the complications of human emotion. Protecting the egg exemplifies her struggle to know herself with the conflict brought about by her desires and the like. She is trying to find the balance between what is inner and what is outside, both of which she suffers from due to confusion and uncertainty.
That is when the girl’s internal conflict is at its fullest; in one of the most intense scenes, the girl faces the boy, who bluntly confronts her with the question of her attachment to the egg. Of course, it is the egg, but it is also everything else she has tied to the egg—her dreams, nightmares, and identity.
Questions from the boy serve to coerce the girl into confronting the reality behind the very things she has protected for so long, essentially being that moment where she must decide whether the girl continues to keep the egg away from the world or risk letting it out into the world-herself, her insecurities, and perhaps what she truly desires.
Such great intensity in interaction makes Freud’s ideas about the unconscious most visible because the girl’s reaction towards the boy is not merely the egg or the boy but pretty much everything buried in her unconscious depths. For one thing, the egg is to be protected against all threats, holding on to her dreams and wishes.
However, the boy also comes with probing questions, probing right through into the layers of their psyche, those hidden, repressed thoughts she has been avoiding all along. It is as if a mirror were held up before her unconscious mind; she is to face the opposition between the egg’s unconscious demands and the conscious reality of her fears and insecurities regarding who she is.
It is an excellent moment of confrontation for the girl, a wake-up call, the moment of growing up, coming face-to-face with all the things she has dodged her entire journey. Until now, the egg has been guarded fiercely, but now comes the question of what the egg means in her life. Is it hope, or is it just a way for her to hide herself from the complexities of the world?
The boy brings forth questions that force her to mesh with everything from her cultural attachment to the egg to her definition of self and what it means to live fully in a contradictory and confusing world. Here, as it is without a doubt, a confrontation, which has been a pivotal moment in her emotional change, pushes her to question the very existence of her being in the world and how she is planning to define herself in understanding that coming together of the outer world and her inner world.
Freud laid the groundwork for psychoanalysis; Lacan built on it and developed many of his ideas that gazed into the depths of human psychology. Lacan’s work mostly dwells on understanding how identity is formed and how the self is imprinted from within and externally. One of Lacan’s significant contributions is the “mirror stage,” which refers to the point at which the infant sees himself in a mirror for the first time.
He asserts himself as such and begins to think of himself as having a self, an “I” or ego, that is beginning self-awareness. However, he also says this is the moment of a small quantity of illusion. The child sees himself as reflected in the mirror to capture the image completely perfectly, but this does not compare with what he feels within, giving rise to a kind of disconnection that forms our sense of self for all our lives.
What Lacan throws open is the concept of the “Real,” an exceedingly confusing term because, as he explains: “The Real is that which is beyond language”—these are the things that one can die trying to express because these sensations or experiences are categorizable in neither terms nor understanding but effectively capture everyday life: for example, some unexplainable emotion. The reality partially out of reach is never genuinely represented by language or images.
Moreover, again, there is the “Imaginary.” The imaginary has to do more with images and illusions, the things we conjure up in our minds, such as representations of how we see ourselves or perceive the world through our mental lenses. The Imaginary is, however, wholly about the illusion of coherence and completeness that make our worlds intelligible.
Lastly, Lacan speaks of the “Symbolic,” which pertains to language and societal law—the rules and symbols of structuring by which an individual learns how to communicate with others in their understanding of what constitutes reality. It defines how we learn concepts such as family, identity, or even love since these notions are constructed through the imported symbols (words, behaviours, social expectations) from the surrounding culture.
The Symbolic provides a system for navigating the world and managing our interaction with others. Lacan builds upon Freud but adds a little more complexity to show how the identity and psyche are formed by this mixture of the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real, which resists knowability.
It fascinatingly becomes a study of identity and perception when we look at Angel’s Egg through Lacan’s gaze. The leg of the girl connected to the egg is the clearest example of what Lacan would identify as the fact that the sense of self is always fragmented. The egg represents what she imagines lacking inside herself as a means to become whole and complete. However, as Lacan says about the ego, this is an illusion. The egg stands for an unattainable ideal because she believes it will repair or determine her.
However, she could never actually reach or possess it. Lacan’s concept of the “objet petit a,” which is the “object-cause of desire,” comes into the very thing we think would complete us but never entirely can. In this case, that object is the egg itself for the girl. It was what she craved, what refuted her to feel she needed to complete herself, but it was ethereal, nowhere as close as that idealized self by which we all measure ourselves and cannot meet.
Then, we have the boy who, in Lacanian terms, happens to be the “Other.” The Other is that external force that challenges our self-image in such a way as to ensure we have to come to terms with parts of ourselves that we do not fully understand or accept.
Questioning the girl by the boy and the girl’s attachment to the egg keeps rocking her perception of herself. He will bring her reality into question, making her think if the egg is the answer she seeks or if it is just an illusion she has created to make sense of her fragmented identity.
It is the tussle between the Imaginary and the Symbolic as played out in their interactions. The Imaginary is an illusion in Lacanian; it is all about the false images we create in our minds, about how we see ourselves and our desires. The Symbolic is then understood as being created by the outside world, the rules, and the expectations surrounding it. The desires (egg) of the girl are in discord with what is expected of her by the society or “Other” (boy).
She is thrashing about between the illusion of the egg, her desire for wholeness, and the wringer of outside pressures that run up against his reality of who she is. It is a tumultuous dance between how she sees herself and how others see her—and we grapple with that at different times in our lives.
For instance, the boy can be compared to a movie character. All his attempts to visit the girl merely reflect Lacan’s understanding of the Other. From a Lacanian approach, the “Other” is not an individual random person; it comprises everything outside ourselves that enlivens who we are. In a way, the boy represents the external forces: society, other people, and even internalized ideals of what we ought to be.
His presence becomes an interruption instead of constituting an entry point. It forces the girl to stop while considering herself from the outside. With his presence in her life, she is forced to encounter her desires, fears, and insecurities. Holding a mirror to her, challenging her views, and making her believe that her feelings and perceptions of others dictate her identity.
There is great tension here between self-view and other people’s approval. It is like the girl wants to shield her version of self-denotation with the egg, but at the same time, she is being pushed into questioning that version by the boy, who represents all those external pressures. The dynamic is internal; will she stick to her understanding of who she is, or will she let these outside forces reshape her?
Such surreal imagery augments the experience of watching this film. It creates the aptest dreamlike landscapes and peculiar, sometimes spine-chilling visuals that distil how the human mind could be complex and jaggedly patterned. The world outside the girl is spastic and chaotic, just like the interiors of any head where presumably contrarily desires, fears, and self-impressions clash.
The egg is synonymous with all those feelings because it represents hope, possibility, and the future. At the same time, it also represents panic, fragility, and the vision of losing control. Her battle with the egg and the boy who confronts her represents the general contest of growing into an identity with more stability within a chaotic, unreliably loud world.
At this point, it will be necessary to apply Lacanian concepts to the film’s understanding of identity and desire. Indeed, it involves something more than the relationship between the girl and the boy; it concerns the interplay between the world outside and the world inside.
The forces pitted against each other define who and what we are. It is indeed the film’s perspective on identity and desire as well, not the least because it opens an exciting field with the uncanny regarding the interdependence of the film and the Other.
The film functions, in addition, with the usage of water and primarily reflections, as an illustration of how Angel’s Egg far extends Lacan’s theory, particularly the mirror stage. Water often stands for the unconscious in the film—the wet and fluid, constantly changing environment within which the deepest of our longings, fears, and feelings remain. In a way that can be very hard to argue against, the film almost seems to use water to illustrate just how fluid and unstable one’s identity can be.
This turmoil is evidenced particularly in her relationship with water and reflections. She tries to understand herself and find a solid identity whenever she gazes at water or reflection. The reflections are almost a reminder of how fragmented her self-perception is, reflecting Lacan’s idea that we are never really whole in how we think we should be.
Everything seems strange regarding the girl and the water she interacts with, as if she were searching for something that has remained disembodied. Water takes a crooked turn from the movement and conveyance that manifests the instability of identity, but it is always on the go and hard to catch. This activity especially relates to Lacan’s Imaginary since it means that we fashion an image of ourselves onto things idealized.
Although always just out of reach, fluctuating endlessly like the water itself, her action with her reflection alludes to the Symbolic—the very way society and outside forces play into shaping how we think we are. In that dreamy world where nothing appears solid, she faces constant tension between the Imaginary (who she feels she is) and the Symbolic (who the world tells her to be), resulting in a continual struggle for self-definition.
The water and reflections also showcase the girl’s journey of self-discovery. She is trying to figure out where she fits into an incoherent, confusing world, thus mirroring this process through our efforts to understand who we are when everything feels chaotic. The water-and-reflection imagery becomes significant in grappling with her identity because it is complex and broken.
It leads to a feeling of being stuck between wanting our own, needing validation from outside, and seeking meaning in a world that should not offer easy answers. Water, an allusion to the unconscious and identity, suggests this journey about bringing together all the different parts of herself in a world that often feels out of control.
One of the film’s most potent images occurs when the girl looks into a stagnant puddle of water. Reaching out to touch the image of himself makes it difficult for her to grab it since the surface ripples and disfigures. This moment is significant; it almost metaphorically enacts the struggle for her self-definition.
She wants to see herself clearly and make her identity clear. However, the water keeps moving, reflecting the nature of identity as constantly changing, between possible perceptions never completely fixed or attained. The constantly changing surface of the water symbolizes how slippery her sense of self is and how hard it is to pin down even our desires and ideals in a world so constantly in flux. It is akin to attempting to grab something that always slips past us, regardless of how hard we grip it.
The boy’s presence adds to the intensity of the moment. At a time in her life when she is at a loss trying to understand herself, he stands there watching her with an expression combining curiosity and concern. What he sees adds weight to the entire scene. As the Other under Lacan’s definition, the boy forces the girl to face not just her own fragmented self.
However, also the other who sees her. His gaze confronts her inner struggle and makes her even more painfully aware of her vulnerability. She is being watched as she goes through her most fragile moment, which only weakens the internal conflict. Should she continue reaching the elusive reflection or let herself be seen by the boy already questioning her?
At this moment, the awareness of tension between the two speaks to the complexities of desire and identity. The girl wants connection; she wants something from someone to see and understand so she will know who she is. On the other hand, however, she may fear such vulnerability.
She could be afraid of opening up and letting someone else in, thus risking the potential revelation of how lost or fragmented she feels. So the scene, really aptly, captures this very quietly but powerfully: exactly how Lacan speaks about the emotional and psychological tension that characterizes the space between people’s desires, wanting connection, and that fear always there of being exposed or revealing oneself.
If Freud appeared in a psychoanalytical passage while looking at Lacan’s interpretation of Angel’s Egg, it would be so different in finding similarities and dissimilarities in those psychoanalysis studies. Freud can very well be understood in his initial write-up by the constructs of theories regarding the unconscious and dreams yielding hidden desire. For Freud, dreams are not just random thoughts; they act as an entrance to the unconscious.
All repressed fears and desires reside there, so the girl’s journey in the film feels like a dream. Wandering desolately through a strange world with the egg signifies her inner turmoil, desires, fears, and things she suppresses or is unaware of. Freud does this sort of thing, as he looks at dreams (in this case, dreaminess in the film) as a modality of working through and making sense of all things unconscious.
Freud’s theory allows us to appreciate the girl’s travels as a voyage in search of those repressed emotions, the things not consciously dealt with but feeding into her actions and how she interacts with the egg. The egg might symbolize what she hangs on to, which she wants but cannot put her arms around because of the deeper fears and desires it stimulates. In Freudian terms, the egg would engage all that is buried under the surface of her mind conscious.
For Lacan, the analysis goes beyond unconsciousness into constructing identity relationships with the “Other,” which are fundamental to understanding why desiring is never yearning. Through Lacan, one comprehends that the girl does not merely struggle with reality but constantly faces a fragmented aspect of self within herself. In Lacanian terms, the egg is not just a repressed desire.
It is an idealized object that signifies something that can never entirely be obtained, although it is always striven for. According to Lacan’s focus on the Imaginary and the Symbolic, the girl’s Internal World is constructed and shaped by her desires and identification with her relationship with others. This boy stands in the way of her self-conception.
Freud will tell us about a girl’s journey as unconscious, repressed desires and emotions; Lacan, however, reveals greater depths into the complex id manifestations of shaping a self by various external forces like that particular gaze, the boys’ gaze. Between them, they create the best tools to decode the advanced psychologies, but where Freudian schemes concern hidden drives and the unconscious, Lacan’s focus hovers around the fragmented nature of the self and the compulsively endless pursuit of unattainable desires.
In the end, Angel’s Egg is, as an assertion, one of the more profound films. It weaves surreal imagery with high-level psychologizing, calling upon us to engage those complexities in our unconscious. Through the lenses of Freud and Lacan, we start to discover layers of meaning both more prosperous and stranger than what is suggested by the mere surface of its narrative.
The girl’s journey, the recurring presence of the egg, and the oscillation of desire and identity all point to the human experience. These elements contextualize how we are often wrestling, as individuals, with our inner desires, fears, and complications of our identity. The themes of Angel’s Egg do not merely exist in the filmic realm-they resonate on a far deeper level, the resonance of our unconscious struggles.
On reflection, one appreciates how psychoanalytic theory helps interpret not just this particular film but art in general and how secretly illumined Oshii’s surreal imagery must be because it speaks to places in the shadow of our psyche. It forces us to pay the price for the complexity of our desires, anxieties, and emotional conflicts.
This film is substantial testimony that animation, a medium long considered more unrealistic or less grounded, may directly address some of the most profound psychological questions that beset humanity. It invites us to perform soul-searching, explores the unfathomable recesses of our minds, and examines the forces shaping our understanding and self-being.
References
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- Wright, C. (2010). The Art of Mamoru Oshii: A Study of the Director’s Work. McFarland.
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