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Rating: A world perpetually covered by clouds. A soldier with a cruciform weapon. An enigmatic girl wandering in a desolate and lifeless landscape, with long white hair and carrying an egg to which she seems very attached.
The result of the collaboration between Mamoru Oshii and Yoshitaka Amano is an exceedingly hermetic and interpretative work. Perhaps the closest thing to films like "2001: A Space Odyssey" to be found in animated cinema.
The first image is a hand turning and twisting in close-up, making the gesture of grasping, squeezing, and breaking something. Then we see a huge, turquoise, and semi-transparent egg, within which the outline of a bird or an angel is clearly visible. Another scene change: what appears to be a young soldier with white hair holding a weapon (a rifle?) in the shape of a Latin cross under a fiery sky. He is one of the only two human characters in the work.
The work was a commercial flop and thus wasn't even distributed in Italy. Of its 72 minutes, the first 25 are silent, while the few, surreal dialogues are filled with metaphysical-religious quotes, and the symbolism of all the sequences is obscure and almost indecipherable.
In this pre- or post-human world, the girl and the soldier meet. The two are strangers to each other. The girl distrusts the soldier but soon abandons her concerns, convinced she has finally found a companion in her wandering.
The questions that the slow and dreamlike progression of the event, non-event, (after all, there's no real story behind all this) develop on two different levels: the first includes all the questions concerning what is seen on the screen: what is the egg? What does it contain inside? Why can't the one who keeps it reveal its contents? Where do the shadows of the huge coelacanths we see on the walls of the ruined buildings come from, and what are they? Why do the soulless fisherman-statues hunt them? The second level, instead, includes questions that dig deeper and go far beyond the sense of sight. Questions arising from the vision of a painting that not only changes depending on who looks at it but also changes depending on how, where, when, and why it is looked at. It is thus impossible to provide a single key for interpretation, a correct interpretation.
The presence of symbols, references, and biblical quotations evokes a dimension where religious contents are extracted from their context. The soldier's weapon, the fish and the fishermen, the flood, and the Genesis quotations along with the presence of the egg as the only hope for exegesis in a scenario of destruction and nihilism create a symbolism of their own that contrasts with that from which these elements originate. The secret force of life that cannot be limited or explained by any religion, whatever it may be.
The animation often crystallized in long and static shots abandons its narrative side to glorify its visual and visionary one, surrounding everything with a crepuscular and rarefied atmosphere, with strongly contrasting colors and a hypnotic and meditative pace.
In short: the pinnacle of something
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