Who did the art for Angel's Egg?

Angel's Egg, released on December 15, 1985, was director Mamoru Oshii's first original work. The credits carry Amano twice: original concept, shared with Oshii, and art direction. The project began as an Animage Bunko picture book by the two of them, and its drowned city, its feathered machinery and its silent girl carrying an egg through the rain are Amano paintings set in motion.

It was made ascetically: near-monotone colour, almost no dialogue, unusually long takes, and only about 400 cuts, roughly a third of the number in a typical anime production. A commercial failure on release, it became one of the most studied cult films in anime, and the purest record of what Amano's imagination looks like when nobody asks him to design for anyone else's story.

Forty years on, the film returned. A 4K remaster made from the original 35mm film, supervised by Oshii himself, premiered in the Cannes Classics section in 2025 before Dolby Cinema screenings in Japan, and Amano drew a new illustration for it, his first Angel's Egg drawing in about forty years. The Library's News desk has covered the remaster's collector editions as they were announced.