Like several other notable titles of the 1980s, Angel’s Egg was briefly shown in a Tokyo cinema in order to qualify it as a “film”, and hence command attention from movie magazines. However, it was hardly a major splash – an early morning screening on Sunday 22nd December at the Toei Hall, a week after the video cassette was already on sale, ironically on the release day of the fourth film in the Urusei Yatsura franchise that Oshii himself had once helmed, and only a day after the premieres of both Vampire Hunter D and the Captain Tsubasa movie. If you were an anime fan that weekend, you would have had a busy schedule. Angel’s Egg, it seems, lost out in all the competition, an avowedly arthouse project in an anime scene that had a very different idea of what “grown-up” cartoons should be.

The reaction to the film on its original release was muted. Yoshikazu Yasuhiko damned it with faint praise in Animage by comparing it to Eiichi Yamamoto’s Belladonna of Sadness (1973), itself a film that flopped on its original release, only to be praised by later critics as an arthouse classic. Hayao Miyazaki commented that Oshii had gone on a “one-way trip” with no notion of how to come home. In the most cutting of bad notices, Oshii’s own mother told him that she doubted anyone would want to see another one of his films ever again.

From my article in the sleeve notes to the Umbrella (Australia) release of Mamoru Oshii’s Angel’s Egg.