Ten years before Ghost in the Shell, Mamoru Oshii got his first taste of shell-based sci-fi in this 1985 anime about a girl (Mako Hyōdō) protecting a big egg, presumably in case she grows up to be Greg Wallace’s lawyer.

Angel’s Egg is a heady scramble of dystopian sci-fi, religious imagery, looping narrative and uncompromising style that resembles a Salvador Dalí version of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Like Kubrick’s monolith, the egg stands for the unknown and unknowable; for the young girl it appears to represent her faith, but she meets a sceptical stranger (Jinpachi Nezu) prepared to break it to see what’s inside.

Oshii bakes this clash of competing ideologies into the design, set in a desolate, Gothic city descended upon by futuristic alien technology. The animation is breathtaking, especially when you consider how it was made in the 1980s. The girl is the film’s single source of light, shining egg-white against deep black backgrounds, carrying new life and hope under the yoke of some apocalyptic natural disaster. There is also very little dialogue (most of it devoted to Noah’s Ark) but intense, jolting sound design, alongside elegiac music by Yoshihiro Kanno.

Angel’s Egg is a product of the OVA era; nothing to do with eggs, but ‘original video animation’ made for the home video market, at the height of Japan’s economic bubble. This is what happens when you give an artist a lot of money to realise their vision without commercial constraints. The result is enchanting, frightening and often alienating, largely due to the lack of plot and characterisation in a movie with only two characters. But if you want to see 70 minutes of virtuoso animation (and where the Wachowskis got The Matrix from), Angel’s Egg is a cracking watch.