I recently watched Night on the Galactic Railroad (NGR from here on out), and was surprisingly reminded of one of my favorite films, Angel’s Egg. These two 1985 anime really have a number of striking tonal and stylistic similarities, from the long periods of silence, to the interspersed Christian iconography. They have a somewhat similar structure as well. We get a very uncomfortable-feeling introduction to the main characters and their worlds, complete with eerie (and gorgeous!) music, before the entrance of something that radically diverges from the main characters’ normal lives, the soldier in the case of Angel’s Egg, and the train in the case of NGR. Throughout Angel’s Egg and beginning with the train’s entrance in NGR each of these films presents a series of vignettes that seem to be attempting to communicate individual messages that tie into the larger themes of the films as a whole. In NGR these splits are more obvious, being marked by transitional title slides, but I believe that the girl waking up and heading to the lake, her walking through the town, the whalers, she and the soldier walking through her bottle collection, the scene in her bedroom, etc. are all separated by obvious enough cinematic transitions, and have enough of a unique set of motifs and symbols to seem distinct from each other as well.
What really struck me was how cryptic NGR‘s individual vignettes were to me as compared to those of Angel’s Egg. Whether it was due to being heavily abstract like in the case of the bird catcher, or presenting a very strange moral case such as that made by the children’s caretaker, I struggled to determine the meaning of each of these scenes. In the case of the latter the film’s Christian imagery probably contributed to my confusion. The woman ended up refusing to save the children’s lives in service of their well-being according to a Christian worldview, which to me is a twisted value judgement. However, the film seemed to be expressing Christian ideals to a degree that made me seriously doubt that she was meant to be criticized as an example of religious devotion gone too far. As esoteric as some of its vignettes were, NGR‘s actual message is still far more clear than Angel’s Egg‘s by the end, since that movie bothers to explain it. It is praising the Judeo-Christian idea of self-sacrifice, which clears up my confusion about the caretaker. We are indeed supposed to take the child-murderer-through-inaction as a religious role model.
Knowing that NGR was based upon a classic Japanese novel going into my viewing it was easy for me to view its vignettes as chapters (perhaps the titles of each scene were chapter titles taken straight from the book itself) building towards a thematic end goal. Mamoru Oshii (director of Angel’s Egg) has been quoted as saying that not even he understands the theme of the film, as he was at a difficult point in his life at the time of its production. I think that this openness to interpretation works in its favor however, since the film has more staying power as a point of thought and discussion than NGR, which while being a beautiful film leaves little room for interpretation when it comes to its thematic message.
Let’s use that beauty as another point of comparison between the two films. While I found both of them to be impressive, NGR can’t compete with the raw artistic talent that Angel’s Egg’s production brought to the table. With Mamoru Oshii of Ghost in the Shell and Patlabor fame directing, the character designer for franchises such as Final Fantasy and Vampire Hunter D Yoshitaka Amano doing what he does best, probably the most prolific and distinctive art director in anime Shichiro Kobayashi doing some of the most impressive work of his career, and composer Yoshihiro Kanno breaking away from his usual work on ballets and orchestral pieces to provide his only soundtrack Angel’s Egg is brimming with talent. Heck, beyond these upper-level positions there are more industry superstars to be found. The man behind what may very well be the most iconic character designs in anime, Evangelion’s Yoshiyuki Sadamoto provided key animation for the film, as did Shinji Ootsuka, who has worked on a number of films by two of the medium’s greatest directors, Hayao Miyazaki and the late Satoshi Kon, and FLCL. Gisaburou Sugii has directed a handful of solid anime outside of NGR, but nothing of particular note, Koichi Mashimo, notable industry eccentric who later went on to form studio Bee Train provided storyboards for NGR, and the composer worked on a number of video game soundtracks. (if you couldn’t tell by now I have a massive hard-on for anime staff listings)
“A man’s got to know his limitations,” and NGR does. It has some moments of stunning imagery when it counts (the first train stop in particular comes to mind), but generally we get a lot of fairly minimal character animation, and the fact that much of the film takes place in the same train car let background art resources be allocated elsewhere. Even the decision to make the bulk of the characters into anthropomorphic cats (something not present in the original novel) was apparently made in order to simplify the character animation. While much of the soundtrack is not too noteworthy the main theme is suitably haunting, and the usage of the Hallelujah chorus is excellent as well.
On one hand we have an audio-visual masterpiece chock-full of talent that provides a highly thought-provoking but thematically vague experience, and on the other we have a well-made adaptation of a beloved novel that employs intriguing and oftentimes esoteric vignettes in the service of what becomes a clear moral message, doing the best it can with limited resources. The former film is the brainchild of many talented collaborators, the latter a retelling of an old tale for a new audience. Both end up being excellent tone pieces that are sure to stimulate some philosophical thought.
My Internet Ramblings are Unbelievably Self-Indulgent 