Night on the Galactic Railroad and Angel’s Egg – Discussion

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.