Coming soon: Soundtracks

Review: Mamoru Oshii's undersung masterpiece Angel's Egg stands out among the Japanese animeteur's otherwise superbly varied filmography, in which his better known productions such as Ghost In The Shell and Memories stand out unduly loudly compared to it. Something of an initiatory shibboleth for anime fans, the DVD version of Angel's Egg went unavailable in Western markets for far too long, so we're not surprised Kanno's original score only now makes it to the hi-fi. Matching the film's flowing, tapestried, 19 Century gothic anime fusions - and its alleged mute allegorical retelling of the story of Noah's Ark - Kanno's soundtrack proves inseparable from the film's soundworld itself, hence the snippets of metaphysically charged dialogue you hear throughout this reissue.