In The Aftermath: Angels Never Sleep (aka On A Planet With No Fish)

In 1985, Mamoru Oshii, the future director of seminal anime Ghost In The Shell, released a 71-minute animated project known as Tenshi no Tamago, or Angel's Egg, an unrelentingly sombre and impenetrable feature with minimal dialogue and an abundance of achingly lyrical imagery. Despite amassing numerous admirers in the decades that followed, it did little to impress Japanese audiences at the time, and when, three years later, it caught the attentions of New World Pictures, the former production/distribution company of indie titan Roger Corman, it was deemed that Western audiences would be no more receptive. Instead, the Western release, retitled In The Aftermath, was completely overhauled and re-edited to incorporate a significant amount of new live action footage, under the direction of Carl Colpaert, a 25-year-old Belgian who'd cut his teeth working as an editor on prior New World productions. Both films were unmistakably the products of then-surging home video era - Angel's Egg was an Original Video Animation, or OVA, an anime title released directly to videocassette, the demand for which became significant in the 1980s, boosted by Japan's economic bubble and the proliferation of the videocassette recorder. Colpaert's film also went straight to video, at a time when video rental stores in the West were big business, and required more product than the major Hollywood studios could provide, making it golden era for low budget indie productions to step up and seek appreciative audiences away from theatrical venues.

In The Aftermath definitely belongs to another era of international film distribution - an era where, in lieu of providing a faithful translation and endeavouring to keep the original vision as intact as possible (not that we can automatically count on this to be the case in the current age), it was acceptable practice for producers to cut and paste what they needed from foreign imports, mixing in original footage and creating what was effectively a whole new product, under the assumption that Western audiences, whether rightly or wrongly, would respond less favourably to the original. What was exercised with In The Aftermath was not radically different to what Corman himself had achieved in assembling his 1962 release Battle Beyond The Sun from the plundered skeleton of Soviet sci-fi Nebo Zovyot (1959), complete with newly filmed sequences (directed by a budding Francis Ford Coppola) and, naturally, carefully vetted to extract the anti-Western overtones of the original. This in itself was nothing particularly radical, considering that reptilian icon Godzilla got his start on American soil through Godzilla, King of Monsters! (1956) a heavily edited and localised version of the Japanese Gojira (1954), with brand new footage interwoven starring Raymond Burr. But In The Aftermath carries particular interest for what it reveals of the West's blossoming awareness and simultaneous wariness of Japanese animation. In some respects, it is curious to think that In The Aftermath came out in the same year as Katushiro Otomo's ground-breaking film Akira, which played a significant role in whetting the appetite for Japanese animation in the Western world.

By then, New World Pictures weren't exactly newbies in handling anime; in 1985, they had released an English language dub of Hayao Miyazaki's Nausicaä: The Valley of The Wind, extensively edited and repackaged for Western viewership under the title of Warriors of The Wind. Miyazaki was famously disapproving, and later took special measures to prevent Princess Mononoke from befalling a similar fate at the hands of the Weinsteins. Nowadays, anime has such a strong following in the West, and Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli in particular are so well-known and respected among general audiences that New World's treatment of Nausicaä is widely regarded as one of the great sins against Japanese animation. A new dub created by Disney in 2003, more faithful to Miyazaki's script, has since supplanted it as the go-to English language version; Warriors of The Wind lives on, chiefly, as a curiosity/cautionary example. Doubtless there are numerous fans of Oshii who view New World's appropriation of Angel's Egg in the same unforgiving light; I am not about to suggest that they are wrong to do so, but as an admirer of Oshii's film with a weakness for curios of all stripes, I can personally attest that there is room in my heart for both productions. I was delighted when, in 2019, Arrow Video released In The Aftermath on special edition Blu-Ray, and the film later became something resembling comfort viewing for me during the lockdown era of 2020, when some of its images of a post-apocalyptic Earth, in particular, the characters' wariness to set foot outside, seemed suddenly very relatable. Ideally, I would have preferred that the film be released as a double feature with Oshii's original, but that was always a long-shot. Despite the increased niche popularity of anime in the West, and the high profile of Ghost In The Shell in particular, Angel's Egg remains something of an obscurity, with In The Aftermath still being the closest the film has to an official English language presentation.

Angel's Egg takes place in what is presumed to be a post-apocalyptic wasteland - the remains of a deserted city, surrounded by water and cloaked in seemingly perpetual night - where a mysterious young traveller (voice of Jinpachi Nezu) arrives and crosses paths with a small girl (Mako Hyoudou) going about her established survival routine with nary another living being in sight. Is she all alone out there? Not exactly; it seems that, intermittently, an army of men clutching harpoons will spring from inertia and take chase through the ruins in a futile effort to bring down the enormous fish that drift across the skies (the fish are represented only as silhouettes, raising questions about their corporeality), but the girl wisely maintains her distance. Her priority is with protecting the large white egg she has acquired under unknown circumstances, and from which she anticipates new life (possibly the reincarnation of the skeletal angel remains she's uncovered amid the debris) will eventually emerge. In a world steeped in decay and desolation, the egg is an obvious symbol of fertility and prospective regeneration, reinforced by the girl's habit of cradling it inside her garment, giving her the conspicuous appearance of possessing an impregnated belly.

The closest we get to illumination on the fate that has befallen this world is when the young traveller recounts the story of Noah's ark, but offers a bleak alternate ending in which the dove sent out to search for dry land never returns, leaving the occupants of the ark stranded in limbo with nothing to do but to physically and mentally stagnate, forgetting whatever world might have existed prior to the apocalypse. His tale is echoed in the film's final image, which reveals the land on which the characters dwell to resemble the underside of an enormous boat suspended amid a harrowing black void. Are these people, whether literally or metaphorically, the progeny of Noah, survivors of some terrible divine judgement intended to destroy the entirety of creation, and whose continued existence may be rooted more in some bizarre fluke than in any immunity specially granted to them? The film's preoccupation with Biblical imagery extends to the New Testament - the young man carries a cross-shaped staff across his back, cluing us in that he is to be interpreted as a Christ-like figure, although whether we are to view him as a bringer of salvation is as ambiguous as everything else. A common interpretation of the film is that it functions as an allegory for the director's own personal abandonment of faith (Oshii himself being an ex-Christian), hence its rather ambivalent attitude to its Christ stand-in. He establishes himself as a danger to the girl's egg early on, suggesting that she break it open if she really wants to know what's inside, a threat he later carries out himself by taking the egg and smashing it with his cross-shaped staff. Why he destroys the egg is unknown - is he looking to demonstrate to the futility of the girl's assumption that it contains new life, or is he determined to shut down any prospect of regeneration? The implication of his take on the Noah's ark story is that the characters live in a universe that has been abandoned by its creator, although perhaps in the figure of the young man we are witnessing that creator's belated return, albeit not to restore the world to its former glory, but to finish what was started once and for all. If so, then are we to perceive their destructiveness as an act of callousness, or of mercy? Likewise, there are those who see the film as a meditation less on the loss of faith than on the loss of innocence in a much broader sense, with the staff being a phallic symbol, and the destruction of the egg signifying some form of sexual violation.

Very little of this ambivalence makes its way into In The Aftermath, which finds a new purpose for the animated characters. The girl and the cross-bearing traveller went unnamed in the original film, but here they are known as Angel (voiced by Katie Leigh) and Jonathon (Ian Ruskin), respectively, and are explicitly identified as a) siblings, and b) angels. The egg continues to play a prominent role in the plot, but here it is ascribed a very specific meaning - Angel is undergoing an angelic initiation ritual, under the mentorship of Jonathon, which requires her to venture into the mortal plane and restore a waning creature to health, should she deem it worthy of receiving the regenerative powers stored inside the egg. In the latter stages of the film, Jonathon, much like his Japanese counterpart, gets hold of the egg and destroys it while Angel's guard is down, an ostensible act of betrayal that is revealed to be all a part of Angel's schooling. Jonathon takes the egg to punish Angel when she violates the rule overt in the film's title, and falls asleep (thus neglecting her angelic duties); when she awakens and acknowledges her error (admitting that her brother "should have spanked me with asteroids"), he hands her a replacement egg, a sequence of animation that viewers of Oshii's film will recognise as occurring before the egg's destruction in the original narrative. This allows Colpaert's film to reach a more optimistic conclusion than Oshii's, although those unfamiliar with Angel's Egg might still detect a note of dishonesty in this seemingly joyous development. Since Colpaert sees fit to incorporate the most distressing moment of Oshii's film - the girl screaming upon discovering that her beloved egg has been destroyed - the viewer has already witnessed an overwhelming despair that Jonathon's reassurances about being "a fairy of second chances" doesn't quite manage to dispel. This despair is so deeply ingrained into the bones of Oshii's production, in the bleakness of the backgrounds and the pallid vulnerabilities of the girl, that it can't help but resonate throughout all of Colpaert's.

Nor are the two films so intrinsically at odds. In place of the story of Noah, we hear the story of Tesseria, a planetary traveller whom Jonathon claims to have once encountered, and a wrecked paradise, once home to a magnificent array of flying, whale-sized fish that Tesseria failed to protect from greedy encroachers. Now, Jonathon tells us, "if you put your ear to the heavens and listen for the sound of a man crying, that is Tesseria siting alone on a planet with no fish." Tesseria's cautionary tale is, on the one hand, a rather baffling means of attempting to tie in the revamped narrative with Oshii's images of men with harpoons inexplicably chasing the shadows of fish, here incorporated as a kind of dream vision Jonathan shares with Angel in order to illustrate what could go wrong should she fail in her angelic mission. But it has bleak implications all of its own. Tesseria's story, for all its eccentric detail, has a similar outcome to that of Oshii's Noah, with a character left to contend with total emptiness and no prospect of renewal. Minus the existentialist anxieties that dogged Oshii's characters, the story lends itself more readily to ecological interpretations, with the men's relentless harassment of the fish signifying an insatiable plundering of the natural world, or else a metaphor for humankind's predilection for warfare. The implicit suggestion is that this planet with no fish represents a probable future vision of Earth, stripped of all its former glory, with the harpoon-wielding men embodying the darker forces within humanity that have already enabled it to fall into such a derelict state. As this apocalypse was self-inflicted, the focus of the story has shifted from God's rejection of creation to humanity's self-loathing for atrocities committed against one another and the rest of creation. The question that Angel grapples with throughout is that of whether or not humankind can be deemed worthy of a continued existence. Which is where Frank comes in.

Frank (Tony Markes) is a flesh and blood mortal, and the protagonist of a parallel storyline interwoven with the recycled footage from Oshii's film. This takes place in a very different post-apocalyptic wasteland, one more overtly related to the nuclear anxieties of the 1980s, where the outside world is too contaminated to venture into without the precautions of gas masks and radiation suits. Frank and his companion, Goose (Kenneth McCabe), are scavenging the ruins for supplies when they run afoul of a Psycho Soldier (as he is credited, to Kurtiss J. Tews) intent on stealing their oxygen (he attacks them with a harpoon, obviously intended to recall the weapons of the fish chasers, although it strikes me as just as reminiscent of Jonathon's staff). In the resulting confrontation, Goose is killed and Frank's suit is taken, exposing him to the toxicity in the air. Angel witnesses Frank's struggle, and is moved by his futile efforts to revive Goose, but still she distrusts the mortal, and flees back to the angelic domain to seek Jonathon's guidance on whether or not he would be a worthy recipient of her egg. Frank notices Angel and pursues her, only to collapse and later awaken in a hospital operating room; he has been saved by a medic named Sarah (Filiz Tully), who advises him that they will be safe so long as they remain in the operating room, the one area of the hospital with a constant supply of clean air. Various tricks are deployed to create an impression of intersection between Oshii's animation and the live action footage, with Angel's image being superimposed onto the three-dimensional backgrounds in some shots, while in others she is represented by a flesh and blood counterpart (Rainbow Dolan). In some scenes Frank is shown attempting to recreate his visions of Angel by sketching her likeness onto a whiteboard (Angel: "He's a doodler, perhaps, or maybe the Devil sketching a scheme"). The culmination of this stylistic mash-up is a surreal interlude where Frank ventures out from the operating room to play "Carnavalito Tango" by Horacio Moscovici on a piano (a pretty lovely composition, I might add), and images from both the real and animated domains (Angel and her egg, a dancing woman presumed to be Frank's lost lover, footage of forests, fields and rivers representing the Earth in its pre-apocalyptic state) merge together to create a haunting elegy to a world wronged by human destructiveness.

It goes without saying that In The Aftermath isn't much of a substitute for watching Oshii's original, but it has its charms as a curiosity piece, both as a strange footnote to Oshii's career and an example of how a bit of editing, recontextualising and resourcefulness can transform an existing production into something notably different and yet still very much imbued with the underlying character of its original form. What is particularly fascinating, in the case of In The Aftermath, is how the reframed animated sequences, juxtaposed with the austerities of their live action counterparts, take on new life as a kind of fantasy world used to confront and navigate through the traumas of reality. There are times when we wonder if Angel's watchful presence is really nothing more than a dream experienced by a sickened Frank as he drifts in and out of consciousness (an interpretation that is disarming for the way it seems to echo the wanderer's suggestion, in the original film, that "You and I and the fish only exist in the memory of person who is gone"). The figure of Angel stands in contrast to the brutalities with which Frank must contend upon the ruined Earth - unassuming, gentle and nurturing, she seems to represent a lost ideal for Frank. This becomes more pronounced during his piano interlude, when her image is repeatedly superimposed with that of Frank's lost love and the unspoiled Earth, suggesting that Frank's fixation on Angel amounts to a yearning for the restoration of a bygone innocence. If we see Angel's dilemma as reflecting Frank's internal struggle between succumbing to the violent despair of his post-apocalyptic being and the preservation of the benevolent qualities that enable him to dream of something better - Man's compulsion to destroy versus his capacity for altruism - then the disquieting bleakness of Angel's domain becomes indicative of Frank's own weary spirit. His unpromptu piano performance is, on one level, a means of connecting with the stranger Sarah, but is also an attempt at reconciliation with the guileless idealism that lies buried beneath his psychological debris, an olive branch to everything from which the scarred and smoking landscape, both inside and out, has allowed itself to become estranged. The irony being that it is Angel who fails Frank, in failing to hear and respond. Mortals might seek escapism, but angels never sleep (except when they do). For the tender, child-like benignity that Angel embodies to become inert and non-functional is to cut off all prospect of redemption. In Angel's temporary stasis, we see acknowledgement that negligence and indifference have as much capacity to harm as outright brutality.

For Frank, everything ultimately ends happily - Angel returns and gives him the egg, permitting him to restore the surrounding atmosphere to an inhabitable condition, and granting Colpaert's film an implicit Biblical allusion all of its own, with Frank and Sarah becoming the new Adam and Eve in a Paradise Regained (I would note, however, that the fate of Psycho Soldier remains unaccounted for - so, erm, potentially Cain is already out there). For Angel and Jonathon, things are a little less clear-cut; again, Colpaert's film is bound by the intrinsic bleakness of Oshii's images, despite the assurances of a triumphant ending in which Angel is rewarded for successful completion of her angelic mission by getting to "go, grow [and] take flight". We see footage of the girl's death from the original film, which depicts her falling into a body of water, embracing a vision of her adult self as she drowns and spawning an assortment of new eggs with her drying breath, before an orb rises from the waters, revealing a legion of statues - among them, a statue bearing the likeness of the girl, seated upon a throne and cradling an egg. Despite the visibly privileged position of the girl's statue, this doesn't feel like an optimistic ending in Oshii's film, recalling as it does the traveller's insistence that the creatures aboard the ark, once poised to determine the future course of life on Earth, were ultimately forgotten and turned to stone. As an image, it is simply too haunting to convey any sense of unabashed triumph. Jonathon, meanwhile, is last seen standing impassively at the water's edge, allowing the tides to wash over him, with Angel commenting that still he "stands alone, and watches time and the planets race by." Presumably, we are intended to draw reassurance from Jonathon's watchful stoicism, although there are echoes, in his sedimentary solitude, of Tesseria's fate. If we see Angel's ascension (albeit in a disturbingly petrified form) as transcendence above the ruination of Frank's world, then Jonathan's miring to the lifeless, unpopulated shore seems to signify the part of Frank that will remain haunted by the darkness of past, a concession to the traumas that cannot be forgotten and the innocence that cannot be wholly regained.

The final image of Colpaert's film, revealing a great, embryonic avian stirring inside a giant egg suspended above the earth atop a monstrous entanglement of elongated roots, is actually the opening image of Oshii's, and it is hard not to entertain the notion that Colpaert has deliberately reordered the sequence as a winking tribute to the iconic closing image of Stanley Kubrick's 1968 science fiction landmark 2001: A Space Odyssey. The embryonic bird is obviously intended to symbolise the awakening of new life, although the alien, distinctly non-human nature of the egg and embryo is troubling, suggesting that, despite Frank's triumph, the future of the reinvigorated Earth does not ultimately belong to humankind, but they are rather the stepping stones in some greater scheme. In Oshii's film, the significance of the bird is discussed in an exchange between the girl and traveller, with the latter claiming to have seen the bird, and speculating that it still lies in its dormant state, dreaming. The girl asks what the bird is dreaming about, a question the man deftly avoids answering. If, In Colpaert's film, we are to perceive the animated figures of Angel and Jonathon as dream beings existing only in the flesh and blood Frank's visions, then perhaps we can see the closing image of the animated bird stirring as an indication of this process coming full circle, with the hint that human existence should be seen as no more permanent or substantial than the content of a dream (or possibly nightmare?) playing out amid the slumber some other form of life. If the bird is to awaken, then humankind must presumably fade away. The juxtaposition of reborn Eden and emergent new life seems almost hauntingly contradictory, and that's what makes In The Aftermath such an enigma of its own.