There are countless recurring tropes and conventions that can be found across anime of all genres. While many of these are well-known and heavily discussed, with most fans knowing why they exist, something less talked about is the prominence of eggs in anime. Eggs are everywhere in anime, frequently playing major roles in series and movies, and there have even been anime entirely centered around them.
The importance eggs have in both old anime and new-gen series is staggering, but there are reasons for that. Anime like Digimon, Pokémon, and Angel’s Egg have eggs naturally baked into their premises, while others, like Wonder Egg Priority, Puella Magi Madoka Magica and Berserk, use them for the sake of symbolism. Still others, such as Dragon Ball, Food Wars, and One Piece, use them purely for aesthetic or practical purposes tied to their real-world usage.
Popular Anime & Manga Have Been Featuring Eggs in Major Roles For Decades
It might be easier to count the number of mainstream anime over the past 40 years that haven’t featured eggs in some way than the ones that have. From a purely functional standpoint, it isn’t hard to understand why. The egg is a universal object known around the world, it can serve multiple purposes, both as a food and as a means of birthing new life, and its appearance is simultaneously instantly recognizable, and open to ample visual customization.
Within the ever-popular Shonen genre, they’ve served a number of purposes in Dragon Ball, most iconically being the means by which King Piccolo spawned his children, the most recent arc of One Piece was set on the egg-themed Egghead island, they were one of the most highlighted ingredients in Food Wars, and one of Yusuke Urameshi’s first tasks as in Yu Yu Hakusho was to ensure the egg he was given by Spirit World hatched into a good-natured beast by cleansing his own soul. Eggs naturally play a role in any type of monster capture anime, the most prominent examples being Digimon and Pokémon, as they’re what the main characters’ fighting partners typically hatch out of. On the darker side of things, the Soul Gems in Puella Magi Madoka Magica are deliberately designed to resemble eggs, Wonder Egg Priority is themed entirely around eggs, and the 1980s classic Angel’s Egg is all about a young girl looking after an egg.
Anime Eggs Offer Clear Symbolism That Ties Into the Themes of Their Series or Movie
Beyond their iconography and functionality, eggs, and even just egg imagery, are used in anime so heavily due to what they symbolize. By their very nature, eggs are a form of sustenance, used to preserve life, and the means by which countless forms of new, pure and untainted life enter the world. This makes them perfectly suited to represent a number of themes, most notably rebirth and enlightenment.
Everything in Egghead in One Piece isn’t egg-themed just because it makes for cool and/or funny aesthetics, but because it’s the home of the smartest man in the anime’s world, and because it’s within the arc that fans receive one of the biggest lore drops in the entire series, even finally being given some information on the mysterious Void Century. In the Digimon Adventure continuity, Digimon revert to Digi-Eggs after they die, and they need to wait to be reborn, with evil Digimon typically being purified via this process. And Yu Yu Hakusho practically spells out its symbolism for audiences, with Yusuke’s initial round of growth into a better, kinder person being directly tied into his hatching of the cute and adorable Puu.
In Madoka Magica, the egg-based Soul Gems possessed by the main characters contain their souls. Throughout the series, the Magical Girls all work to keep their Soul Gems clean, as they’re corrupted by their own inner darkness. And, in the Rebellion movie, Homura shatters her Soul Gem, which winds up being akin to hatching it, as it allows her to use Madoka’s divine power to make herself be reborn as the devil. Wonder Egg Priority, meanwhile, is an anime all about mental health struggles, with the main characters working to help each other, and various other innocents, through their trauma so they can move forward. And, when it comes to Angel’s Egg, the film plays heavily with Biblical themes and imagery, while also being extraordinarily surreal throughout its entire run. It can be difficult to parse exactly what the movie is trying to say overall, with it being deliberately left open to interpretation, but what is clear is that after the egg that the main girl worked so hard to protect is shattered, she quickly meets her end, only to be reborn in a form director Mamoru Oshii has described as “salvation.”
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