SCARLET (Mamoru Hosoda 2025)

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MAMORU HOSODA: SCARLET (2025)

An ultraviolent, peripatetic riff on 'Hamlet' with a goody-goody finale

After a longer than usual delay due to developing a hybrid animated look, described by the maker as "neither traditional hand-drawn Japanese anime nor Pixar-style digital animation," Japan's second most famous animation artist (after Hayao Miyazaki), and the only other one to score an Oscar nomination (for the 2018 Mirai), Mamoru Hosoda has produced another riff on a famous story. Last time it was Belle, based on The Beauty and the Beast; this time the source is Shakespeare's Hamlet, only in a very diffuse high action travel version, with the Danish prince replaced by a long-haired fiery blonde Danish princess with sword-fighting skills called Scarlet (voiced by Mana Ashida). She's poisoned by Claudius (Koji Yakusho) and winds up (apparently) dead but trapped in a nether world of continuous adventures and combat. She is joined along the way by a missionary from modern Japan, a first aid medic called Hijiri (Masaki Okada) They're opposites, since she wants only revenge and keeps fighting people while he wants peace and to treat the injured, but they are drawn together and make more identifiable characters for the viewer as an accidental couple.

Visually I was pleased, even at moments ravished, by the film, without being able to take the action particularly serious. In his The Japan Times review Matt Schley goes into more technical detail about the look, which he also likes, but seems to wind up dissatisfied. Schley notes that Scarlet features "facial expressions, lip syncing and fight choreography" that "would be hard or impossible to achieve with hand-drawn animation" while yet retaining "that signature anime feel."

It's fun and visually diverting to observe the adventures, which are eclectic, to say the least. There are mobs of medieval poor people, scenes from contemporary urban Japanese life involving Hijiri, middle eastern characters, reappearing heavies from the court of Denmark, and even a hula dancer. Pretty much anything goes, and the far-fetched and dreamy narratives are even a little reminiscent of the tales of the 1001 Nights and they have a similar indifference to plausibility.

The universe of this film has its own rules and its own landscape. It's hard to keep track of the different worlds Scarlet and Hijiri pass through, which may seem somewhat arbitrary. Events begin in the 'real world' of late medieval Denmark, the court where, as in Hamlet, Scarlet's uncle Claudius murders her father the king and takes over the throne. Instead of staying, mirthless and stymied like Hamlet, Scarlet winds up traveling. She has tried to poison Claudius but in a switch on the play, he switches glasses and Scarlet, seemingly anyway, gets poisoned.

So she is apparently dead when the main action begins (but stay tuned). She enters the Otherworld (or Otherlands): A surreal, purgatory-like wasteland that acts as an afterlife where the dead and souls from various eras may coexist, with a dark magma-filled landscape inhabited by wandering souls and marauding bandits. It's a liminal space where Scarlet, initially fatally injured in her own world, travels, and therefore is a sort of purgatory, if without all the interesting historical figures inhabited by Dante's.

Scarlet is continually getting into fights and sometimes Hijiri intervenes to dress her wounds; he even shoots an arrow to protect her from an adversary, despite his pacifistic mindset.

When people die in this film, they don't just drop down but very often crumble into fluffy ashes and fade away. The landscapes are the high points. Figures have a conventionalized linear anime look, meant to evoke popular Japanese comic books, that brings us back to earth. Drawing women with big outsize eyes to make them more appealing of 'emotional" as Scarlet is drawn, is a sentimental, saccharine effect, but that's another part of the complicated landscape of Japanese animation.

Schley points out the obvious: that as it progresses the film is more and more full of "pat messages about forgiving and forgetting" spelled out with zero subtlety. Even if Hosoda is focusing on the younger audience, Schley thinks he is "underestimating" it, and notes that the ending is "particularly glib". It's also sanctimonious. But as Schley says, when the film "puts the narrative aside and lets the atmosphere take center stage," then "it's a ride worth taking." This requires us to pretend a lot of it isn't there, but for fans of Japanese animation, perhaps fans of animation features in general, this is a film you need to look at, and parts of it are a feast for the eyes.

Scarlet, (Japanese: 果てしなきスカーレット, Hepburn: Hateshinaki Sukāretto; lit. 'Endless Scarlet') premiered at Venice out of competition Sept. 4, 2025, and was shown also subsequently at Toronto, New York, Hong Kong, Taipei, Göteborg, Rotterdam, and many other festivals, including of course festivals of animation. Released by Toho and Sony in Japan Nov. 21, 2025, it had a rewards-qualifying Dec. US release and will be distributed more widely in the US by Sony Pictures Classics in Feb. 2026, Feb. 6 at Bay Area IMAX cinemas. Metacritic rating: 61%.