Scarlet Review – Mamoru Hosoda’s reimagining of Hamlet is a sword and sandals spectacle with stunning visuals and killer sound design
Plot: A medieval princess on a quest to avenge her father’s death awakens in a realm between life and death, where she encounters an idealistic young man from the present day who shows her the possibility of a future free of bitterness and rage.
Review: It’s been at least a few decades since I read William Shakespeare’s Hamlet in middle school, and there have been many reimaginings of the Bard’s classic tale since then, but none have combined elements of R.F. Kuang’s best-selling novel Katabasis and Adrian Lyne’s Jacob’s Ladder like Mamoru Hosoda‘s Scarlet, a gripping sword and sandals anime epic from the filmmaker behind Belle, The Boy and the Beast, and Summer Wars. For his latest animated feature, Hosoda journeys into a lawless world populated by lost souls and a massive, thunder-conjuring dragon, offering a surreal look at death, revenge, and forgiveness.
In Scarlet, a young princess witnesses the execution of her father, the kindly King Amleth, by her Uncle Claudius (Kôji Yakusho), a delusional and power-hungry despot obsessed with opening the gates to the Infinite Land, a fabled paradise of endless promise and boundless power. One evening, while stalking her uncle, determined to end his life, Princess Scarlet (Mana Ashida) becomes poisoned, an act that finds her coming face-to-face with death as her soul becomes lost in the OtherWorld. In this paranormal purgatory, individuals from different backgrounds and eras converge to search for meaning while death looms like a shadow, haunting their every laborious step toward the promise of salvation.
Consumed by rage, Scarlet learns that her Uncle Claudius is also in OtherWorld, and so her mission to end his life continues. While exploring the mysterious expanse, Scarlet meets Hijiri (Masaki Okada), a dutiful, kindhearted paramedic who abhors violence in all forms. Rather than see Scarlet hurt, Hijiri joins her on her destructive mission, hoping she’ll opt for peace instead of succumbing to her unquenchable bloodlust. While Hijiri is as loyal a friend as they come, and a helpful traveling companion with his backpack of medical paraphernalia, his do-gooder demeanor quickly becomes his only defining characteristic. I’m often a fan of earnest characters with kind hearts, but Kijiri could use more substance beyond his upbeat attitude and insistence on non-violence in a strange world teeming with villains and dancing blades.
Hosoda’s Scarlet presents an eye-catching blend of 2D hand-drawn animation and computer-generated landscapes. The hand-drawn elements exhibit a painterly quality, with smears of color adding texture and dazzling patterns to clothing and expanses of desolate land. I’m not always the biggest fan of CGI and 2D coming together, and Scarlet is a mixed bag of the two. While some scenes look positively gorgeous, the CGI is almost photorealistic, while the 2D characters look cut from finely-sanded wood. As I’d said, it’s an interesting blend, though the style doesn’t always complement the film’s direction as the camera sweeps over locales that look superimposed or stale.
Where the film truly shines is in its depiction of Princess Scarlet, a would-be ruler of a broken kingdom desperate for revenge. Throughout the movie, I could feel Scarlet’s pain, whether it stemmed from her mission to run Claudius through with her trusty blade or from her defiance of the Otherworld’s siren song of oblivion. She’s a fierce warrior, but also gets knocked around, making you feel like one false step could lead to her end. I like a one-woman-army as much as the next action fan, but watching Scarlet struggle to get the upper hand on her enemies adds a level of drama to the combat that I enjoy. She’s a badass, and a compelling lead.
Forever a fan of music, Hosoda includes musical elements in Scarlet, with one sequence featuring Hijiri dancing alongside a Hawaiian woman, and another that finds Scarlet dancing with Hijiri in a busy town square, after she time-travels to his future for a perplexing respite from her primary mission. While the town square sequence feels out of place at first, it leads to some of the film’s best drama as Scarlet witnesses a world where she could be free of her pain. Watching herself dance with Kijiri sends Scarlet into an emotional tailspin, as she contemplates a life where she could achieve happiness, the never-ending urge to put sword to skin no longer a concern. Upon returning from her time-traveling journey, something inside Scarlet mends. She begins to imagine a life of peace and, for the first time, contemplates forgiveness. It’s a beautiful turning point.
While I would have preferred to see Scarlet in an IMAX theater as I’d initially intended, I made do with my at-home screener copy just fine. I’m an audiophile, and watched the film while wearing a quality pair of headphones. Scarlet‘s sound design is something to behold. I immediately noticed the mix, with the atmospheric background score bouncing from one headphone to the other for an enchanting display of sound and personality. When you watch the film, pay particular attention to the audio during combat sequences. It sounded like a shotgun went off when Scarlet would kick an enemy in the face, sending shockwaves of devastation through my skull. Despite some of the film’s music being unremarkable, the sound design itself is something to behold.
Having perused a few reviews before writing my own, I liked Scarlet more than most. As reimaginings go, Hosoda’s take on Shakespeare’s Hamlet is powerful, emotional, and breathtaking in its depiction of a world somewhere between life and death. If I had to knock it for anything, it would be that I found the laws of the OtherWorld confusing. I don’t know if I blacked out, looked at my second monitor for a moment, or let exhaustion take hold (it’s been a long week), but the inner workings of OtherWorld eluded me for much of the film’s duration. Granted, OtherWorld is mysterious and ambiguous while blurring the lines of reality, but I struggled to grasp its rules and intricacies. I trusted that I would understand it by the end. And I did, but it was a perplexing journey to the film’s conclusion.
Regardless of whether Hosoda’s other films are better constructed, there’s still so much to enjoy and take away from Scarlet. I love watching movies featuring characters overcoming impossible odds, and Scarlet delivers an engaging spin on Shakespeare’s tale with hypnotic art, an engaging internal struggle, and action that peppers the experience with heart-racing thrills and slick displays of power. It may not be Hosoda’s strongest film, but they can’t all be Summer Wars.
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