Remember my holiday movie preview last week, where I said that Mamoru Hosoda’s Scarlet wasn’t likely to hit our theaters until February? Yeah, never mind. The thing opens at two AMC theaters (Eastchase and Parks at Arlington) this weekend, and this Japanese animated Shakespearean pastiche has its moments. Still, I named Belle, Hosoda’s previous film, the best movie of 2021, and so I had lofty expectations going into this. Those went largely unmet.
Much like Hamlet, this movie is about a scion of Danish royalty whose father Amleth (voiced by Masachika Ichimura) is poisoned to death by his brother Claudius (voiced by Kōji Yakusho), who does it to become king of Denmark. However, unlike in Shakespeare’s tale or the source material he took it from, the hero is a pink-haired daughter named Scarlet (voiced by Mana Ashida) who is determined to take revenge on her uncle. Despite being handy with a sword, she fails because Claudius is smart enough to hand her a poisoned glass of champagne before she can stab him to death at a big party.
Fortunately, she gets a second bite at the cherry in the afterlife, because Claudius is killed shortly after her. She can kill him in the afterlife, because much like in Coco, you can die again in the next world. Tagging along on her journey is Hijiri (voiced by Masaki Okada), a recently murdered paramedic from the present day who thinks her revenge quest is wrong. Hosoda has not adapted this from any manga or other source material, which is a refreshing change from recent anime movies that assume you’ve watched 20-odd previous episodes of TV and know the characters inside out.
He has made other changes to Shakespeare, too, as Polonius and Laertes (voiced by Kazuhiro Yamaji and Tokio Emoto) team up to try to kill Scarlet during a fight sequence on a snowy mountain ledge. Other minor characters from the play such as Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Voltemand, and Cornelius are hired hit men for Scarlet to eliminate, though one of them sees the light and becomes more interesting than his Shakespearean counterpart.
I wish all this added up to some critical mass of craziness. Alas, it boils down to Hijiri and her father’s spirit teaching Scarlet the importance of letting go of past grudges, even though Claudius turns out to be truly irredeemable. That comes across more powerfully in a vision that she has of herself living in the present day and dancing to pop music without any thoughts of revenge. The movie could have put the idea across without indulging in so much fuss. Maybe it’s harsh to compare this to Akira Kurosawa’s samurai Shakespeare adaptations like Throne of Blood and Ran, but when you’re a Japanese filmmaker riffing on the Bard, that’s what you’re setting yourself up for.
The visuals have some power in the massive army that Claudius assembles with designs of conquering the next world, and there’s a lovely quiet interlude where our heroes take refuge with a group of other recently deceased people from other parts of the world. They stop to watch a Polynesian woman perform a traditional dance, and clearly the animators have closely observed both the choreography and the muscle movements required to carry it out. Scarlet has more than a bit of evidence that Hosoda is a major voice in anime, and indeed animated film in general. You’ll just have to go to his other work to see what he’s really about.
Scarlet
Voices by Mana Ashida and Kōji Yakusho. Written and directed by Mamoru Hosoda. Rated PG-13.
