SCARLET
2025
Written and directed by Mamoru Hosoda
To an American, that a major animated feature might be completely and utterly broken can come as no surprise; such things are issued from our major cartoon factories with distressing frequency, and I'm sure that must be the case, too, in Japan. But as that nation has produced a few talents that you could legitimately call animation auteurs, who likewise have command over the resources of entire animation studios, theirs can be broken in rather different ways than, say, how Disney breaks something like Wish, simply by keeping its story development process circulating through a ruminant-like series of digestive baths right up until the point it absolutely needs to be made or it's not going to be released on time; yet, precisely because it can remain a personal and vital albeit illogical expression of an artist's passions, it sometimes doesn't even matter that much if what they made is broken, which is the place I'd hoped I'd gotten to with Mamoru Hosoda with Belle, despite it having a modest shambles of a structure and a relationship with plausibility that one might like to describe, charitably, as "optional." But now he comes at us with Scarlet, and Belle, a movie about how the Matrix and borderline-actionable references to Disney's Beauty and the Beast allowed a YouTube singer to redeem the soul of a rogue Twitch streamer, or something along those lines, turns out to have been on inestimably solider ground than its follow-up. Scarlet feels like some kind of accident, like several ideas for a reimagination of an old school source material collided and were left so inseparably mangled that nothing could be done. It's inexplicable: I have a spurious theory that it must've entered the stage of production where there was no turning back in early 2022, and then Robert Eggers's The Northman came out, and Hosoda panicked.
This suggests it's about Vikings, which it is not, but it is about William Shakespeare's Hamlet, and if you were forced to describe Scarlet in ten words or less, I think they'd come out something like, "Hamlet barbarian action in the wasteland, also it's gender-swapped," which is our starting place and frankly could've been our ending place, but that would've been unworthy of getting exercised about, merely the more-or-less normal application of imagination to an oft-retold tale, resituating it in a fantasy realm (and, again, gender-swapping it) so as to freshen it up. My God, is that not even close to everything. I'm not sure how many words it would take to describe Scarlet; let's find out.
So at the outset, it is—in some ways—"actually Hamlet," and in 16th century Denmark reigns the king Amleth (Masachika Isimura), father to Scarlet (ah yes, the extremely early modern Danish name "Scarlet," which isn't even Danish for "scarlet"; Mana Ashida). Amleth is a fine and loving parent, though we cannot say the same about Scarlet's mother, Gertrude (Yuki Saito), who despises her daughter so thoroughly I wonder if they forgot to mention a retcon about being Scarlet's stepmother; we also cannot say much nice about Amleth's brother, Claudius (Koji Yakusho), who in combination with his lover Gertrude stages an open coup against Amleth, whose pacifist ways provide a pretext for a charge of treason. Claudius saves the customary poison for his niece instead, and Scarlet, despite having trained anime-style for years to forge herself into a living weapon of vengeance, dies without a fight.
That loops us back to the actual beginning of the movie, where we've already cold opened on Scarlet in that wasteland I mentioned, Scarlet being already dead and the wasteland basically being Hell. The very first images of the movie give us only an apocalyptic fantasy desert, wherein a filthy, cloaked figure drinks from a puddle in a salt flat that she probably had an inkling was going to be make her sick, but she had to chance it anyway, and this is something of a blind, in that you think this movie might engage with "the procedures of wasteland survival"; however, shortly thereafter we learn she's in the "Otherworld," and at present receding even further, into oblivion, represented by a bloody pit full of ghouls dragging her soul down into their crimson abyss. Overhead, a dragon the size of a battleship and studded with the weapons of a thousand challengers impassively flies, sometimes striking down wayward inhabitants of the Otherworld with Ghidorah-like bolts of lightning, the storms it occasions presumably being the sole source of water for this arid land. But Scarlet remembers her mission, and she learns Claudius, has also died, so he's here in the Otherworld, too, though her beloved father vanished long ago. This latter fact is also not going to make immaculate sense as we go forward but I think it'd be chivalrous to allow the movie its chance to exist, and so far, so metal, as Scarlet wrenches her way back to "life," rededicating herself to Claudius's destruction, which shall be even harder now than it was then, for the king of Denmark has established himself as king of Hell, controlling the one way out besides oblivion, a gate to "the Infinite Land."
If you're asking if it will also be harder to destroy Claudius because he's already dead, then I'm afraid this question is bad and wrong—the answer is a flat "no," because in Hell physical combat retains physical consequences, so if you die in Hell, you die again, a fate demonstrated upon some of Claudius's henchmen, who, having been apprised of Scarlet's arrival, have been sent to re-kill the king's archenemy. So no special rules about death apply, though while the movie prompts many follow-up questions—"how do you heal from injury, in Hell?", "if you get your body back intact, why are you the same age, in Hell, as your body was when it died?", "why do you get to bring your stuff with you to Hell?", "do I get to have my car in Hell? because those guys got to bring their horses")—these questions shall not be dwelled upon, and one of the most alienating aspects of Scarlet is that nobody shows much interest in how the Otherworld works, not even to the extent its clumsy rules are necessary for motivating its startlingly overburdened plot. The biggest question that nobody dwells upon is why Claudius even wants to control the gates of Heaven in the first place—it's not any kind of limited resource, it's just the exit from Hell and he theoretically just wants to leave, and while it makes sense for him to still be here (light spoilers, but the gate won't even open, and he's waiting for his beloved sister-in-law anyway), it doesn't seem to serve much purpose besides ensuring the villain of Hamlet remains the villain of Scarlet, something already slightly dubious, considering it effectively declares Claudius, from Hamlet, a force of cosmic-scaled evil unrivaled in history.
For you see, in the Otherworld, all times are one. As a practical matter, what this means is that soon Scarlet makes the acquaintance of a figure with no allegiance to all this Shakespearean tragedy. This is Hijiri (Masaki Okada), a paramedic from 21st century Japan; he offers Scarlet, Princess of Denmark circa 1550, the rendering of his name in kanji, because Jesus Christ, this movie's bananas.
It took 796 words, for the record, and maybe I could've been more efficient, and maybe I also could've communicated more breathless amazement at just how motherfucking bananas the movie is, except I think then you'd get the wrong idea, though I'm sure you have regardless. Because here's the deal: I don't think there's any way to describe Scarlet without making it sound much more engaging than it is, if for no other reason than the pure crazy shit that gets flung at you for 111 minutes, and in Scarlet's defense that crazy shit does keep getting flung, so there is, of course, pleasure to be extracted from being continually amazed how damned many distinct concepts it has and how absolutely terribly they work together—"let's make Hamlet with a pink-haired anime action girl!" "no, let's make Hamlet in Hell!" "no, wait, Hamlet with freaking time travel!" "ah, but why choose?"—though I surely do not think this pleasure can remain wholly unironic. I had, anyway, "a good time" with Scarlet, but mostly because I spent my time tittering away at the unhinged randomness of completely incompatible ideas uniformly presented with the dopiest straight face. It even overshadows a seemingly-central concern regarding this weird, weird (yet surprisingly-boring) film, namely "does Mamoru Hosoda have, like, any idea what Hamlet's about?"
Sort of, but presently I want to talk about what it means that this goofed-up Hamlet comes from Hosoda's Studio Chizu, and the short version is "wow," and while that wow's never as big as it was with Belle, that's because in 2022 Belle just knocked you senseless with what Chizu could do with 3-D CGI rendered as classical 2-D character animation. Accordingly, one's a little less awestruck here—there are a lot of reasons to say Scarlet isn't nearly as interesting about its animation technique as Belle was—but what's objectively true is that Hosoda was clearly in the mindset to "make more Belle" and he has literally done so, as even the briefest side-by-side comparison of Belle's Belle and Scarlet's Scarlet ought make clear. (I wouldn't say they look exactly alike, but it could be nothing but their modal emotional states—Scarlet is generally knotting her brow into a warlike snarl—that keeps me from assuming the institutional process at Chizu was anything besides, "so we built this entire character model and we're going to throw her away after using her for only half a movie?") Still, Scarlet is after a very different world within which to envelop its pink-haired anime teen, and though Hell is direly inhospitable we'll discover that it's chock full of all sorts of people animated much the same way as Scarlet, and, indeed, the movie ticks up once it concludes its phase of clomping through a fun-but-limited wasteland that's differentiated mainly by "deserts made out of rocks" and "deserts made out of dunes," though I am potentially overstating how different it is, even once it's "a desert swarming with people from various time periods." (It is being quite noticeably withholding on this front, of course: as much as I think it wants to present this pulp vision, something akin to the cross-time army of Kang the Conqueror, for the pure joy of it, somebody obviously decided that e.g. a drone-equipped Ukrainian infantry squad just wasn't going to coexist cleanly with Claudius's medieval satanic tyranny.)
Still, what it's grasping for, it's reaching, and that's a sense of oppressive weight to every frame of every character's movement, burdened as they are with anger and violence, which spreads out to encompass their entire universe, so that even immobile backdrops feel hideously solid and the very sky itself—embodied in that storm dragon—constantly bears down upon them. It's useful for Scarlet as an action movie, too, supplying our heroine and her adversaries and even the extras with a great deal of credible physicality—it's an unfair comparison that obviously occurs to me only because they're all hypothetically "traditionally" animated, but the great mass of the damned is sort of like the culmination of what Disney was managing with its clunky crowd-generating programs at the turn of the millennium—and there's a fair number of martial arts-inflected fight sequences peppered through Scarlet, that have a lot of enjoyable heft to them (going by the stunt coordinator in the credits of this cartoon, some of these were either life-referenced or straight-up mo-capped), even if those fights can sometimes, especially early on, feel like Polonius (Kazuhiro Yamaji) or whoever is politely taking his turn to take his swing at Hamlette here. (They'd also be more fun if Scarlet were not so bizarrely allergic to blood: I'm not asking for adult anime gore geysers, but notwithstanding the giant pit full of blood that opens up the movie, people scarcely bleed at all, and it can feel like the anime about deadly vengeance, set in Hell, is trying to keep its options open for a freaking PG.)
It's not hardly as expressive as Belle, which honestly feels more like a function of its characters' much smaller emotional repertoires than a failure of the technique (on her merits, Scarlet is certainly a well-animated protagonist), and of course, with the sheer amount of 3-D-unto-2-D animation here, we're going to get technical shortfalls (especially compared to Belle's untethered Internet world), such as the finale with Claudius that jarringly reveals the limits of how far you can deform a character's facial features when there's a "skull" made of rigging points underneath, or the disconnect between the models and backgrounds whenever Hosoda decides he's going to do a tracking shot following a character's feet. It's also not as "smart" as Belle: it doesn't have real access to the intellectually-fascinating gambit Belle was making with its two different kinds of 2-D animation, and while it tries to replicate that gambit—Scarlet is using a measure of genuine "traditional" animation, segregated into the flashbacks to Scarlet's life on Earth—there's just no way these backstory-flogging flashbacks are ever going to have the same level of importance as Belle's IRL alter ego. Still, the main thing is that tangibility, exploiting the hell out of CGI's potential for stability—just some astounding "costumes" here in this cartoon, such as would be completely impossible under any kind of hand-drawn regime—camera freedom, and physics-bounded weight. It affords it an atmosphere and mood that's not like much else.
And that's good, because it needs every atom of atmosphere and mood it can hold onto once its characters have all shown up: I left off recapping any further story developments when Hijiri appeared and I'm trying to decide whether this sentence should end, "that's because I wish he hadn't," or "that's because there aren't any more story developments after he does," because both of these criticisms are true. Scarlet herself is fine, no Hamlet's Hamlet (though I like her better than Olivier), but her vengeful obsession is naturally compelling enough to drive a story; Hijiri, on the other hand, is the biggest sucking void, whom Scarlet herself initially clocks as an interloping jackass unaccountably placing himself in between her and her story, and while this initial appraisal of the character who becomes Scarlet's unwanted escort mission changes for her, because the screenplay says it has to, it never changes for us. Hijiri, pacifist and an inert authorial insert figure, exists for no other reason but to condescend to Scarlet in a gruesome simulacrum of a philosophical challenge to her worldview, and thus deliver the themes of the movie, which are—I hate to put it so bluntly—stupid.
So: does Hosoda know what Hamlet's about? Well, I'm pretty sure he doesn't remember who Fortinbras is. But if nothing else, Hosoda has correctly identified Hamlet as an iconic story of revenge, and is therefore at least somewhat appropriately using it to tell us why vengeance is bad, except there's this yawning gap between the person-sized theme, "hatred will rot your soul," that a Hamlet could support, and the preposterous utopian pacifist grandiosity that the movie is actually forwarding through Scarlet's pair of male role models, and I would adjudge that Hosoda is not even aware that gap exists, so huge stretches of his movie come off profoundly idiotic, sometimes even obliquely offensive. (Hijiri also seems to have infinite medicine in his paramedic's bag he brought to Hell with him, through which he makes himself "useful" by tending to the illnesses of dead people. For his part, Hijiri is pretty sure he's having a dream, which I guess is as good an explanation as any why his character almost autonomically manages to take this shit "seriously"—he does, stultifyingly so, as a matter of "ethics"—while having no conception of himself whatsoever as a participant in a drama that's actually happening. Just. Pure. Sucking. Void.)
So it's much worse than just "themes you might not agree with": the execution thereof is nothing besides Scarlet and Hijiri having the exact same superficial conversation over and over, somehow spending almost an entire movie with each other and never even finding a rapport with one another by accident, until at last enough runtime has elapsed that Scarlet could have undergone a character arc, though she hasn't, and by the very end the movie's just outright cheating to keep its kludgy join between its narrative and its moral message holding together long enough to reach the credits. But again, that's not the real problem, when the credits are a good hour and a half away: you know the movie is all-but-lost within minutes of Hijiri's arrival, because you've already understood that what could've worked as a quiet exploration of a striking symbolist dreamscape is destined, instead, to be inundated with constant irritating dialogue that's going to try to tell you what to think even though most of it is dumb. The movie will only intermittently work thereafter, and only as animated technological spectacle. But there are the rare moments, because the animated technological spectacle has physically forced the screenplay to shut up for a few minutes, that it works regardless, especially as the outcome of the only even-halfway-intelligent conversation I think the deuteragonists ever have, which pokes—however inarticulately—at whether it might be easier to forswear violence in a softer, more comfortable 21st century than a blood-soaked 16th. That's a debateable issue, but it prompts the most utterly wacked-out and therefore best scene in this often-wacked-out movie, a dance number (!) that is essentially psychedelic within this context, but if I call this the best scene, I've seen a lot of people declare it the worst, and such is Scarlet that I can't even really come up with a satisfactory reason why they must be wrong.
Score: 5.01/10
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