Scarlet (now on Netflix) is the latest film from celebrated Japanese anime director Mamoru Hosada, perhaps best known for 2018’s Mirai, a surprise Oscar nominee, and 2021’s Beauty and the Beast adaptation, Belle. For the new film, he once again draws from classic literature, gender-switching Hamlet to Scarlet — then indulging some significant creative liberties by setting most of the story in a strange and beautiful quasi-afterlife existing beyond time and space. Which is to say, out of all the nontraditional Shakespeare adaptations out there, this might be the first one featuring a gigantic magic dragon that blasts lightning. Anime!
SCARLET: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: An unnamed narrator (Kayoko Shiraishi), who will later in the film be seen tarnishing her reputation as a wise old shamanesque woman by picking her nose, tells us about the Otherworld, a place where life and death and the past and the future coexist. Scarlet (Mana Ashida) awakens and wonders if it’s heaven, but does heaven have clouds that look like oceans and a gigantic magic dragon that blasts lightning? Most would assume not. She soon pieces it together: “That’s right,” she says matter-of-factly. “I died.” It happens!
FLASHBACK: late 16th century, Elisnore, Denmark. Scarlet is a princess, the daughter of the noble king Amleth (Masachika Ichimura), beloved by the people. He seeks peace over war but his brother Claudius (Koji Yakusho) thinks that’s soft, beta nonsense, as does the queen, Gertrude (Yuki Saito). You’re likely familiar with this particular story, it being 500 years old, so perhaps it’s no spoiler that Claudius has Amleth slain and takes Gertrude as his wife, fulfilling their status as grossly thirsty greedy jerks, and giving them powerful reign over Denmark.
Here’s the twist, besides the fact that there’s a Scarlet in this story instead of a Hamlet: Before she can deliver even a single soliloquy — but thankfully after she learns to become a highly skilled warrior — she drinks poisoned wine and awakens in the Otherworld. Yes, that’s how she died. It happened! It’s the ideal place to exist, should you be thirsty to avenge your father and also be dead, since Claudius, who is not dead, also can exist there. And he exists there to find the gate to Eternity, which he deems to be the ultimate imperial conquest. Scarlet journeys across the harsh desert on her revenge quest, encountering thieving bandits, friendly nomads hailing from vastly different times and places, and burly thugs loyal to Claudius. Most importantly, she befriends Hijiri (Masaki Okada), an EMT from 21st-century Japan, who counters her thirst for Claudius’ blood with a healthy dose of pacifism. Will he temper her single-minded campaign o’ death? What’s the deal with her bizarre dreams and visions? Is that dragon a dragon ex machina or what? THOSE are the questions.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? We saw the behind-the-scenes making-of via Hamnet, now we get the borderline-nutty anime version of Hamlet, which is very much of a piece with Hosoda’s Belle.
Performance Worth Watching Hearing: Okada’s vocalization of Hijiri is a calming, welcome respite from some of the film’s typically anime-style OTT declarative bellowing and overwrought emotionalizing.
Sex And Skin: None.
Our Take: I’ve always considered anime to be closer to opera than any other art form, in terms of emotional scope and the ability to cram 20 minutes of story into two hours. With its grandiose thematic gestures, Shakespearean tragedy is a logical progression from that, and Hosoda quite ambitiously integrates the hyperbole of anime into perhaps the greatest and most influential story of the whole of Western literature. The liberties he takes with the tale ultimately render Scarlet safely within the confines of anime, via Hosoda’s measured blend of wildly expressive wildcrazyhyperdiehard anime flourishes. See: the finely conceived and executed action sequences — especially the one-on-one battles — and the more narratively, structurally, and tonally-disciplined Studio Ghibli style.
Setting the film in a realm with unpredictable landscapes and fantastical creatures and people from any and all times and places gives Hosoda a vast palette for visual indulgence, and some somewhat random plotting, as the film meanders into the episodic during a saggy midsection that fiddlefarts around with some vague romantic tension between Scarlet and Hijiri. But there’s enough large-scale haven’t-seen-THAT-before eye candy to compensate for the film’s shortcomings. The skies that look like ocean waves, a vast legion of refugees battering Claudius’ barriers to the path to Eternity, that intimidating and godlike dragon raining lightning upon the wicked. Ultimately, Scarlet’s clanging hammer-to-anvil assertions on the folly of revenge tend to simplify Hamlet’s themes, but if there’s a more visually rambunctious version of the story out there, I’ve yet to see it.
Our Call: Not sure Scarlet stretches as far outside its genre boundaries as expected, but there’s no denying its visionary aspirations. STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.
