Scarlet, Mamoru Hosoda's Disappointing Return Spans from Shakespeare to Isekai

When Alberto Barbera, the director of the Venice Film Festival, announced in late July that Mamoru Hosoda's new work would have its world premiere in Venice, he said two things: that he is not a great connoisseur of Japanese animation, but that his collaborators assured him that the director in question, along with Hayao Miyazaki and Makoto Shinkai, is one of the most important contemporary voices in the Japanese animated production sector. The second statement is absolutely true, as evidenced by a long series of critical and public successes such as Wolf Children and The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, passing through Belle (seen a few years ago at the Cannes Film Festival) and Mirai. Barbera's first clarification, however, subtly alluded to a certain underlying perplexity of the Festival director regarding the animated film in question, so I feel I can reassure dear Alberto: it's not that you don't understand anime, it's Scarlet that truly doesn't live up to the director's reputation.

Scarlet Straddles Shakespeare and Isekai

It's hard not to call it Hosoda's worst film ever, even considering his earlier, more commercial works like the Digimon and One Piece franchise films. Scarlet, despite its enormous technical-narrative ambitions laid out in its two-hour runtime (a lot, considering that the animated genre average often stays under one hundred minutes, given the costs and production times of these works) does very little and does it poorly, drawing from cultural past and present, transforming them into a jumble that often makes no sense.

The film's primary reference is William Shakespeare's Hamlet, but in a female key: at the end of the 16th century, the protagonist is the daughter of the King of Denmark, who is betrayed and killed by his brother Claudius, who aims to steal his crown. Traumatized, young Scarlet vows revenge and trains until she becomes a ruthless warrior, determined to avenge her father's death. Something goes wrong, however, and Claudius surprisingly manages to eliminate her before she can exact her revenge, poisoning her. Here, one cannot help but think of isekai, a genre of great fortune in recent years whose premise is precisely the death of the protagonist in their original world and their arrival in another reality governed by different rules, where they must reinvent themselves.

Scarlet ends up in a strange afterlife that is neither quite heaven nor hell, where there are powerful dragons and where inhabitants from various eras seem "stuck" in time. In this afterlife, one can die, again, disappearing permanently (or at least, given the tedium generated by the film, this is our hope for them). Here Scarlet meets Hijiri, a kind and caring Japanese paramedic from the present who doesn't exactly remember how he ended up in that world. The two initially struggle to understand each other, partly due to the profound diversity of the eras they come from, and partly because he is her mirror opposite in character: as much as she is prone to anger, attack, and offense, he is calm, composed, ready to heal others.

Scarlet is a Big Disappointment for Hosoda Fans, Here at His Worst

What follows is a very long wandering in this world whose logical coherence diminishes with every new corner explored. Claudius also ends up in this reality with his henchmen and decides to preclude eternity to everyone, to keep it only for himself. It is unclear, once again, on what basis, how, or why, given that none of those who have just arrived in this world have precise answers about its dynamics (and, I suspect, neither does Hosoda himself). The whole thing is a convenient excuse to recast Scarlet as the fighting heroine and further postpone her therapeutic realization that revenge will bring her neither relief nor improve the world.

A realization that, for no specific reason, will mature in a parenthesis where in a dream she is sent to a Japanese version of La La Land where she happily dances in the street with Hijiri for no apparent reason. Upon waking, she decides to cut her long hair and give up revenge, inspired precisely by her look in this passage.

There's no delicate way to say it: Scarlet is a mess that transforms its ambition into confusion and Hosoda's thematic cornerstones (the mixture of timelines, the relationships between characters that evolve in complex and unexpected directions) into their worst incarnation ever. What's annoying, then, is how it unnecessarily overemphasizes drama and trauma, making the poor protagonist scream and cry her eyes out, with an anger and bitterness that then punctually culminate in nothing.

The anti-war resolution at the end is also embarrassing: certainly not in its message (which is, however, disarmingly simple) but in the double premise that the present is an ideal era without wars (what terrible timing, Hosoda!) and that the solution for a more just world is an enlightened sovereign. On the other hand, it is perhaps useless to expect a daring philosophical leap from a film that cannot even present characters who are theoretically less adolescent in age but then makes them act with truly childish attitudes.

Last but not least, the animation is far from excellent. While it is objectively impressive how the crowd scenes were created and managed, with thousands of characters moving in complex and independent ways on screen, there is something unnatural, robotic, in the movements of the protagonists' faces and bodies. The impression is that some new software was experimented with, promising great fluidity of movement in sequences like the dance through the streets of contemporary Japan, and instead ended up in uncanny valley territory. Moreover, with the aggravating factor that there is a clear jump between scenes that utilize these additional resources and scenes animated "normally."