Denmark, 16th century. Princess Scarlet (Mana Ashida) seeks revenge for the murder of her father, King Amleth (Masachika Ichimura), by her uncle Claudius (Kōji Yakusho). She fails an attempt on his life and is killed herself, waking up in a strange purgatory called the ‘Otherworld’. Here, she gets another shot at revenge.
After creating a series of parallel worlds sprung from the internet — first in Digimon, then Summer Wars and Belle — Mamoru Hosoda takes a more theological approach with his latest anime movie, Scarlet. Very loosely based on Hamlet, its vengeful princess Scarlet (former Pacific Rim child star Mana Ashida) wakes up in a strange and shimmering landscape which looks like a cluster of nerves viewed from above, announced with a droning ambient score. This is the ‘Otherworld’, a place where the living and the dead, from the past and future, overlap with each other in an uncanny wasteland: not quite heaven, more like purgatory, with strange gods watching over its still-warring denizens, who fight each other for a chance at eternal paradise.
16th-century Danish princess Scarlet finds herself there after being poisoned by her uncle Claudius (Perfect Days‘ Kōji Yakusho), the murderer and usurper of her father the King. As it turns out, Claudius is there too, so Scarlet sets off, crossing the afterlife itself to kill him (again). All with the help of a Japanese paramedic named Hijiri (Masaki Okada), who is appalled by her desire for bloodshed. Like in the Beauty And The Beast-inspired Belle, the shift from reality to the Otherworld is signified by a shift from hand-drawn 2D to computer-generated 3D, the worlds split by different mediums of animation.
Making matters somewhat worse is the general feeling that Hosoda is struggling to find something new or emotionally resonant in his reflections on violence.
Sadly, the 3D CG experiment falls short of the expressive potential of the 2D segment. The digital characters have a lot of convincing texture, but miss the clear humanity of the hand-drawn linework. You could imagine this is the point in the presentation of an afterlife existing between heaven and hell. But seeing the power of the drawn segments, set in the past, makes the 3D animation feel a little less potent. It’s not that the approach is inherently problematic — Belle’s similar blend of styles worked, after all — and there are moments where the choice makes a lot of sense, but it dulls the emotional impact.
Making matters somewhat worse is the general feeling that Hosoda is struggling to find something new or emotionally resonant in his reflections on violence. Though the film is not so simplistic as to suggest that tyrants can be fixed through forgiveness, neither does it feel like a particularly impactful take on revenge movies, nor the classic text it’s based on. It all comes off as trite — in its best moments only managing to repeat what Hosoda has tackled with his previous work.
Mamoru Hosoda’s continuing experiments with animation are passable enough. But it’s not enough to uplift this loose adaptation of a literary classic with its rather clumsy thesis on cycles of violence.
