by Cain Noble-Davies
Worth: $17.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Mana Shida, Masaki Okada, Masachika Ichimura
Intro:
… a dazzling fantasy epic with visuals, music, and pathos sharpened to a keen edge.
Mamoru Hosoda doesn’t just create mere animation. He creates prisms that refract old light into new shapes, new spectrums. Raw material gathered from literary classics (Beauty & The Beast for Belle), anime staples (Digimon for Our War Game!, One Piece for Baron Omatsuri And The Secret Island), even his own work (Our War Game! for Summer Wars), reshaped into modern art that holds true to the source’s core ideas while conveying meaningful communication between past and present.
Scarlet, his latest feature, is arguably his most ambitious work to date. Opening as a somewhat-stunted retelling of Hamlet, with the pink-haired princess Scarlet in place of the infamous Danish prince and initially failing to avenge her father, the bulk of the story takes place in the Otherworld, a wasteland purgatory where time, space, and mortality all fold in on themselves.
A mighty dragon, pierced by a thousand weapons and wreathed in storm clouds, soars over the undead sands. A grand army formed by Claudio seeks the door that leads to the fabled Infinite Land. And Scarlet, still determined to fulfil her vengeance oath, readies her sword to bring a death beyond death.
The premise is as much connected to the medieval court politics of the Shakespearean original as it is to the operatic grandeur of Tolkienesque high fantasy (along with some possible dashes of Kill Bill in its recurring flashbacks to those who set our lethal heroine on her path), and it all looks phenomenal. Even working outside of the rural and/or cyberspace locales that they’re accustomed to, Hosoda and his Studio Chizu construct vistas that are vibrant, expansive, and so well-rendered in CG as to be eerily similar to live-action. To say nothing of how well the characters turn out, creating a stunning fluidity to every movement from energetic combat to tempered dance steps, and expressive faces that stand out not just from the more simplistic visages of Hosoda’s previous work, but from the anime standard altogether.
As the frame follows brave Scarlet and present-day paramedic Hijiri in this timeless realm, Hosoda’s scripting dives deep into the vengeance that connects this retelling with its original… and actively interrogates it. Using the Otherworld’s removal from mortal time to show multiple generations of lost souls inhabiting the same space, like with sword-wielding bandits escaping a desert caravan raid only to be cut down by muskets, vengeance as a concept is extrapolated into all forms of interpersonal conflict, centred on the idea of what it means to live solely to spite another. Scarlet’s own cycle of violence becomes part of a much larger whorl that encompasses all of humanity.
It builds on the thematic optics of Hamlet to show how the priorities of leaders can affect those under their rule, and even links with The Lion King in its depiction of unjust rule as going against the laws of nature itself. In turn, Scarlet’s eye-wateringly personal quest for compassion and forgiveness becomes a universal fable that stretches across time and space. Human nature abhors a vacuum, but to remove something as toxic as spite, something must take its place. Not just for peace in the now, but peace for all time.
Scarlet is a dazzling fantasy epic with visuals, music, and pathos sharpened to a keen edge. Mamoru Hosoda’s retelling of a Shakespearean classic not only thoughtfully recontextualises the Bard’s more pointed political notions, but also bolsters the writer/director’s own empathetic cinematic vision and his championing of collective progress. It can stand proudly alongside just about any other Hamlet adaptation for how entertainingly it delivers the text (the himbo reimagining of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is genuinely hilarious), but its marvellous visuals and all-encompassing thematic scope give it an emotive power that stands out.
