There’s no “Alas, poor Yorick,” and no “to be or not to be” monologue, but Mamoru Hosoda’s “Scarlet” is still undoubtedly “Hamlet” — that is, a genderbent fantasy anime version of “Hamlet.”
“Scarlet” is peppered with a few exceptional moments of inspiration, but ends up caught in an awkward push-pull between Shakespeare’s text and the fantastical spaces where Hosoda’s vision extends. The Sony Pictures Classics film, which was an official selection at last year’s Venice and Toronto international film festivals, opens with a release across North America
on Friday.
The movie starts with — surprise — the death of its main character. Scarlet, a princess from 16th-century Denmark, lies bloodied in a white dress, and is being pulled down into murky depths by corpse hands. We’re quickly caught up to how we got here, beginning with a familiar betrayal by Scarlet’s Uncle Claudius. In a scheme to usurp the kingdom of her father, Amleth (an anagram, get it?), Claudius had his brother executed. Scarlet grows up determined to avenge his death, but, in this version, her plan to claim her rightful throne is cut short when Claudius poisons her. She lands in a limbo called the Otherworld, a place beyond time and between life and death. There, she discovers that Claudius has also died and is in the Otherworld seeking passage to a kind of heaven called the Infinite Land. Turns out he’s also got a battalion of dead soldiers armed with everything from swords and spears to powder pistols. So Scarlet decides to continue her revenge mission before Claudius can find eternal peace. As she treks across the Otherworld, encountering caravans of travelers, bandits and Claudius’s lackeys, she reluctantly joins up with a man named Hijiri, a modern-day paramedic who teaches Scarlet to consider peace rather than war.
“Is she a princess or a wild animal?” one character balks, watching Scarlet gladiator her way through a fight. This pink-haired Danish princess is markedly fiercer and more resolute than her male counterpart, handily taking down soldiers with weapons, grappling and hand-to-hand combat.
But the rest of Hosoda’s adjustments to “Hamlet” are less thrilling. The bard’s oh-so-eloquent language is nixed, with a few cheeky exceptions, when some classic lines are awkwardly slotted into fresh, often silly, contexts. (“Get thee to a monastery!” Scarlet says to Hijiri upon meeting him, for some reason.) And the characters themselves are flattened, the dynamics between them simplified. Claudius is relentlessly arch, as is Queen Gertrude, who is more like the scowling evil stepmother from a fairy tale than a queen caught in an impossible conflict.
Scarlet’s character arc is similarly disappointing. At first it seems she’s some composite of Hamlet and Ophelia: She shares Hamlet’s status and mission but her early death, her gender swap and even the floral appliqués on her dress as she dies all recall Ophelia. But she doesn’t share Hamlet’s wit, and has no time for existential musings. Instead, Hijiri is the vehicle for those big questions, but his character’s presence undermines Scarlet as a strong, independent female figure; instead of allowing this protagonist to stand and fight on her own, “Scarlet” opts for a love interest solely meant to soften her.
There’s also an unevenness to the animation, which is sometimes awe-inspiring and in other instances looks too artificial. The backgrounds are stunning, so detailed that you can get lost in the intricate patterns of the tapestries in Scarlet’s castle, or in the moldings and markings of the wooden wall panels. And there’s a beautiful expansiveness to the Otherworld scenes — blustering skies and roiling clouds sail above a desert that seems to stretch infinitely in every direction, a trail of footprints extending far behind Scarlet and Hijiri as they make their way forward. The occasional appearance of a monstrous dragon with weapons protruding from its hide punctuates the film’s action and provides the most cinematically interesting element of the movie.
But the film’s heavy reliance on computer generated animation does a disservice to the design of the characters, whose expressions look too obviously fabricated. Hosoda, whose previous films include “Belle” and “Mirai,” also struggles to maintain a steady sense of pacing in directing some larger action sequences. One massive character-heavy “Return of the King”-style battle scene cuts to lone shots of Scarlet that suddenly feel out of context with the larger action.
In one scene later in the film, Scarlet has a vision of a different world — a contemporary one in which she’s not the princess bent on revenge but a normal girl singing and dancing about love. It’s giving “La La Land,” and the film never recovers from the abrupt hop and shimmy into the world of camp. Because for a movie bold enough to reinvent a classic, “Scarlet” isn’t bold enough to offer more than a pat, toothless ending about the futility of war. “Scarlet” curiously manages to be both too close to “Hamlet,” and not close enough, leaving this vengeance story in its own no man’s land.
Scarlet Rated PG-13 for post-mortem battles in the afterlife. Running time 1 hour 51 minutes. In theaters.
Maya Phillips is an arts and culture critic for The Times.
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