Director – Mamoru Hosoda – 2025 – Japan – Cert. 15 – 111m
****
Trapped in the Otherworld, a limbo preceding the afterlife, Princess Scarlet seeks revenge on her uncle who has killed her father the King – anime reimagining of Hamlet is out in UK cinemas on Friday, March 13th
Walking across a vast desert and dying of thirst, a redhead recalls how she came to be there. Those were happier times in sixteenth century Denmark, when Scarlet (voice: Mana Ashida from Lonely Castle in the Mirror, Keiichi Hara, 2022; The House of the Lost on the Cape, Shinya Kawatsura, 2021; Poupelle of Chimney Town, Yusuke Hirota, 2020; Pacific Rim, Guillermo del Toro, 2013) – for it is she – spent time with her father King Amleth (voice: Masachika Ichimura from Giovanni’s Island, 2014), drawing his portrait outdoors. Amleth always had the best interests of his people at heart.
Yet there was always a dark foreboding in the background – Scarlet’s severe mother Gertrude (voice: Yuki Saito from The Third Murder, Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2017) who ripped up her drawing, her power-hungry, warmongering Uncle Claudius (voice: Koji Yakusho from Perfect Days, Wim Wenders, 2023; Belle, Mamoru Hosoda, 2021, The Third Murder; Cure, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 1997; Shall We Dance, Masayuki Suo, 1996) with his greedy eyes on the throne. When her uncle unexpectedly came up with a pretext to have her father executed, Scarlet, rushing down the palace steps, was too late to catch his last words.
Some time later, Scarlet consumed a drink that her uncle had poisoned. Apparently, we will learn in due course, he too had drunk some of the same drink. Both now find themselves in the Otherworld, which is where everyone goes when they die rather than the widely-believed options of Heaven or Hell. It’s a hostile environment, sparsely populated, where lone warriors and gangs of bandits roam, ready to attack the unwary. A gigantic dragon which shoots lightning bolts rather than fire from its mouth periodically appears in the sky.
Scarlet equips herself with armour and weaponry from the corpses of fallen knights along her route. After fighting off attackers, including a knight in rusted orange armour, she comes across Hijiri (voice: Masaki Okada from Drive My Car, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, 2021; Villain, Lee Sang-il, 2010, Confessions, Tetsuya Nakashima, 2010), a present day paramedic who, not having died, doesn’t understand why he’s there. Where Scarlet wields a nifty blade, having rapidly schooled herself in swordsmanship following her father’s execution, Hijiri administers first aid and healing remedies from his backpack. When the pair come across a peaceful, wandering tribe, he gains their trust by administering remedies to cure their various ailments.
Claudius, who somehow has a castle in the Otherworld, sends out trusted men Polonius (voice: Kazuhiro Yamaji) and Laertes (voice: Tokio Emoto from Perfect Days) to kill the Princess.
Both Claudius and the Princess desire to pass through the Otherworld by climbing the Starlight Staircase to the Infinite Land beyond. The problem is finding the staircase; when Scarlet, Hijiri and companions reach the summit or the Otherworld’s highest mountain range, where the staircase is supposed to start, rather than finding the staircase, they come under attack by Polonius and Laertes.
These Shakespearian characters – which also include Voltemand (voice: Kotaro Yoshida from Lupin III the First, Takashi Yamazaki, 2019; The Third Murder), Rosencrantz (voice: Mumetaka Aoki from Godzilla Minus One, Takashi Yamazaki, 2023; True Mothers, Naomi Kawase, 2020; It Comes, Tetsuya Nakashima, 2020; Silence, Martin Scorsese, 2016; Battle Royale II: Requiem, Kinji Fukasaku, Kenta Fukasaku, 2003) and Guildenstern (voice: Shota Sometani from Suzume, Makoto Shinkai, 2022; Belle; Detective Chinatown 3, Chen Sicheng, 2021; First Love, Takashi Miike, 2019; To the Ends of the Earth, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2019; Foreboding, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2017; Himizu, Sion Sono, 2011; Ping Pong, Fumihiko Sori, 2002) – suggest a hackneyed attempt at reimagining Hamlet. Shakespeare adaptations have been attempted far more successfully in Japanese cinema by Akira Kurosawa, who turned MacBeth and King Lear into Samurai epics Throne of Blood (1957) and Ran (1985).
Hosoda attempts something similar, turning Hamlet into an anime fantasy set between this world and the afterlife. Scarlet is Hamlet, although changing Shakespeare’s crown prince of Denmark into the cliché of a redheaded anime warrior woman somehow robs the character of the necessary gravitas. One could argue that its because Hosoda doesn’t use Shakespeare’s dialogue, but if that were the reason, the Kurosawa Shakespeares wouldn’t work as well as they do.
A comparison with the Western-produced anime The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim (Kenji Kamiyama, 2024) is instructive. That film better adapts its source material (one of the appendices in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings), but certain elements of the anime production values let it down. Scarlet’s problem is the reverse; if Hosoda’s take on Hamlet isn’t entirely successful, he has found a way of making all the visual elements that didn’t quite work in Rohirrim come together into an integrated whole, which is a remarkable achievement.
Yet watch Scarlet beside Throne of Blood or Ran – or, for that matter, the magnificently mythic, recently released, non-Shakespearean, non-Jpaanese, live action quest Sirat (Óliver Laxe, 2025) – and it comes nowhere near the same league. You might describe Scarlet as cod-Shakespeare. Which is strange, because the latent power of Hosoda’s extraordinary Belle suggests that, if anyone could successfully pull off adapting Shakespeare into an anime feature, Hosoda would be the man.
Scarlet is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, March 13th.
Trailer: