Anime columnist Andrew Osmond has things to say about the new afterlife fantasy by the director of ‘Belle,’ ‘Mirai,’ and ‘The Girl Who Leapt Through Time.’
The animated film Scarlet opens in American IMAX cinemas today, followed by other cinemas next week. (The film’s website is here.) I saw it at an early London screening; its main British opening was meant to be today too, but that’s been postponed. Scarlet’s a fantasy, about a girl whose fury isn’t quenched when she finds herself in the realm of the dead. Scarlet was a princess in life, who’s sworn to find the uncle who slew her and her father. He was the king of Denmark, by the way.
Yet before Scarlet can take on her malefic uncle Claudius, she meets a different man. A stranger from another time and place: Hijiri, a male nurse from (our) present-day Japan. As gentle as Scarlet is murderous, he’s determined to do no harm in a barbarous world, for this land of the dead is a lawless desert. Like the living world, there are people here, but nothing protects the weak and unarmed from bandits who raid their nomadic groups and cut them down. There are also Claudius’ henchmen, sent to dispatch Scarlet a second time – and in this world, death is final.
So, this is an isekai Hamlet. The Hamlet links are hardly subtle once names like Denmark, Claudio and Gertrude have dropped. As for Scarlet herself, female Hamlets go back more than a century, even in cinema. For anyone wondering what isekai is, anime fans know it’s one of the medium’s most common genres of the last 15 years. In isekai stories, characters from “our” world find themselves in fantasy settings, often through death and resurrection. Isekai are to anime what slashers are to horror films. They’re very common, full of formula and usually bad, though with masterworks from time to time.
I wrote more on isekai in a column last year. One thing I noted then was that the genre’s more upmarket titles, the films especially, often evoked literary traditions, as if they wanted to be literature too. (The huge-headed witch Yubaba in Spirited Away evokes the Duchess in Alice in Wonderland.) Perhaps the creators just love great books, though a mischievous pundit might point out it’s a good way to separate your serious animated work from mere cartoons. Scarlet’s Hamlet namedrops could be an extreme case – what’s more literary than Shakespeare?
Not for anime fans?
Indeed, Scarlet’s unlike most cartoons. Moreover, despite its anime-ish scenario, I’d suggest you may like it more if you don’t think of it as anime. Its oddness and idiosyncrasies reminded me of old European animated films, like Fantastic Planet (1973) and Time Masters (1982), both by René Laloux. It’s a vision and a journey, more than it is a film with a satisfying story or characters.
If that sounds like a soft-pedalling refusal to slam a bad film, let me say there are loads of things wrong with Scarlet, starting with characters who are either placeholders or utterly one note. Scarlet is bitter and angry, Hijiri kind and gentle, Claudius is a monster… and there’s little more to any of them, save a scene of Claudius’ maybe-repentance that’s cleverly reworked from Shakespeare. Scarlet’s backstory in the opening minutes has little room for character as it speedruns through its alternate version of Hamlet. What we learn of Hijiri’s background amounts to “He’s from modern Japan.”
Scarlet is also almost totally lacking in humor, even the observational kind that’s so important in “grim” Ghiblis like Grave of the Fireflies or Princess Mononoke. Coupled with the dearth of dimensional characters, Scarlet is often boring, especially in its middle stretch. Even the climax, which is good, is compromised by a coda with a sea of faces which may well provoke audience laughter, and not laughter with the film.
Then there’s the way Scarlet looks. It’s a hybrid, with early scenes – Scarlet’s backstory - in traditional 2D, but most of the film is in a form of CG that won’t endear anime fans. On the forums I frequent, readers rejected Scarlet’s look in early trailers with the venom they usually save for AI. Scarlet’s motion is blunt and impersonal. It doesn’t have the combo of forceful action and subtle complexity that you find in classy anime. Even in one of Scarlet’s most impressive moments, when the heroine dispatches foes with lightning blows and kicks, it feels soulless next to San’s fight moves in Princess Mononoke.
So, given all this, why did I find Scarlet worthwhile?
Partly it’s because, for all the tedium of Scarlet’s film-long purgatory, her journey took me interesting places. There’s a scene with still water and dense vegetation, and another with a huge celebratory dance, the latter in the frolicsome spirit of one of my favorite anime films, Masaaki Yuasa’s Mind Game (2004). Both scenes made me smile, and repaid my journey to them. Even Scarlet’s last scene has a (Terry) Gilliamesque derangement that’s treasurable. The dogged self-seriousness of the rest of Scarlet’s journey is easily mocked, but I liked its sustained, one-track vision, in the spirit of the Laloux films I mentioned. The film’s Cinemascope ratio (2.35:1) makes Scarlet’s and Hijiri’s desert trek feel big.
As for the movement, I accepted it. The characters reminded me of paper cut-outs, with some of the physicality (though not the tactility) of Lotte Reiniger’s figures in The Adventures of Prince Achmed a century back. They’re “un-anime,” but so are some of the best Japanese animation, from the woozily rotoscoped Flowers of Evil to the largely unanimated Belladonna of Sadness. But to repeat, Scarlet denies the pleasures fans want from anime. Expect YouTube videos with titles like “Scarlet Looks TERRIBLE And Here’s Why.”
It may be the visuals, more than anything else, which explains the film’s poor, perhaps catastrophic opening in Japan. Scarlet opened in nearly 400 cinemas in November, but after a week in third place, it crashed out of the charts. That it opened so widely reflects the status of Scarlet’s director, who I’ve avoided discussing till now: Mamoru Hosoda. I’ve already suggested you may like Scarlet more if you don’t think of it as anime. You may like it even better if you don’t think of it as a Hosoda film.
Not for Hosoda fans?
Mamaru Hosoda, if you don’t know him, has been prominent in anime since the release of his film The Girl Who Leapt Through Time in 2006. It wasn’t his first feature – he’d made a One Piece film the year before – but it’s widely counted as his “beginning.” Girl and its successor Summer Wars (2009) were animated by the Madhouse studio, but when Hosoda founded his own Studio Chizu in 2011, its logo was his leaping heroine.
All Hosoda’s films between One Piece and Scarlet are set largely or wholly in modern Japan, though their action sloshes into other worlds. Scarlet breaks with that approach, being almost all in the desert of the dead or in the quasi-historical Denmark, with Japan reduced to glimpses. Hosoda’s past films depicted strong and interesting relationships within families, though Hosoda told me his deeper interest was in children growing up. There’s a version of that theme in Scarlet, but without a family context it feels very different, with the film’s father-daughter moments cut off fast.
Hosoda had used 2D/3D hybrid styles back in his 2009 film Summer Wars (above), but its scenes of character drama were mostly in 2D. Even 12 years on, in his 2021 Belle, the CG figures had limited screentime and looked closer to conventional anime than Scarlet’s characters. Speaking to Variety, Hosoda suggested Scarlet was aimed at an international audience who had the “literacy to understand the nuance” of multiple animation styles. We’ll know if that was wise soon.
There are some continuities between Scarlet and Hosoda’s past films, particularly Belle (above). Scarlet herself resembles Belle’s title heroine, though the characters otherwise aren’t alike. It’s no surprise; Scarlet and Belle shared a character designer, former Disney animator Jin Kim. There’s an echo of Belle in Scarlet’s suggestion of a character finding “another you,” of being freed from a self’s constrictions. Scarlet’s hysterical rage at her father’s killing recalls the heroine’s breakdown in Belle when her mum died – though that depiction was more effective.
Scarlet’s Hamlet references are comparable to how Belle paraphrased a newer classic - Disney’s 1992 Beauty and the Beast - down to its ballroom dance scene, which I discussed here. Then there are deeper cuts. One of Scarlet’s first scenes has the heroine hearing taunts from bits of armor in the sand; it recalls a scarily brilliant moment in Hosoda’s 2018 film Mirai where a child enters a hellish station and is taunted by trains. The gliding dragons which occasionally intervene in Scarlet’s world are sinister analogs of the benign whales circling the virtual world in Summer Wars, named John and Yoko.
Yet Scarlet is shockingly different from Hosoda’s other films. Above all, it’s the minimalist treatment of the characters, the leads’ reduction to single emotions. Meanwhile, everyone who isn’t Scarlet, Hijiri or Claudius is a placeholder who’s either nameless or has a name from Hamlet without a pretense of its substance. Hosoda has made popular films too long for this to be anything other than a contrarian choice. Scarlet may be marketed as mainstream, but its approach to character is more like Mamoru Oshii’s 1985 Angel’s Egg, one of the most notoriously cryptic anime ever made.
Tales from Earthsea and Satoko Okudera
As mentioned, Hosoda’s breakout was The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, which opened in Japan in July 2006. As it happened, that was the same month as Studio Ghibli’s Tales from Earthsea, directed by Goro Miyazaki. Earthsea earned far more, but it was trashed by many critics, while Girl Who Leapt was praised as being a sleeper hit and a vastly better film.
Yet 20 years on, Scarlet feels very reminiscent of Earthsea. Both are humorless fantasies showing the purgatorial journeys of young protagonists steeped in hate, for themselves or others, while kind men show them the way. I’m in the minority who defends Tales from Easrthsea, but it damaged Ghibli’s popular reputation. Scarlet may do the same for Hosoda, in Japan at least. I don’t see anyone calling Scarlet “Hosoda’s Earthsea” in English, but I’d be amazed if the tag’s not circulating in Japan.
Another irony: Scarlet opened in Japan last November, making the domestic top 10 for one week. A few places below it was a live-action film called Kokuho, but that was on its 25th week in the charts. A three-hour epic about two kabuki stage actors, Kokuho wasn’t just the top Japanese film of the year, but the most successful live-action Japanese film ever. (Measured against anime blockbusters, it’s just behind Princess Mononoke and One Piece Film: Red.) Acquired by GKIDS, it’s in some US cinemas now.
The irony is that Kokuho – based on a huge novel – was scripted by a writer called Satoko Okudera, whose name is known to Hosoda fans. As I mentioned recently when discussing anime writers, Okudera wrote on three of Hosoda’s features – The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, Summer Wars and 2012’s Wolf Children, trailer below. (Hosoda has “Original Story” credits on Summer Wars and Wolf Children, plus a script co-credit on the latter).
Many fans argue that these three films aren’t just Hosoda’s best, but that Hosoda depended on Okudera for their success and his films have declined since he and Okudera parted. (Hosoda has sole writing credits on all his later films, included Scarlet.) This is almost common wisdom in anime fandom now, and honestly, it’s plausible. The Girl Who Leapt, Summer Wars and Wolf Children are all immensely satisfying films. For myself, I think Hosoda’s next, 2015’s The Boy and the Beast, was almost as good, though it had a far more mixed reception from critics and fans.
With Hosoda’s next two films, Mirai and Belle, I found them unruly, haphazard in their plotting, but bursting with wonderful ideas and themes. Belle had gracelessly bumping sub-plots, but its payoff was magnificently empowering. Reviewing the Oscar-nominated Mirai (trailer below), I found it “admirable as a creative experiment by a popular director who’s demonstrably still restless” Though it might “struggle to find an audience beyond the director’s followers and fans of non-conformist animation,” I valued its free spirit, irreducible to star ratings.
What now for Hosoda?
If you do want reduction, I’d give Scarlet three out of five. It’s Hosoda’s worst film, and unless it does far better internationally than in Japan, it’ll be a costly flop. (According to Variety, it took much longer to make than any of Hosoda’s past films, with co-financing from Sony.) If so, Hosoda may well be pressed to retreat to something far safer next time, and perhaps take on a writing collaborator. If Okudera’s not available, there are other excellent anime writers, as I highlighted recently.
And yet, I still like Scarlet, and I like the fact of Scarlet even more. I’m glad films like it can still be made, films which are more than reviewer scorecards or markers of career rises and falls. There’s a joy in a film by someone driven to make, say, an isekai Hamlet with CG that feels like paper cut-outs. When it comes to a film like Scarlet, interesting is enough.
