Scarlet

After her father, the king, is murdered by his brother Claudius, the Danish princess Scarlet is poisoned and sent to an Otherworld between life and death. There, she goes on a bloody quest for revenge with the help of Hijiri, a medic from the future. 

Three years after reimagining Beauty and the Beast as an anime in Belle, director Hosoda Mamoru turns the words of Shakespeare’s Hamlet into visually striking action and colours. Genderbending the protagonist, who becomes the titular Scarlet, the animator puts the ghosts of the Bard’s text in dialogue with Japanese mythology, in which the living and the dead are believed to be able to communicate, transporting the story into an Otherworld where life and death coexist. 

In this purgatory of sorts, a bloodthirsty princess from 16th-century Denmark tries to avenge her father’s death alongside a 21st-century pacifist medic. Hosoda structures Scarlet around these dualities – life and death, past and future, vengeance and forgiveness, violence and compassion, heaven and hell – embodied by the two characters and the in-between world they inhabit. His reinterpretation gains life with stunning action sequences, an unexpected musical number, and a revised third act that dares to rewrite Shakespeare to comment on current world-politics, its corrupt, authoritarian leaders, and the immigrants and refugees lying in wait for an elusive promised land.

– Daniel Oliveira

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