Scarlet

Scarlet is the new animated feature from Mamoru Hosoda, the director behind The Girl Who Leapt Through Time and Belle, who this time takes on Shakespeare's Hamlet filtered through a vividly colorful fantasy world and Studio Chizu's signature visual style. The protagonist is Scarlet, a princess who failed to avenge her father Amleth's murder at the hands of her uncle Claudius, and who as a result wakes up in the Land of the Dead, a realm on the border between life and death where, unless she completes her mission and reaches the so-called Endless Place, she is doomed to fade into nothingness. Wounded and struggling, Scarlet encounters an idealistic young man from the world of the living, who not only helps her heal but shows her the possibility of a future free of bitterness and vengeance, a plot that partially inverts the bleak premises of the Shakespearean tragedy to open it up to a more hopeful register.

True to the studio's tradition, the film pairs visual spectacle with emotional introspection, exploring themes of identity and redemption in a way that speaks to both adult and younger audiences. Critical reception has been cooler than for Hosoda's previous work, some observers praised the ambition of reworking an absolute classic of Western literature through the tools of fantasy animation, while others found the writing thin, the secondary characters underdeveloped, and the pacing uneven, unable to fully hold up against either its Shakespearean source or Hosoda's own earlier achievements. It remains an ambitious project within the director's body of work, one that has divided audiences and critics more than his recent films, and it has recently returned to attention after several outlets named it among the best animated films of the year's first half, a recognition that renewed interest in the title months after its release.