Another Other World
By Dan Schindel
New York Film Festival 2025:
Scarlet
Dir. Mamoru Hosoda, Japan, Sony Pictures Classics
Every Mamoru Hosoda film straddles multiple worlds. The leads in Digimon Adventure: Our War Game (2000), Summer Wars (2009), and Belle (2021) must solve their real-life problems by delving into immersive online metaverses. Wolf Children (2012) and The Boy and the Beast (2015) concern characters caught between mundane contemporary existence and concealed realms of folkloric beings. The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (2006) and Mirai (2018) ricochet between present, past, and future. In his latest animated feature, Scarlet, Hosoda imagines a fantastical “Otherworld,” where “life and death coexist,” and which acts as a crucible in which its denizens either evolve or cease to exist completely.
The title character, Scarlet (voiced by Mana Ashida), comes to Otherworld after living through a reworked adaptation of Hamlet. She takes the place of Shakespeare’s tormented prince, and much of the rest of the play’s cast is present, though sometimes significantly changed. Queen Gertrude (Yuki Saito) is here an accomplice to the murder of her husband by Claudius (Koji Yakusho), and Polonius (Kazuhiro Yamaji) is now an evil-minded and bloodthirsty warrior instead of a well-meaning fool. Rather than soliloquize whilst brooding or devising a play within a play as an elaborate ruse, Scarlet takes a decidedly more animesque approach to vengeance, spending years undergoing combat training while planning to challenge Claudius directly.
But then Scarlet is poisoned and finds herself in Otherworld, which changes her goal not at all. Claudius and his underlings are here as well, since this ersatz purgatory is outside of space and time and everyone to ever live has already arrived, even those who died after her. This includes people born long after Scarlet’s time, such as 21st-century Japanese nurse Hijiri (Masaki Okada), who becomes her traveling companion. Hijiri’s skills prove vital, since even in a land beyond death, it seems people can still die, dissolving irrevocably into nothingness. There is rumor, though, of a way to another, more heavenly afterlife. Claudius has amassed an army and positioned himself as the gatekeeper to that paradise, so Scarlet doggedly crosses Otherworld to confront him, with Hijiri begging her to give up on vengeance each step of the way.
Having a distaff Hamlet go to Purgatory to learn to cast aside useless hatred is an idea characteristic of Hosoda’s brand of storytelling. His parallel worlds are metaphors for life experiences that get people to change their ways of thinking. In Mirai, a young boy learns about the interiority of others through time-traveling visits with members of his family at different ages. In Belle, people who can better express themselves within the pseudonymity of the internet form relationships that help them escape real-world abuse.
In Scarlet, the subject matter is almost as heightened as its setting. Particularly in the modern world, revenge is far more common as a storytelling trope than an applicable issue in anyone’s life. The link between broadly defined “hatred” and social violence and war is complex and nebulous. This means the movie, like so many others warning against vengeance, can’t help but fall back on platitudes like “letting go of hatred” instead of saying something concrete. Hamlet is invoked as a familiar revenge-plot classic, but that premise is mere window dressing, discarded once things move to Otherworld. The characters from the play bear little resemblance to how they are written in it here, and are mostly marginal anyway, leaving the movie more like fanfiction than a seriously considered retelling.
The film does locate some resonance in its message about forgiveness through the interplay between Scarlet and Hijiri. It posits that by dedicating herself to peace, Scarlet can change the future and prevent the eventual violent death that brought Hijiri to Otherworld. It’s a tangible representation of the responsibility that we who live now owe to those who come after us. But their relationship is ultimately marginal against the backdrop of a generically “epic” clash of two massive armies. And at the end—skip the rest of this paragraph if you’re spoiler-averse—the story cheats by doing in Claudius with a cosmic dose of karma. If choosing to forgive (as her late father pleaded) meant Scarlet must live alongside the one who’d wronged her, that’d be more challenging, and truer to how real people who suffer injustice often have to simply endure it.
More disappointing than Scarlet’s clichéd ideas about hate and revenge is how generic its cast is, since Hosoda’s films are usually populated with distinct, multifaceted characters, defined by their single-purpose roles in the story. Part of this is a function of the setting, which strips people down to pure survival mode. But the best films about survival demonstrate how such circumstances can also bring out people’s humanity. There are glimmers of this in Scarlet, like a lovely scene in which people from different eras show off their culturally and temporally specific treasures, culminating in Hijiri awkwardly trying to dance with a Hawaiian woman. This is also the sequence that best uses the idea of bringing together people from every time and place, which is otherwise mostly wasted.
Hosoda is one of the most visually experimental high-profile animation directors working in Japan today, often delineating his parallel worlds through their looks. Think of the Superflat-influenced design of the metaverse in Summer Wars, or how the real world is traditionally animated and the internet world has a cel-shaded 3D look in Belle. Scarlet adopts a similar conceit to the latter film. The world of the living looks like traditional animation, while Otherworld is three-dimensional. This impressively recalls how The Wizard of Oz demarcates dreary reality from vivid dreaming via color, and how A Matter of Life and Death did the opposite, using the starkness of black-and-white to underline the afterlife’s finality. But Otherworld, being an endless expanse of wasteland and desert, leaves the animators with limited blocking options. There are lots of medium shots of people conversing against these vistas; despite the animation style, this leaves a good deal of the movie looking flat.
Despite marked progression in technology and technique over the years, the cel-shaded anime look still comes with an unmistakable stiffness, a stuttering herky-jerkiness to character movement that consistently distracts. It makes sense that Hosoda pursued this animation method. He was extremely skilled at lending depth to animated action even before computers made that task much easier, and the action scenes in Scarlet feel electric in his hands, with the “camera” pirouetting around moving bodies in dynamic, sometimes impossible ways, ducking under arms our fully circling around swordfighters at high speeds.
But for once, Hosoda’s visual prowess isn’t in service of something truly personal and heartfelt. He has spoken movingly about how specific life experiences have inspired his stories—how meeting his wife’s family inspired Summer Wars, how his and others’ experiences as parents became Wolf Children and Mirai. Meanwhile, he said Scarlet was inspired by “the geopolitical state of the world”—a statement whose vagueness suits the film.