Mamoru Hosoda’s ‘Scarlet,’ a Riff on ‘Hamlet,’ Takes Audiences to Another World

The past year has seen a glut of “Hamlet”- related movies — everything from Chloé Zhao’s possibly-based-on-a-true-story “Hamnet” to “Grand Theft Hamlet,” a documentary where William Shakespeare’s immortal play is staged within the video game “Grand Theft Auto.”

But the most audacious “Hamlet” riff of the year has got to be “Scarlet,” the latest film from Mamoru Hosoda, whose 2018 film “Mirai” was nominated for the Best Animated Feature Oscar.

“Scarlet” follows the title character, a medieval princess who seeks to avenge the death of her father. The problem is that Scarlet is also dead and in a hellish alternate dimension. (If you saw Hosoda’s last film, the “Beauty & the Beast”-ish “Belle,” you know how much he loves a fully realized alternate dimension.) The movie hinges on Scarlet’s quest for vengeance and whether she can free herself from its stranglehold on her.

Hosoda said that he began developing the concept for the film in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. “Just as it felt like we might be returning to some sense of normalcy, conflicts around the world started to happen,” he said. “That sudden shift from hope to fear made me realize it’s not over. I couldn’t stop thinking about the question: How do we break the cycle of revenge? When someone is hurt, how do we carry that pain? Is it truly possible to forgive? Every time I look at my 9-year-old daughter, I find myself asking: How will her generation live in such an unstable world? Can we still believe in the future?

“’Scarlet’ was born out of these questions. Rather than dramatize triumph or offer a feelgood ending, I wanted to explore the emotional complexity on the other side of revenge, such as the quieter moments of healing, the inner struggle to move forward. That quiet first step toward something better.”

As for his use of parallel universes, Hosoda said, “In my work, alternate worlds aren’t places of escape; they’re mirrors. They reflect our reality from a different angle. Even when a world looks purely fantastical, I always root it in something real that shows the dualities we live with: light and shadow, or public identity and private truth. What I call other worlds are metaphors for emotional or psychological landscapes.”

In “Scarlet,” that other world “isn’t the afterlife in the philosophical sense,” he said. “It’s a visual manifestation of grief and regret, of emotions too big for reality to contain. I wanted to turn that unseen emotional weight into something limitless and beautiful.”

To do so, Hosoda spent years developing a style that combines 2D hand-drawn animation with computer animation. “We wanted to merge the best of both worlds in a way that felt seamless,” he said. “We spent a great deal of time experimenting to find a visual language where the hand-drawn expressiveness of Japanese animation and the dimensionality of 3D computer graphics could coexist organically.”

One thing that the director focused on: dirt. “I wanted audiences to feel how desperately Scarlet was fighting to survive, not through dialogue but through the scuffs, bruises and worn clothing on her body,” he said. “In most animation, these details are just for realism. But in Scarlet, I wanted them to carry emotion. The dirt, the wrinkles, even the textures, these weren’t just details; they were expressions of character.”

This story first ran in the Awards Preview issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.

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