Wars of Scarlet

2025 was a great year for cinema, but not particularly strong for animation. Among the Academy Awards’ selections for Best Animated Feature were Pixar’s disappointing Elio, the overwrought commercial that was KPop Demon Hunters, and the entertaining, if forgettable kid-centric international titles Arco and Little Amélie or the Character of Rain. It’s a rare twist that Zootopia 2, which is now one of the 10 highest-grossing films ever made, is the most substantial of the nominees thanks to its surprisingly nuanced perspective on gentrification. Scarlet, the new fantasy action epic from Japanese animator Mamoru Hosoda, was written off entirely. Beyond the film’s graphic violence, which is far more gruesome than what’s usually seen in a PG-13, Scarlet’s aim is to recontextualize aspects of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. As seen as recently as Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet, an analysis of a masterpiece often resembles a freshman English essay.

Hamlet is a story that most filmmakers have some hesitation approaching, but this isn’t the first time that Hosoda has taken inspiration from an iconic story. 2021’s Belle was a musical adaptation of Beauty and the Beast that drew from the original French fairy tale, yet retained awareness of Walt Disney’s 1991 animated film. Scarlet is a more ambitious undertaking; the film’s faithful to the broad story beats of Shakespeare’s five acts, but has much more customization on Hosoda’s part. Instead of a young prince, the protagonist of Scarlet is the titular medieval princess Scarlet (voiced by Mana Ashida), who has sworn vengeance on her uncle Claudius (Koji Yakusho) for stealing the throne from her father, King Hamlet (Masachika Ichimura). The palace intrigue of Hamlet is reduced in favor of stylized action sequences that begin as soon as Scarlet is on the run, determined to raise an army that could usurp Claudius.

The film’s characterization of the “warrior princess” isn’t tied exclusively to Hamlet. Medieval fantasy stories are drawn from the history that has been written by victors, and Scarlet’s determined to be remembered for her act of defiance. Her initial motivation is to restore the reputation of her father because Claudius poisoned the popular king’s legacy by spreading rumors of a conspiracy with a neighboring kingdom. However, this drive to reclaim her homeland that Scarlet has felt is revealed as the only thing the young princess has held on to in lieu of coping with her grief. In her eyes, death is the worst fate someone can experience because it’s when they cease to create memories.

It’s within this speculative examination of the afterlife that Hosoda has saved his greatest deviation from the play. The international mission that Hamlet embarked on in the fourth act of Shakespeare’s text is reconfigured as Scarlet’s journey through a desert filled with various figures stolen from history and mythology, obliquely referred to as “the Otherlands.” It’s within what’s a literal and emotional wasteland that Scarlet’s confronted by a man from the future, Hijiri (Masaki Okada), who’s flummoxed by her obsession with revenge. The mechanics of time-travel aren’t something that Hosoda is interested in explaining, but the intention is to include a modern perspective that has understood Scarlet’s story as a tragedy.

Hosoda’s intent isn’t to refute anything that Shakespeare wrote. Instead, Scarlet has pondered whether a quest of vengeance can ever end in peace, even if it’s justified. Although Scarlet does add subtext to the supporting characters, there’s nothing that would differentiate Claudius from any other ruthless villain; he’s content to sacrifice his nation’s sanctity and rip apart his family for the sake of personal glory. That may not make him a candidate for forgiveness, but for Scarlet to stage his execution would send the wrong takeaways to the people that she was once poised to represent.

The commentary of Scarlet is occasionally hijacked by Hosoda’s intention to make a sweeping adventure, which has all the pricklier details of Shakespeare, and a little more. In addition to the ghosts, knights in armor, and bloody sieges within Hamlet, Scarlet includes fire-breathing dragons, zombified warriors, and a means to time-travel to contemporary Japan through pop music. Given that most of these more extravagant components are derived from the wasteland in which Scarlet and Hijiri meet, and could be taken as metaphorical, there’s reason to believe that Hosoda has a deeper reason for the haphazard approach to genre. There’s also a lot of extraneous stylization in Scarlet that’s inserted because Hosoda thought it would look cool; tales of sacrifice and retribution shouldn’t be invested in populist spectacle.

It’s once Scarlet is forced to stage a new ending that the film is weakest. The kineticism of the film’s animation, which fused both 2D and 3D elements in a manner similar to Sony’s animated Spider-Verse films, is peeled back for the sake of a more primal conflict between Scarlet and her uncle. Hosoda’s points are well-taken, but his literary delineation is a blow to the film’s pacing. After the clever ways in which Scarlet merged classic drama with the hallmarks of contemporary anime, the film’s conclusion is anti-climactic.

It’s hard to know who the intended audience for Scarlet was, which may be an attribute. The highest-grossing popular anime films of 2025 were extensions of established shows that existed to satisfy fans that were already engaged, whereas Scarlet has built an entire world and visual language of its own.