REVIEW: SCARLET

There isn't a story on the books that can't somehow trace its genealogy to the works of William Shakespeare. Such is the nature of inspiration and archetype.

But the latest film from anime auteur, Mamoru Hosoda, is almost an adaptation of, rather than a homage to, Shakespeare's Hamlet, carrying over character names and even a few iconic lines. Yet it's not what Scarlet borrows from Shakespeare that gives the story its weight, but what it adds--and I'm not just talking about the giant thunder dragon in the sky.

The Prince of Denmark in this story is reimagined as Princess Scarlet. This film sees her failing in her quest to avenge her father and being doomed to wander in some sort of desolate afterlife. Her only consolation is the idea that she might find her treacherous uncle somewhere in this wasteland and see her vengeance fulfilled in this world. But her quest sees her crossing paths with someone else, a medic from a future time named Hijiri. Though his world also knows violence and hurt, his mission in death, as it was in life, is to heal and restore. She can't see what someone like him could teach someone like her, but if she could open her eyes to a new way of seeing the world, then even the realm of the dead could give her a new way of living.

This film's animation blends more traditional anime technique with contemporary digital tools, and I found the overall result mixed. This format really helped bring to life the landscapes or the larger set pieces, like the aforementioned thunder dragon, but the character animation somehow wound up more fluid and more rigid. It may take another few turns in the washing machine for the effect to really make the most of itself. Though, the traditionalist in me would also be fine if those developments just confined themselves to the backdrop--and left the character animation alone.

And the audience's experience makes the most out of the liberation afforded by animated canvas. This story takes place in a dreamlike afterlife where it feels like almost anything goes. This is, for example, a film where our protagonist can listen to her friend sing a campfire song and she'll have an Alice in Wonderland experience where she'll imagine falling through the fire until she imagines herself at a street party dancing in what I assume is contemporary Tokyo.

And the swiftness with which this stage transforms is where I imagine this movie is going to lose some viewers. The walls and ceiling are barely solid in this space. But I myself did not feel like this narratively liquidity pushed me out of my comfort zone anymore than something like Spirited Away: it's anime, folks--know the territory.

Scarlet's conviction to avenge her father turns this princess into a battle maiden who feels far outside what we've seen from Hosoda's larger filmography. (I'll admit I'm not as familiar with Digimon, but I'll take a gamble here.) And perhaps it was Hosoda's intention to reflect her state of mind in the frantic pacing of some of the earlier scenes where, like our protagonist, we feel almost dehydrated with bloodlust.

While this interplay winds up being fairly one-note in the character dialogue, the film's real discussion ripples out a little wider than all that. Scarlet wonders at one point that if she had not been born into a time or a world of war, would darkness have consumed her heart? And would the time that Hijiri knows be flushed with this same violence? Where did the world give itself over to hatred? Does it matter? And does a person really have it in them to step off that trajectory?

The film dares to imagine that Scarlet can cleanse her bloodlust in the afterlife and somehow cure her ancient world of all the hate and wars that will follow in the centuries to come. And in that fashion, it allows the viewer to imagine that cleansing their hate here in the thralls of storytelling can heal the world offscreen of its rot as well.

And this is also where the Hamlet connection makes the story feel like more than just a high-concept book report. This pilgrimage to the original story of vengeance and what it means to be human has us imagine that we can tap into that most elemental part of the collective human psyche, that we can identify that base genome which makes us vengeful creatures who are only capable of afflicting more destruction into the world, and actually do better when the lights come back on and we return to the land of the living.

This winds up being one of the bolder promises that I've seen a film make recently. It possibly this same tenacity that made The Academy get cold feet when reviewing Wicked: For Good. (And, no, I'm not letting that go.) Some will say a film's business is to observe or reflect the mess, but never imagine a way out of it. Yet when it comes to this artform and its capacity to show us a better world, what can we say but, "To thine own self, be true."

--The Professor

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