{"id":536965,"date":"2026-03-13T03:52:13","date_gmt":"2026-03-13T03:52:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/536965\/"},"modified":"2026-03-13T03:52:13","modified_gmt":"2026-03-13T03:52:13","slug":"scarlet-review-it-all-comes-off-as-trite","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/536965\/","title":{"rendered":"Scarlet review \u2014 ‘It\u00a0all\u00a0comes off as\u00a0trite’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Denmark, 16th century. Princess Scarlet (Mana Ashida) seeks revenge for the murder of her father, King Amleth (Masachika Ichimura), by her uncle Claudius (K\u014dji Yakusho). She fails an attempt on his life and is killed herself, waking up in a strange purgatory called the \u2018Otherworld\u2019. Here, she gets another shot at revenge.<\/p>\n

After creating a series of parallel worlds sprung from the internet\u00a0\u2014\u00a0first in\u00a0Digimon, then\u00a0Summer Wars\u00a0and\u00a0Belle<\/a>\u00a0\u2014\u00a0Mamoru Hosoda takes a more theological approach with his latest anime movie<\/a>,\u00a0Scarlet. Very loosely based on\u00a0Hamlet, its vengeful princess Scarlet\u00a0(former Pacific Rim<\/a> child star Mana Ashida)\u00a0wakes up in a strange and shimmering landscape which looks like a cluster of nerves viewed from above, announced with a droning ambient score. This is the\u00a0\u2018Otherworld\u2019,\u00a0a place where the living and the dead,\u00a0from the past and future,\u00a0overlap with each other in an uncanny wasteland: not quite\u00a0heaven, more like purgatory, with strange gods watching over its still-warring denizens,\u00a0who fight each other\u00a0for\u00a0a chance\u00a0at\u00a0eternal paradise.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

16th-century Danish princess Scarlet\u00a0finds\u00a0herself\u00a0there\u00a0after\u00a0being poisoned by her uncle Claudius\u00a0(Perfect Days<\/a>‘ K\u014dji\u00a0Yakusho),\u00a0the murderer and usurper of\u00a0her father the King.\u00a0As it turns out, Claudius is there too, so\u00a0Scarlet\u00a0sets off,\u00a0crossing the afterlife itself to kill him (again). All\u00a0with the help of a Japanese paramedic named Hijiri\u00a0(Masaki Okada), who is appalled by\u00a0her\u00a0desire for\u00a0bloodshed. Like in the\u00a0Beauty\u00a0And\u00a0The\u00a0Beast<\/a>-inspired\u00a0Belle, the shift from reality to the Otherworld is signified by a shift from\u00a0hand-drawn\u00a02D to\u00a0computer-generated\u00a03D, the worlds split by different mediums of animation.<\/p>\n

Making matters\u00a0somewhat worse\u00a0is the general feeling that Hosoda is struggling to find something new or emotionally resonant in his reflections on violence.<\/p>\n

Sadly,\u00a0the 3D\u00a0CG experiment falls short of the expressive potential of the 2D segment. The\u00a0digital\u00a0characters have a lot of convincing\u00a0texture, but\u00a0miss the clear humanity of the hand-drawn linework.\u00a0You\u00a0could imagine this is the point in the presentation of an afterlife existing between heaven and hell. But seeing the\u00a0power of\u00a0the\u00a0drawn\u00a0segments,\u00a0set in the past,\u00a0makes the 3D animation feel a little less potent. It\u2019s not\u00a0that the approach is inherently problematic\u00a0\u2014\u202fBelle\u2019s similar\u00a0blend of styles\u00a0worked,\u00a0after all\u00a0\u2014 and there are moments where the choice makes a lot of sense, but\u00a0it dulls the emotional impact.<\/p>\n

Making matters\u00a0somewhat worse\u00a0is the general feeling that Hosoda is struggling to find something new or emotionally resonant in his reflections on violence.\u00a0Though the film is not\u00a0so\u00a0simplistic as to suggest that tyrants can be fixed through forgiveness, neither does it feel like a particularly impactful take on revenge movies,\u00a0nor the classic text it\u2019s based on. It\u00a0all\u00a0comes off as\u00a0trite\u00a0\u2014\u00a0in its best moments only managing to repeat what Hosoda has tackled with\u00a0his\u00a0previous\u00a0work.<\/p>\n

Mamoru Hosoda\u2019s continuing experiments with animation are passable enough. But it\u2019s not enough to uplift this loose adaptation of a literary classic with its rather clumsy thesis on cycles of violence.\u202f<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Denmark, 16th century. Princess Scarlet (Mana Ashida) seeks revenge for the murder of her father, King Amleth (Masachika…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":536966,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[64,63,134,344],"class_list":["post-536965","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-entertainment","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/536965","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=536965"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/536965\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/536966"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=536965"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=536965"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=536965"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}