\u201cScarlet,\u201d<\/a> the director\u2019s enviable reach exceeds his grasp. In it, his female protagonist is a medieval princess who, after seeing her king father killed by her uncle, and dying herself, awakes in an expansive purgatory. In this strange afterlife, peopled by the dead from all time periods, she seeks revenge for her father.<\/p>\nAnyone, I think, would grant that a Japanese anime that transplants \u201cHamlet\u201d to a surreal netherworld is a touch more ambitious than your average animated movie. Unlike the wide majority of cartoons, or even live-action movies, the problem with \u201cScarlet\u201d isn\u2019t a lack of imagination. It\u2019s too much.<\/p>\n
Hosoda, a former Studio Ghibli animator whose other films include \u201cWolf Children\u201d and \u201cSummer Wars,\u201d has an extraordinary knack for crafting anime worlds of visual complexity while pursuing existential ideas with a childlike sincerity. But an excess of baroque design, of emotion, of scope, sinks Hosoda\u2019s \u201cScarlet.\u201d It\u2019s the kind of misfire you can forgive. If you\u2019re going to fail by overreach, it might as well be with a wildly ambitious rendering of \u201cHamlet.\u201d <\/p>\n
In the thrilling prologue, set in 16th century Denmark, Scarlet (Ashida Mana) watches as her uncle Claudius (K\u00f4ji Yakusho) frames her father as a traitor and has him executed. Enraged, Scarlet \u2014 without any visitation from her father\u2019s ghost \u2014 goes to kill Claudius. Only he poisons her first, and Scarlet awakes in what she learns is called the Otherlands.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a kind of infinite wasteland, full of wandering souls and marauding bandits. People are there for a time, and then they pass into nothingness. A stairway to heaven is rumored to exist somewhere. As she seeks Claudius, Scarlet is joined by a stranger she encounters named Hijiri (Okada Masaki). A paramedic from modern day, he spends most of his time in the Otherworld trying to heal the wounds of others, including Scarlet\u2019s foes.<\/p>\n
\u201cScarlet\u201d can be meandering and tedious. Even Rosencrantz and Guildenstern turn up. If the Otherworld is laid out like Scarlet\u2019s troubled conscience, the ensuing battle between vengeance and forgiveness feels dully simplified. It’s all a sea of troubles. Hosoda tries to build some interiority to the story (not a small aspect of \u201cHamlet\u201d) through Hijiri’s backstory, telescoping Shakespeare\u2019s quandaries to contemporary times.<\/p>\n
Hosoda grafted \u201cBeauty and the Beast\u201d into \u201cBelle,\u201d to sometimes awkward, sometimes illuminating effect. But in \u201cScarlet,\u201d he struggles to bridge \u201cHamlet\u201d to today. It’s a big swing, the kind filmmakers as talented as Hosoda should be taking, but it doesn\u2019t pay off. Still, it\u2019s often dazzling to look at it and it’s never not impassioned. Hosoda remains a director capable of reaching trembling, operatic heights. In \u201cScarlet,\u201d for instance, Claudius gets a spectacular death scene, a remarkable accomplishment considering he’s already dead.<\/p>\n
\u201cScarlet,\u201d a Sony Pictures Classics release, opens in limited release Friday and in wider theatrical release Feb. 6. Rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association for violence\/bloody image. Playing in both Japanese with subtitles and English dubbed versions. Running time: 112 minutes. Two stars out of four.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Japanese writer-director Mamoru Hosoda has made some amazing films that take profound leaps into dreamlike worlds. Hosoda\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":178764,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[104608,25430,127,146,85,46,397],"class_list":{"0":"post-178763","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-104608","9":"tag-animation-and-comics","10":"tag-article","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-il","13":"tag-israel","14":"tag-movies"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178763","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=178763"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178763\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/178764"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=178763"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=178763"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=178763"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}