Throughout his ten-year feature career, Mamoru Hosada has stuck to a few important things. Family in all its complexity; forgiveness over revenge, and sincere faith in the goodness of the human race they were born with. He explores these themes with dramatic structures with big emotions but keeps the scope of the character close, and even when he touches on the idea of suicide, foreign intervention and animal abuse, Hosada keeps his tone light while not being afraid to tug at the heartstrings. It’s a template that worked very well for the Japanese director as his ambitions grew, but unfortunately it falls flat Scarlet.
A loose adaptation of Hamlet – marking the third strike In the UK cinemas in three months – we follow 16th century Danish princess Scarlet (a gender-reversed Hamlet) who sees her father’s throne violently usurped by her evil uncle Claudius. When he fails in his quest for revenge, he falls into The World Between, a wasteland of purgatory where the sky is a sea guarded by lightning-shooting dragons, time folds in on itself, and Claudius brutally rules over his people by holding a captive path to the Endless World where the dead can live nothing instead of disappearing. Joining Scarlet on her odyssey for revenge is Hijiri, a pure-hearted Japanese doctor from the present day who acts as a forgiving ying to her angry yang.
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Hosada is almost a sight to behold Scarlet as his epic. A number of shots that aren’t wide angles or feature large landscapes, with at least one expensive montage Lawrence of Arabiacan be counted with both hands. There are epic battle sequences, stunning digital effects that work with oceanic skyboxes, cacophonous sound design, and a busy story that takes constant detours. On paper, it’s standard Hosada tunes blown up on a grand scale.
Actually, the results are an overblown but simple insult. While many of the individual shots and character designs stand out in classic muted colors, the decision to render The World Between uses digital animation aimed at identifying the traditional ape. 2D Anime in three dimensions and the accompanying lowered frame rate lead to disturbingly stiff character movements and stunted choreography. An unusual digital experience that worked Bear.‘the virtual world here is like a middle-class PlayStation cutscene and, unlike Bearthe majority Scarlet and its great mood swings take place in this strange valley of souls.
More dangerously, Hosada’s typically family-oriented writing comes unstuck with this dark material. His sincere commitment to the basic goodness of people and rejection of violence, which already risks infidelity in his good films, reduces the absurdity of underestimating when the antagonist is an unrepentant dictator hungry for power. The fact that divine intervention ends up being what resolves the central conflict, rather than Scarlet herself doing much of anything, is the result of a dangerous didacticism in Hosada’s screenplay. The sheer number of characters, concepts, and unusual display settings are reminiscent of the hats-on-hats-on-hats nature of Makoto Shinkai and I don’t make that comparison as a compliment to any filmmaker. Worst of all, neither Scarlet nor Hijiri are developed or fleshed out enough to sell the heart-burning emotions that Hosada has successfully pulled off before. During the climax clearly repeats the end of the Bearone has to admit that the harmonies don’t add up in this.
