There are quite a few Hamlet-reimagined films on the TIFF 2025 program, and this was one of the ones I did not want to miss. The ambitious and epic Scarlet is the much-anticipated latest from Academy Award-nominated anime director Mamoru Hosoda (Belle, The Boy and the Beast), evoking Shakespeare’s most famous tragedy. The film follows a young girl as she seeks to avenge her father’s death at the hands of her uncle Claudius. Before she can exact vengeance, she’s poisoned and sent to a kind of purgatory where the rules of our universe are turned on their collective heads—called: the Otherworld.
The dwellers here are all dead, seeking their way to Eternity, and Scarlet is befriended by Hijiri, a medic from the future. Together, the pair strives to overthrow the powers that be in this strange dimension, so that she can finally wreak her revenge. Hosoda creates an imaginative world beyond space and time, representing a dark world of madness and war. The corruption of greed and power that invariably leads to social strife and discord is mirrored in the anime convention of being transported to another place to resolve emotional and psychological trauma.
Scarlet’s loss is so devastating, and her desire for retribution so fierce, that her world—and the afterlife—are thrown into chaos, with time frames collapsing and blending to create a new, strange reality. From an animation perspective, Hosoda is not a stranger to blending both 3D/3D CG and 2D animation. For Scarlet, they used 3D animation for the most part, with many of the close-ups done in 2D. The overall techniques looked flawless, transitioning between 3D and 2D—sometimes having a 2D-animated character against a 3D-animated background. Yet still, it fell in the uncanny valley territory.
Something about the choppy frame rate feel does not look as clean as 2D animation. Hosoda noted in the Q&A following the TIFF 2025 screening that they did “a lot of R&D” into executing the animation style for this film. Despite my slight animation technical bias, it is the best blend of styles I have seen so far—definitely better than Ninja Kamui! But not as good as the way a Hollywood animated feature like the Spider-Verse films blends 2D and 3D animation.
“For Scarlet, they used 3D animation for the most part, with many of the close-ups done in 2D. “
Like Netflix and Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein coming out this year, Scarlet is a reimagining of William Shakespeare’s tragedy: Hamlet. While the afterlife or purgatory take on Hamlet made me curious, it leads down some strange paths—and not the Hayao Miyazaki kind of strange, abstract interpretation paths. Rather, the film shows how wandering souls have a chance at redemption but must get over their problems prior to dying. However, people who do accept their fate still live in a purgatory world with bandits who can kill them.
The whole story appears to conveniently revolve around Scarlet and her fixing the whole world’s problems. The story forces Scarlet to learn things about the future from the nurse who died around our current times, Hijiri, primarily so she can learn that her revenge is bigger than herself. Some of the better writing comes from Hosoda hitting the story beats to fit this Hamlet-inspired anime film. In the first act, getting the original play details out of the way quickly helped pick up the pace. After Scarlet gets sent to the Otherworld, the more interesting parts of the movie begin.
Scarlet’s voice cast carries this movie heavily—bringing a lot of gentle care, passion, and exuberance from its lead actress. Mana Ashida (Pacific Rim) lends her voice for Scarlet, and she sounds like she went all out in the voice booth. Her character gets beaten up and betrayed so much that Ashida must have lost her voice multiple times, screaming and gasping.
Masaki Okada stars opposite Ashida as Hijiri, and he played the straight comedy and love interest perfectly. From a character writing standpoint, I enjoyed Hijiri’s personal arc. He was written to be the guy who is lost and in denial about dying up until the end, adding a lot of much-needed comic relief. Hijiri creates great entertainment and serves his purpose for Scarlet’s journey well.
Scarlet has its good moments, from the voice acting to some stunning 2D-animated shots, but it fell short in its own purgatory—its cohesion of blending animation techniques, and the screenwriting is not quite up to snuff for the message it intends to convey. While there are some great-looking frames to be enjoyed on the big screen, this is a film that could be easily enjoyed at home on a streaming site.
