Scarlet (dir. Mamoru Hosoda)

by Jack Martin | Mar 15, 2026

Certificate: 15

Running Time: 111 mins

UK Distributor: Sony Pictures

UK Release Date: 13 March 2026

WHO’S IN SCARLET (JAPANESE VERSION)?

Mana Ashida, Masaki Okada, Koji Yakusho, Kazuhiro Yamaji, Tokio Emoto, Munetaka Aoki, Shota Sometani, Noa Shiroyama, Kayoko Shiraishi, Kōtarō Yoshida, Yuki Saito, Yutaka Matsushige, Masachika Ichimura

WHO’S IN SCARLET (ENGLISH VERSION)?

Erin Yvette, Chris Hackney, David Kaye, Jamieson K. Price, Fred Tatasciore, Jason Marnocha, Yuri Lowenthal, Ian Cardoni, Michael Yurchak, Michelle Wong, Juanita Jennings, Aaliyah Sun Huang, Aaron Encinas

WHO’S BEHIND THE CAMERA?

Mamoru Hosoda (director, writer), Yûichirô Saitô, Nozomu Takahashi and Toshimi Tanio (producers), Taisei Iwasaki (composer), Shigeru Nishiyama (editor)

WHAT’S IT ABOUT?

After failing to avenge her father, a medieval princess (Ashida/Yvette) finds herself in a mysterious realm…

WHAT ARE MY THOUGHTS ON SCARLET?

Mamoru Hosoda, the anime filmmaker behind revered classics like The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, Wolf Children, the Oscar-nominated Mirai and most recently the sci-fi fantasy Belle, clearly thinks he’s got a masterpiece on his hands with Scarlet. In fairness, it is by far his most ambitious project to date, not just narratively but also aesthetically (to where it apparently took at least four years to perfect its highly intricate blend of hand-drawn designs and computer-generated animation), so Mamoru does have a good enough reason to be extremely confident with what he’s setting out to do here.

Unfortunately, that confidence appears to have been wildly misplaced. Nobody should discredit someone like Hosoda for taking such a giant swing, but his is a wildly disorienting film that frequently stumbles under the weight of its own ambition, leaving the viewer more frustrated by its ultimate practises rather than genuinely enthralled.

The film is essentially a very loose adaptation of Hamlet, albeit with a few key differences. For one, our hero is Scarlet (voiced by Mana Ashida in the original Japanese version, and by Erin Yvette in the English dub), a pink-haired princess in 16th century Denmark who watches in horror as her beloved father King Amleth (Masachika Ichimura/Fred Tatasciore) is executed by her power-seeking uncle Claudius (Koji Yakusho/David Kaye). Much like Shakespeare’s tragic hero, Scarlet seeks retribution for her father’s death, only here she actually fails in her ultimate mission while Claudius gets away scot-free.

This is where things differ almost entirely from the story of Hamlet, as Scarlet suddenly finds herself in a strange barren wasteland called the “Otherworld”, where the dead and the living from across all points in time co-exist in a purgatory-like landscape. For instance, she quickly comes across Hijiri (Masaki Okada/Chris Hackney), a paramedic from present-day Japan who insists he must still be alive despite having ended up in the Otherworld himself, but also learns that Claudius – or at least, a version of him that has also died long after his would-be killer had – is present in this realm, having gathered an army under the promise that he will lead them to the “Infinite Land” where the dead can finally rest in peace. Still motivated by vengeance, Scarlet sets out on a quest across the Otherworld to defeat Claudius once and for all, with Hijiri following along as a moral anchor for her violent and merciless crusade.

You can probably tell just from reading all of that, especially everything in the latter paragraph, that this kind of plot comes from someone who has spent plenty of years developing all of these ideas and honing them all into one self-contained film. But therein lies the problem: there are just too many ideas working against each other, and even the ones that it tends to put more focus on aren’t quite as well thought-out as they perhaps should be. The concept of dead people from across all time periods existing in the same world together should invite oodles of creativity, perhaps in how people from, say, the present and those from hundreds of years prior could function together with their combined skills and knowledge. But Hosoda keeps himself from exploring these possibilities, sticking to a rather uninteresting-looking barren landscape where every once in a while, some foes – many of them, as it turns out, from Scarlet’s own time period – pop out of nowhere to give our heroes a bit of bother before being quickly apprehended.

It is frustrating because there’s so much more to mine from this premise that Hosoda is actively deciding not to explore, and even more so because what he instead chooses to focus on isn’t compelling enough to justify its more grounded approach. As a character, Scarlet is somewhat generic in her single-minded focus on revenge, with her inevitable connection with the similarly underdeveloped Hijiri feeling unearned as there’s not really many moments prior that have called for a spark between them. The film’s version of Claudius is similarly one-note, lacking the moral complexity of his namesake in Shakespeare’s classic play as his actions as a ruthless and petulant king are so exaggerated that they end up being more cartoonish than the animated visuals. Shakespeare enthusiasts will be mildly amused by some of the other loose connections to the play, but not a whole lot more than that as it aligns about as much with Hamlet as The Lion King does (an animated retelling that’s more worth your time).

For all its promise, Scarlet isn’t very enjoyable to watch as much of its plotting feels utterly random, with most things happening at pure convenience or just for the sake of a few intriguing visuals – at one point, the film becomes both 2001: A Space Odyssey and La La Land in the exact same sequence – while the story and its characters are left out to dry as even they get lost in the overly ambitious nature of it all. Even the animation, as striking and heavily detailed as it can be, feels like it’s being held back by a filmmaker who’s more fixated on the sheer gravity of his ideas than on delivering a coherent and satisfying product.

If he had focused more on his storytelling rather than all the add-ons surrounding it, Hosoda might genuinely have had a masterpiece on his hands. As is, Scarlet is a blistering disappointment that is a victim of its own ambition.

SO, TO SUM UP…

Scarlet is an extremely ambitious yet ultimately disappointing anime epic by Mamoru Hosoda that constantly buckles under the weight of its creative yet underdeveloped ideas, settling for a generic set of Hamlet-inspired story strands and characters that lack the complexity and nuance of Shakespeare’s original play.