Scarlet (2025) – Review

Quick Thoughts

1. Between The Boy and The Beast, Belle, and Scarlet, Hosoda loves featuring multiple worlds and time frames in his films. 
2. It does seem like Hosoda was too focused on the gorgeous visuals to clean up the screenplay. The story isn’t tight, which hurts the flow of the film.
3. I love a random dance scene in a movie about a revenge-driven princess.
4. It’s worth a trip to an IMAX theater.
5. The opening five minutes rule.

With an 80% CGI and 20% hand-drawn blend of animation,Scarlet is an interesting film to behold. The screenplay is far from tight, but it looks and sounds great in theaters, which means there’s enough good stuff to justify a trip to the cinema. Perhaps it’s because Hosoda wrote the script by himself, and not with Satoko Okudera (Wolf Children, Summer Wars, The Girl Who Jumped Through Time), or maybe it’s because the retelling of Hamlet becomes too ambitious, but the film lacks momentum and sags after an excellent opening. 

I’ve watched Scarlet twice and I have some contradictory feelings about it. I love the idea of a 16th century Danish princess named Scarlet (Mana Ashida) battling her way through an afterlife dubbed the Otherworld, but the storytelling behind her revenge mission to kill her uncle Claudius is too naive and broad. The biggest problem with the movie is that Scarlet’s journey towards enlightenment is loaded with platitudes and on-the-nose dialogue that is about as subtle as a punch to the nose. On paper, teaming Scarlet up with an idealistic modern-day nurse named Hijiri (Masaki Okada) is a fun idea (being that they are complete opposites), but Hijiri never registers as a real person because he’s wildly naive in a world filled with death and destruction, which means he’s a plot device and not a three-dimensional character. This is a shame because Hosoda’s filmography is jam-packed with well-written characters who bridge their differences to find friendship, balance and maturity (Watch Wolf Children, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, and The Boy and the Beast now). 

The opening five minutes are gorgeous and ironically don’t help the overall film because they create visual expectations that aren’t matched until the finale (the middle section of Scarlet is a slog). Watching Scarlet wander around an Otherworld that is home to lightning-spewing dragons, vast deserts, and dead soldiers (whose weapons and armor are used by Scarlet) is highly entertaining and showcases the world that Studio Chizo and Digital Frontier created. While in the Otherworld, she engages in some fun scraps with warriors sent by her power-hungry uncle Claudius (Kôji Yakusho), who isn’t pleased that his niece is trying to send him into nothingness (you can die in the Otherworld purgatory). Scarlet is justifiably angry at Claudius because he killed her father (his brother) and poisoned her while she was attempting to poison him. Now, she’s in the Otherworld looking for revenge. Her quest for murder opens up an expansive world filled with nomads, bambits, cavernous castles, fist-fights, stairways to heaven, and assassins named Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. 

Hosoda spent four years making this film and the overall look is wonderful, but its technological achievements far outweigh anything the story has to offer. Hosoda made sure to respect traditional Japanese 2d animation while updating the methods used to create the animated experiences. The end result blends hand-drawn animation stylings with an eye-pleasing 3D world. 16th Belgian was created with hand-drawn work, while the Otherworld is CG. Scarlet and Hijiri were designed by animation legend Jin Jim (Frozen, Big Hero 6), which explains why Scarlet looks awesome.

Final Thoughts – If you can watch it on an IMAX screen I totally recommend you make the trip.