“Scarlet” is a Gender-Bent Take on “Hamlet” That Misses the Mark
While artists have been riffing on the works of William Shakespeare for generations, 2025 and 2026 are shaping up to be the years of Hollywood rediscovering Hamlet. Written sometime between 1599 and 1601, Hamlet tells the story of a young Prince Hamlet who vows to take revenge against his uncle Claudius, who has killed Hamlet’s father, the king of Denmark. If that doesn’t ring a bell from your high school English class, you might be more familiar with the animal version of this play: Disney’s The Lion King. Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet, Aneil Karia’s Hamlet, and Mamoru Hosoda’s Scarlet are all recent releases that put their own spin on Shakespeare’s famous story.
In Hosoda’s Scarlet, the gender of the lead character has been swapped. Scarlet (Mana Ashida) is the princess of a beloved king in the medieval era. When the audience meets her, she’s trapped in a dark limbo known as the Otherworld. She’s not dead, but she’s also not alive. In a flashback, we learn that Scarlet’s father was killed by her uncle, Claudius (Koji Yakusho), who wants the power of the throne for himself. Claudius, after catching on to Scarlet’s attempt to poison him, poisoned her. That poisoning is what took her to the Otherworld. It’s there she meets Hijiri (Masaki Okada), a medic from the modern day. He offers his assistance to guide Scarlet through a path of forgiveness rather than revenge.
©2025 STUDIO CHIZU. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.
It’s undeniable that Scarlet is an animated epic that feels massive in scope, no matter the size of the screen one watches it on. There’s an inherent largeness to the world that Hosoda and his team have created, and it’s especially evident in the moments when this behemoth dragon cuts across the sky. Hosoda is known for lush visual expanses. His 2018 film, Mirari, was nominated for Best Animated Feature at the 91st Academy Awards and his 2021 movie, Belle, broke through the anime genre to a more widespread audience. Scarlet is more of this same sweeping epic, but the film is missing the emotional heart to match.
One would think the gender swap would serve a greater narrative purpose, but Scarlet isn’t interested in exploring the gendered dynamics at play in Hamlet becoming Scarlet. It’s a small quibble that speaks to the larger issue at the heart of Scarlet. We’re in the midst of worldwide upheaval and the idea of World War III feels far too close for comfort. Scarlet doesn’t come to any conclusion other than the generic belief that “war is bad.” Which it is, but that statement doesn’t do anything to move the needle in terms of solving the issue of how we got here. How do we get to a place where war is our default answer to global problems? How do we move forward to a place where war is the last resort and not the first instinct? Scarlet doesn’t have to solve the crisis we’ve found ourselves in, but it should try to offer something more than platitudes, because platitudes are what brought us here.
“Could I have been a different person?” asks Scarlet. She ponders what her life might have been like had she not felt the need to seek revenge for the death of her father. That’s the rub, though, isn’t it? We could all be different people if the hard circumstances of our lives hadn’t happened, but they did. So now we’re forced to become the people we want to be, the people we could be, in spite of our circumstances. Scarlet is a visual odyssey across a wasteland made in the name of absolution, but it doesn’t delve into the thorniness that comes with forgiveness when revenge was the original intent.
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