The Japanese animation auteur Mamoru Hosoda has long delighted global audiences with fusions of extravagant emotion and flights of fantasy.
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In The Girl Who Leapt Through Time a teenager is trapped and future-proofing in a time loop. In Belle, a grieving girl finds catharsis in a virtual universe. In The Boy and the Beast, an orphaned nine-year-old is adopted into an animal netherworld.
Few film-makers move so fluidly between the intimate and the cosmic. That makes his latest film, Scarlet – an audacious anime riff on Hamlet that never quite comes together – all the more frustrating.
Reportedly beset by a difficult digital development, the film opens with characteristic flair in medieval Denmark. Scarlet (voiced by Mana Ashida), a young princess, watches helplessly as her father is framed and executed by his treacherous brother, Claudius (Koji Yakusho).
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Attempting revenge, she is poisoned and wakes in the Otherlands, a vast, eerie purgatory where the dead from across history wander among crumbling landscapes and warring factions. Picture Mad Max in reddish, Elizabethan hell.
From here, alas, the film begins to sprawl. Scarlet’s quest for vengeance threads through a tangle of Shakespearean detours and philosophical asides. Familiar figures drift in and out – take a bow, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern – while a kind-hearted modern-day paramedic, Hijiri (Masaki Okada), attaches himself to Scarlet as a plausible love interest and pacifist counterweight to her righteous fury.
Hosoda’s visual imagination remains formidable. It’s impossible not to swoon at the director’s reach. The Otherlands are conjured with painterly bravura: vast crowds of lost souls, spectral deserts, stellar flares of colour and violence.
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The storytelling proves less assured. Hamlet’s durable outline is as discernible here as his presence in Hamnet, Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal’s slant-titled origins story, yet the overburdened plot is constantly and needlessly rearranged into odd, cluttered hunks of soliloquy.
The Bard’s most famous creation may be many things, but Scarlet’s earnest moralising about empathy and collective responsibility feels more like Polonius’s vibe.
In cinemas from Friday, March 13th
