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Scarlet Offers Complicated Answers To Simple Questions

Scarlet Offers Complicated Answers To Simple Questions

The most memorable line of Mamoru Hosoda’s Scarlet should probably be when the titular princess of Denmark—an anime-girl stand-in for Hamlet who is in every way a better person and therefore a less compelling protagonist than the Dane—declares that while she cannot forgive her uncle, she can forgive herself. Instead, the most memorable line is shouted by a nameless woman, a peasant amidst the masses starved under the decade of Scarlet’s uncle Claudius’s rule: “Do you promise not to oppress us?” My theater laughs, and Scarlet promises not to. She further declares that she will pursue a peaceful foreign policy with their neighbors, rule for all who have died wishing for an end to war, and create a world where children don’t have to die. And the masses believe her. They herald her as the daughter of the good king Hamlet. Maybe the Northern Wars don’t happen either and there is, as she believes, less conflict in the future.

Is Scarlet cringe? No. It isn’t really an anime adaptation of Hamlet, either. Polonius is one of Claudius’s closest conspirators, and he beats the shit out of Scarlet, for one. And Scarlet is no fool. She’s decided on revenge so entirely that she’s unconcerned with her own life or death or the meaning of anything outside of it. She’s decisive throughout the entire film until its climax, where she finally falters (like Hamlet) to strike her adversary while he falsely prays penitence. Built loosely from the thematic foundation of Hamlet, Scarlet explores what the tragedy could say about its cycles of violence if a father’s last words were not for revenge but forgiveness, and it brings the paranoia and militarization looming behind Shakespeare’s play to the forefront in a commentary not on Elizabethan England but 21st-century global conflict.

What is a world with monarchs but no violence to enforce their rule? What does forgiveness mean to a people who have been violently dispossessed? Hosoda doesn’t imagine the answers to those questions. With no one in the way to stop her, Scarlet, once self-fulfilled, is free to shape the kingdom for the better, singlehandedly, out of her noble obligation. This is where her story ends and it’s all I can really think about—which disservices the other 95% of the movie that looks like a gorgeous collage of animation techniques elegantly rendering the otherworldly African-desert-under-the-sea where Scarlet, on her revenge quest, joins the masses amidst a crusade fighting for their entry to heaven.

Throughout Scarlet, we are shown how power consumes and vengeance blinds. The princess takes arms against a sea of troubles, suffers the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, bears the whips and scorns of time. Revenge is meaningless, the film insists, when she is transported to a whole world of restless souls out of time, where strife continues its endless cycle: bandits armed with swords raid a defenseless caravan only to be shot dead by medieval riflemen, who are then incinerated by something yet stronger. Those who try to protect others are hurt, repeatedly, challenging Scarlet’s ability to trust others. However, she eventually meets someone who challenges this outlook, her accomplice, Hijiri (recognizable as the Ophelia stand-in only by the director’s own admission), a nurse from modern-day Japan who has somehow wandered into the endless battlefield and latched onto Scarlet. He heals her, and even her foes, and shows kindness where she knew none. At camp one night, she wonders if she could be a different person—a person like him—if she were born in a more peaceful time. It’s all a compelling interpersonal journey, though Hosoda (within and without the film) clearly wants to say something bigger about global conflicts today.

But by portraying conflict as inherently cyclical, as fundamentally rooted in an interpersonal and emotional desire for revenge, Hosoda abandons any materiality to oppression in our world. Let’s not pretend 20,000 children have been killed because of a desire for revenge after October 7. Sure, maybe revenge motivates some conscripted teenage soldiers. Are they the ones who aim for babies? Or is it just the emotions of the aristocracy that matter? Even then, who is owed forgiveness and who has been wronged are contested among our literati of pundits, comedians, and staff writers whose private high schools you can find boastfully listed under their Wikipedia bios.

Of course, saying boldly that children shouldn’t die is a controversial statement if you’re someone like a children’s songwriter and educator, but forgiveness is a conversation for the listening tables on Columbia University’s quad — tables that have replaced peaceful student encampments violently dismantled by a militarized police force. What can forgiveness do for the hungry? In Scarlet, untold masses of restless souls take up arms to topple Claudius’s wall. They have to fight after they’re dead just to get to heaven, and when she finally reaches it, Scarlet must also make the choice Hamlet could not—to be.

How much philosophizing, prostrating, humanizing is enough to choose to live? For Scarlet? For a child in Gaza? We’re not supposed to have the answers to these hard, complicated questions. We’re supposed to leave the tables and return to our homes they presume we have. But I know justice does not require forgiveness, and Land Back, food, and medicine are simple enough answers.


Autumn Wright is a critic of games and animation. Find their latest writing at @theautumnwright.bsky.social.

 
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