The first to smash two ideas together usually buys a filmmaker a bit of historical grace, where the audience remembers the ambition more than the chaos. Scarlettfamous anime director Mamoru HosodaThe latest feature film, doesn’t get that kind of grace. As a Hamlet-meet-isekai hybrid epic, it soars into a world that’s too familiar with the former and oversaturated with the latter, and you can feel the film struggling—almost begging—to convince the audience that it’s saying something profound. What remains is a beautiful film that is a touch too irritatingly sanctimonious for its own good.

Scarlet follows a medieval princess of the same name, played by Mana Ashida, who wakes up after her murder in the Land of the Dead — a huge, sun-blasted one. Calid-esque desert where time folds in on itself and the departed wander its endless dunes. His mission is brutally simple: track down the conspirators who overthrew his father, the king, and, fate permitting, cut down the usurper uncle who killed him. On the way, he meets Hijiri (Masaki Okada), a modern Japanese doctor who has inexplicably fallen into this wasteland, who insists on helping him survive the endless violence and slowly points him on a path not defined by anger.

From jumping, Scarlett sets itself apart from Hosoda’s earlier works such as Mirai, The Woman Who Leaps Through Time, Belleand The Child and the Beast. While the familiar themes of time and romance are still present (the latter is absurd), this film is more brutal than its predecessors. Almost every scene sees its protagonist covered in dirt, with bruises oozing from several days’ wounds as he crawls across the desert like a soul stamp rally, moving from one fierce battle to the next.

Despite his demure appearance, he is more than capable of fighting beneath the surface, wresting victory from the jaws of defeat as he roams the wasteland in search of vengeance. His endless battlefield, the wasteland itself, is as strong a metaphor for purgatory as any. The Land of the Dead is an expanse of sand dunes and craggy mountains where time and space collapse in on themselves, and every wanderer who dies once, is destined to disappear into a crumbling dead leaf forever if killed again. The film follows its battered hero through a medley of visceral battles, carving up hordes of raiders and knights with an iron ferocity that belies his dangerous exterior, leaving you compelled to say “Hell yes” as he continues his vengeful tour.

The movie is a visual marvel, with a seamless blend of 2D and occasional 3D character designs set against crisp, beautiful 3DCG environments that are so vivid they feel like a Magic Eye illusion—the kind that tricks your brain into thinking that Studio Chizu simply dropped live-action footage of desert ruins and caravans behind its animated cast. Scarlett brings about the same post-fantasy withdrawal that people who watch James Cameron feel Avatarwish they themselves could enter its world. Save for the film’s brief musical interlude—captivating its own antiquity, Dance Dance Revolution way-Scarlett only momentarily undercut the poor presentation of Studio Chizu’s stunning animation. However, its action is fierce and brutal, brutal in its sequences, and the way the dying wanderers crumble into ash and dead leaves—like Chiaroscuro: Expedition 33‘s gommage—lands as a devastating and poetic end.

In general, the movie is beautiful to watch, where the sky is made like a raging sea, the shadow of a huge dragon floating above, an invincible crowd of people flocking towards and fleeing from an erupting volcano, and the warm rays of the sun almost come from the screen. The artistic talents of Studio Chizu are among the talents of Orange Studio and Ne Zha II; The film is simply undeniable to watch.

The plot, however, Scarlett more on the predictable side, and to its detriment, it tries its worst to avoid that in a way that turns viewers from expectantly waiting for a fable-style moral of the story to giving the entire film an eye roll. You don’t have to be a literary scholar to make time Scarlettits central message from the first events; the problem is not the message itself but the long, winding, self-consciously subversive route the film takes to deliver it.

A big part of that drag comes from Hijiri, who was meant to serve as Scarlet’s window character. Instead, he felt like a dull, empty presence—a walking theme rather than a person. As a character, he is, without fail, a Wonder Bread of a man, and because the film relies on him as an important emotional anchor, he becomes dead weight, slowing down the momentum the film has built for it. And his tacked-on romance with Scarlet only makes things worse, making Hosoda’s usual time and romance fix here.

Because Hijiri is so inert, the script’s isekai-leaning framing feels oddly muted. If anything, it’s more of a distraction from an intriguing premise about a character being judged in a Shakespearean narrative than a meaningful lens for reframing. Hamlet. And since the movie already relies heavily on the audience’s familiarity with the revenge tragedy to understand its ensemble and their relationships before Scarlet’s cosmic odyssey begins, the supposed “modern outsider” meant to bridge those two worlds contributes almost nothing. If anything, the film will be an affair where, unless you know Hamletit’s hard to tell who it’s for.

However Scarlett undeniably beautiful, its story begins to lose its vitality as it pushes towards the climax, twisting itself into an almost impressive, romantic stale knot just to deliver an obvious message in the most roundabout way possible. The rest is beautiful, yes, but its theme is a bit hollow, almost finished. As a hybrid reimagining of one of the most popular revenge stories, filtered through oversaturated anime genres, Scarlett it seems like a movie that insists on itself and its depth, which makes its shocking message more appealing to the eye as it nervously tries to move away from feeling predictable by piling up progress on progress until the once clear water of its ideas urges the audience to drink from the immersion.

By the time the film reaches its conclusion, the “do better” climax is less fake-deep than corny, which could be worse. Finally, Scarlett is a story that feels completely carried by his animation, which is a heavier lift than his script was able to do it justice.

Scarlett playing in theaters now.

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