The Japanese writer-director Mamoru Hosoda has made some amazing films that take profound leaps into dreamlike worlds.
Hosoda's ''Mirai'' (2018) is about a 4-year-old boy who's resentful of his newborn sister. But in his backyard garden, he meets his sister as a teenager. This is just the first of many domestic time travels, as the boy meets other relatives from other points in their lives. A new understanding begins to dawn.
In ''Belle'' (2022), a teenager who's lived through tragedy finds a soaring catharsis in a virtual realm. I thought it was one of the best films of that year, and I still think it might be the best movie ever made about the internet. Either way, its song-and-soul-shattering climax is unforgettable.
Yet in Hosoda's latest, ''Scarlet,'' the director's enviable reach exceeds his grasp. In it, his female protagonist is a medieval princess who, after seeing her king father killed by her uncle, and dying herself, awakes in an expansive purgatory. In this strange afterlife, peopled by the dead from all time periods, she seeks revenge for her father.
Anyone, I think, would grant that a Japanese anime that transplants ''Hamlet'' to a surreal netherworld is a touch more ambitious than your average animated movie. Unlike the wide majority of cartoons, or even live-action movies, the problem with ''Scarlet'' isn't a lack of imagination. It's too much.
Hosoda, a former Studio Ghibli animator whose other films include ''Wolf Children'' and ''Summer Wars,'' has an extraordinary knack for crafting anime worlds of visual complexity while pursuing existential ideas with a childlike sincerity. But an excess of baroque design, of emotion, of scope, sinks Hosoda's ''Scarlet.'' It's the kind of misfire you can forgive. If you're going to fail by overreach, it might as well be with a wildly ambitious rendering of ''Hamlet.''
In the thrilling prologue, set in 16th century Denmark, Scarlet (Ashida Mana) watches as her uncle Claudius (Kôji Yakusho) frames her father as a traitor and has him executed. Enraged, Scarlet — without any visitation from her father's ghost — goes to kill Claudius. Only he poisons her first, and Scarlet awakes in what she learns is called the Otherlands.
It's a kind of infinite wasteland, full of wandering souls and marauding bandits. People are there for a time, and then they pass into nothingness. A stairway to heaven is rumored to exist somewhere. As she seeks Claudius, Scarlet is joined by a stranger she encounters named Hijiri (Okada Masaki). A paramedic from modern day, he spends most of his time in the Otherworld trying to heal the wounds of others, including Scarlet's foes.
