What if Hamlet were a teenager in an epic anime?

Hamnet It is no longer the only film currently showing that revolves around Hamlet. In Scarlet, Mamoru Hosoda It draws inspiration from Shakespeare's immortal text, although it takes considerable liberties, such as changing the name and gender of the main character to transform her into a medieval princess who travels through time and space in a purgatory to bring to justice those who murdered her and her father. Unlike its literary model, Scarlet She doesn't need any specter to drive her to revenge; she alone possesses a rage of epic proportions, as befits the emotions that characterize adolescence, which is precisely the territory most frequently explored by the director of The Girl Who Leapt Through Time and The Boy and the Beast.

ScarletThus, it finds a natural fit within Hosoda's filmography, darkening its tone and amplifying the spectacularity to which the climactic passages of the previous film pointed. BelleAnd here it crystallizes in massive battles and the vision of a dragon soaring through the sky. But the filmmaker's gaze, which has delivered his best works when allowing fantasy to inhabit human-scale narratives, gets a little lost in that almost abstract immensity, in a dramaturgy as obstinate as its protagonist, who seems to lose his purpose as he progresses on his journey through a land of express.