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チリでの #MamoruHosoda の #scarlet のプレミアを楽しんでいます。
とても良い映画です。かなり真剣で哲学的です。観客を何度も実存的な反省へと導き、人間的な文脈で時間、愛、人生、死といったテーマに触れます。強くおすすめします！ 💖
Scarlet Review
Denmark, 16th century. Princess Scarlet (Mana Ashida) seeks revenge for the murder of her father, King Amleth (Masachika Ichimura), by her uncle Claudius (Kōji Yakusho). She fails an attempt on his life and is killed herself, waking up in a strange purgatory called the 'Otherworld'. Here, she gets another shot at revenge.
After creating a series of parallel worlds sprung from the internet — first in Digimon, then Summer Wars and Belle — Mamoru Hosoda takes a more theological approach with his latest anime movie, Scarlet. Very loosely based on Hamlet, its vengeful princess Scarlet (former Pacific Rim child star Mana Ashida) wakes up in a strange and shimmering landscape which looks like a cluster of nerves viewed from above, announced with a droning ambient score. This is the 'Otherworld', a place where the living and the dead, from the past and future, overlap with each other in an uncanny wasteland: not quite heaven, more like purgatory, with strange gods watching over its still-warring denizens, who fight each other for a chance at eternal paradise.
16th-century Danish princess Scarlet finds herself there after being poisoned by her uncle Claudius (Perfect Days' Kōji Yakusho), the murderer and usurper of her father the King. As it turns out, Claudius is there too, so Scarlet sets off, crossing the afterlife itself to kill him (again). All with the help of a Japanese paramedic named Hijiri (Masaki Okada), who is appalled by her desire for bloodshed. Like in the Beauty And The Beast-inspired Belle, the shift from reality to the Otherworld is signified by a shift from hand-drawn 2D to computer-generated 3D, the worlds split by different mediums of animation.
Making matters somewhat worse is the general feeling that Hosoda is struggling to find something new or emotionally resonant in his reflections on violence.
Sadly, the 3D CG experiment falls short of the expressive potential of the 2D segment. The digital characters have a lot of convincing texture, but miss the clear humanity of the hand-drawn linework. You could imagine this is the point in the presentation of an afterlife existing between heaven and hell. But seeing the power of the drawn segments, set in the past, makes the 3D animation feel a little less potent. It's not that the approach is inherently problematic — Belle's similar blend of styles worked, after all — and there are moments where the choice makes a lot of sense, but it dulls the emotional impact.
Making matters somewhat worse is the general feeling that Hosoda is struggling to find something new or emotionally resonant in his reflections on violence. Though the film is not so simplistic as to suggest that tyrants can be fixed through forgiveness, neither does it feel like a particularly impactful take on revenge movies, nor the classic text it's based on. It all comes off as trite — in its best moments only managing to repeat what Hosoda has tackled with his previous work.
Mamoru Hosoda's continuing experiments with animation are passable enough. But it's not enough to uplift this loose adaptation of a literary classic with its rather clumsy thesis on cycles of violence.
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Though centred on a teenager seemingly content to fade into the background amongst her peers, Belle itself is hardly lacking in ambition. It's at once an homage to Beauty And The Beast, and a recollection of its creator's greatest hits (Wolf Children, The Boy And The Beast, Mirai); a large-scale fantasy as well as a small-town coming-of-age drama, reflecting on the intertwining of teen anxiety and social media; an innovative piece of CG animation that blends with a more traditionally hand-drawn style. But it's never overwhelming, as director Mamoru Hosoda arranges all these moving parts into a precise, exciting symphony.
Through his protagonist Suzu's (Kaho Nakamura) story, Hosoda remixes Beauty And The Beast not just as a reflection on how teenagers can escape into internet communities but also on the broader subject of the role of the parent, and the pain that results when they are absent. Taking on the persona of 'Bell', Suzu, who has a fraught relationship with her father (Kōji Yakusho), becomes something of a halfway point between a V-tuber (an online entertainer who uses an avatar) and a pop star, her singing turning her into a viral sensation. Where other films might warn against the perils of this, Belle instead takes a humanist view of the internet, seeing it as a medium through which isolated and misunderstood souls connect. Not that the film ignores the risks — as Suzu encounters 'The Beast' (Takeru Satoh), it engages with the practice of doxxing (a cyber-attack that reveals a user's true identity), and how corporate control of online spaces corrupts communities.
With its intense story, spectacular animation and catchy soundtrack, there's an almost dizzying amount going on.
As with much of Hosoda's work, Belle constantly has one foot in and one out of reality, the setting split between the real and digital worlds, the characters animated with traditional 2D in the former and CGI in the latter. In 2D, they appear more subdued and naturalistic, but very often offer outsized, cartoonish reactions. In 3D, the characters take on a fairy-tale appearance, while the world of 'U' itself appears as somewhere between a sprawling cityscape, a circuit board and a harp. There's a constant push-and-pull throughout, between the 2D and 3D animation, the inner self and the external, it all feeding back into how the online space essentially doubles us, offering the chance to create a new image for oneself. That conceptual approach to the animation makes switching between the two worlds feel seamless.
With its intense story, spectacular animation and catchy soundtrack, there's an almost dizzying amount going on. But Hosoda keeps it all on an even keel, employing recurring visual motifs, a precise rhythm and quieter, slice-of-life vignettes in the real world as room to breathe. It stumbles occasionally: while the nature of Bell and The Beast's relationship aligns with Hosoda's sensibilities perfectly on paper, the revelation of the latter's identity feels clumsily executed. Still, the conclusion to which it leads is powerful, balancing its lavish fantasy imagery with moments of quiet observation and moving intimacy.
