Mark Kermode (14:33)
Okay, Scarlet, which is new anime from Mamoru Soda, who made the Girl who Leapt Through Time, and Belle, which I really, really liked, and Mariah, which was Oscar nominated. So this is a gender swapped reimagining of the story of Hamlet. I mean, at the moment we've got Hamlet and Hamnet still playing in cinemas and now this. In this it is the titular princess rather than a prince, who swears vengeance on her uncle for killing her father and marrying her mother. So the story begins in 16th century Denmark, but soon moves to this otherworldly setting after Scarlet is poisoned by Claudius and wakes up in this world which is a kind of purgatory. It's somewhere between this world and the next. Here the living and the dead seem to coexist as do past and future, as she discovers when her path crosses with that of a modern day paramedic. It's all very, very meta. I'm going to play you a clip. The clip is not in the English language. I'm just going to tell you what you're going to hear. You're going to hear Scarlet saying, I will take revenge. Then the king says, chosen warriors, pledge your loyalty to me. Do not fear, fight. Capture the princess. And Scarlett says, my uncle took everything from me. My father, my people, my homeland. I will find him and take my revenge. And then a third voice says, wait, don't you want to know? At that moment I heard the king's whisper. Here is the clip. So the king's whisper was the king's last words before execution, his last words to his daughter, which she couldn't hear over the side of the crowd, but this character has heard and the last thing he said, and this is kind of crucial, it's not a plot spoiler is forgive. So, but forgive what? Forgive who? You know, in what context. And that really is the subject of the film, which is the battle between vengeance. Because the whole thing with, as we all know, we've talked about, is Hamlet dithering about whether or not he can carry out the vengeance that the ghost of his, the ghost of the deceased father has told him that he needs to enact or whether, you know, an act of grace is better and more importantly, whether an act of grace sometime in the past can affect the future and the fact that we're all going to end up fighting wars forever and ever and ever. So these are big themes, these are big subjects, these are kind of quite big metaphysical issues, but told in a way which is fairly populous the film took over four years to make and it combines old school 2D animation with modern CG. And this is most notable in there are several scenes in which you've got astonishingly rendered and often quite jaw dropping, almost photorealist. Backdrops of raging oceans, vast deserts, huge sort of crumbled societies. And then the characters themselves who are more conventionally 2D animated, certainly in the way that they move. There's also this absolutely massive lightning breathing dragon which appears at various intervals and honestly deserves to be seen in something like imax because even the screening room that I saw it in, which is a fairly small screening room, is pretty awe inspiring. So visually it is kind of breathtaking, eye catching. If you're a 2D purist, you might blanch at the use of CG. And when the film premiered in, I think it was Venice. And it got like a ten minute standing ovation. But then one always has to say everything gets a 10 minute standing ovation nowadays at festivals. And then when it opened in the real world outside of the festival circuit, the response was much more muted. In Japan, I think it, it went top three but didn't go number one, which is remarkable for something of this scale. And its box office has been soft to very disappointing. And then in the US it hasn't actually fared much better. And I was trying to figure out why. I think part of the problem is that the narrative, which despite the fact that this is the retelling of a fairly familiar story, albeit a very changed version of that, it does manage to get quite muddled, particularly in the thing about the otherworld, because it's like, okay, what is this otherworld? How come there are people who are in it that are dead and people in it who are clearly alive? And what's the deal with the dragon? Which is really impressive, but just I'm not entirely sure what the dragon is. And how come there's only one character from the future, because if time really doesn't matter, surely everyone would be from different periods. And I'm. I'm thinking that whilst I'm thinking these things, there is a fundamental flaw in the storytelling. The fact that I'm even raising these issues because heaven knows, I mean, I was referring to Silent Running. Some of the best stories don't make any sense, but you're swept up in them and that does. There's a certain sense of detachment, the general feeling from. Because I read some reviews of it from people who were sort of, you know, hardcore anime fans. They thought that it was kind of messy Narratively and stylistically. I mean, I have to say, I had, I. I had gone in knowing that the film hadn't. Hadn't kind of struck the nerve that they wanted it to. And so therefore I had slightly lowered expectations. And sometimes that is the best way to see a film, because I did enjoy it. I did think it was visually very, very impressive. And there are certain things in it, particularly the whole thing about forgiveness and revenge and the idea that it may be possible to stop a cycle of war by simply turning your back on the vengeful part of, you know, of human nature. I thought that was kind of interesting. Then again, I am the person who liked Goro Miyazaki's Earthsea, which you remember, I reviewed when it came out and that was received very, very sniffly. So much so, in fact, Hayao Miyazaki, who is the director's father, walked out of a screening of it. He said he was going out for a smoke, but he didn't talk to his son about it for ages and then said afterwards his comment was, you shouldn't make a picture based on your emotions. So I don't have a great track record of being particularly purist about this stuff, but I. I enjoyed it more than I thought I was going to, having gone in with lowered expectations. But I do think that even the most charitable assessment of it is it is not up there with the director's best work. There are things in it that are arresting but is kind of all over the place.
