Mamoru Hosoda’s anime feature “Scarlet” is a provocative and daring new take on Shakespeare’s greatest play. His epic anime gender swaps the lead role, so Scarlet (Mana Ashida) is the Princess of Denmark. Her uncle Claudius (Kōji Yakusho) slays her father, marries her mother Gertrude (Yutaka Matsushige), and embarks on a reign of terror. Scarlet swears she’ll have her revenge, but her plan backfires. So she dies, and that’s where the movie starts. Scarlet/Hamlet’s lust for vengeance is so insatiable, not even death quash it. So she scours Purgatory, or possibly Hell, in search of the soul of Claudius, who has amassed an army of the dead, and plans to storm his way upwards to salvation. Along the way Scarlet makes an alliance with the pacifist Hijiri (Masaki Okada), a 21st century paramedic, because time has no meaning in the afterlife. -TheWrap

“Scarlet is a film of many wonders … rendered in complicated and striking animation. It is also, however, a film of ideas…”-Mark Reviews Movies