“Everyone thinks we go to heaven or hell when we die,” Scarlet tells Hijiri in “Scarlet” after the two have found themselves somewhere in between. The latter hails from the present day where he works as a nurse while the former is from the 16th century, banished from the kingdom that her father ruled after his brother staged a coup, and the two have met in a place colloquially known as “the Other World” where lost souls mill about, some more accepting of their fate than others when they essentially live in limbo. People there make make up their own minds about whether they’ve been consigned to eternal damnation or perpetual bliss when there’s no obvious path out, but in Mamoru Hosoda’s enthralling epic, what can’t be denied is the opportunity to cross paths with others that they would have no reason to intersect with otherwise across generations or cultures, all pulled into the same reality.
To create such a place, the legendary director of “Mirai” and “Summer Wars” needed to plot an escape of his own, not wanting to necessarily return to the hand-drawn animation that he had come to master or making a film that heavily involved computer graphics. It would take years to develop the right style for “Scarlet,” where the Other World can often appear hyperrealistic in its backdrops but counterintuitively employs the latest technology to accentuate the human touch when the characters are so expressive in a marriage of more traditional 2D and 3D animation. The innovative hybrid form gives extra verve to an already propulsive tale of revenge when Scarlet’s determination to find her way out of the world is driven by a desire to get justice for her slain father, and fittingly, Hosoda doesn’t hide the initial inspiration of “Hamlet” when she’s originally from Denmark, but in complicating notions of time and space, her horizons could be broadened beyond any passing satisfaction she could take in succeeding in her vendetta as the universe makes it seem relatively petty in the grander scheme of things.
With the scale that Hosoda summons, it isn’t difficult to understand a potential change of heart as Scarlet becomes to overwhelmed with the world’s beauty to be consumed with anger and “Scarlet” delivers a cinematic experience to be in awe of as the filmmaker may have sought out the most cutting edge of techniques to dazzle audiences, but he looks to cultural traditions from around the world in concert with one another to truly touch the heart. With the film now playing a one-week Oscar-qualifying run in Los Angeles and New York ahead of a nationwide IMAX release in February, the director, with the help of a translator, graciously took the time to talk about the genesis of the film, breaking new ground in animation to pull off what the story demanded, and how a tight-knit crew on screen and off came to trust each other enough to take risks.
How did this come about?
One of the big origins of this story was to make a revenge story — for the entertainment factor [since] I know people love revenge stories, it’s very easy to to get behind. But I also wanted to marry that with some current events, taking this classical narrative, but interpreting it through a modern lens and transforming that into an entertainment spectacle. When trying to balance all of these factors, I arrived at “Hamlet,” which I would argue is one of the original revenge stories, taking place 400 years ago in in Europe during the medieval times.
Certainly, the main character Scarlet’s entire motivation is she wants to kill this guy [like Hamlet]. But when thinking of a character absolutely driven by revenge, I started to think about an entirely opposite character and have the two of them travel together and see what might happen. I thought of a nurse whose entire existence is about helping people and watching the two of them travel together, perhaps maybe Scarlet might change her mind and her motivation as a character might shift and vice versa, perhaps Hijiri, by traveling with Scarlet, might also begin to see the world through a different lens.
This idea of the Other World is fascinating when you’re able to pull characters from different eras and different cultures. How did you figure out how to populate it?
The other world in “Scarlet” really is a melting pot of all souls from history and all the other worlds that that exist. A huge point of inspiration was Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” where Dante travels through the different layers of the world and the land of the dead and in doing so, he encounters all of these figures throughout history from Roman to Greek poets to all these legends who’ve kind of shaped the world. And I thought to myself, “If Dante is able to travel and meet these people in this afterlife, “Scarlet” could almost be like a time travel piece in a weird way. It’s a post-world of the living time where someone from a certain era is able to exchange ideas or be able to be influenced by someone from a different era, but it wouldn’t be a sci-fi time travel-type [piece], but in this type of time travel, it’s something that anyone can experience because all you have to do is go to this land of the dead. In “Scarlet,” I wanted this melting pot of influence to be at the forefront, which is how this other world came to be and all the different cultures it draws upon.
The Hawaiian folk song is a particularly beautiful moment in the film. How did that enter the picture?
In this another world, there are many different cultures and perhaps there are tendencies in these circumstances to lean on the dominant Western cultures or even the dominant Chinese Eastern cultures that shape the world. But I felt that there are a lot of smaller cultures, more nuanced cultures that could certainly be represented in this type of setting that don’t often get to see that type of representation. When I did my own research,I traveled to Hawaii to learn about the ancient hula dance and [found it was] a means of communicating with gods through dance. That’s how they were people were expressing their wishes and desire to the gods, and I felt that that was a very important ritual, especially in the Other World. Seeing this dance in person in Hawaii made me feel some kind of spiritual connection as well with some power perhaps beyond our control, whether you call that God or not. That’s something that I felt and I wanted the audiences to also feel through this film because of how how powerful it was.
The animation style for the film is wholly original and I understand took time to develop when it isn’t either exactly hand-drawn or computer generated. What was it like to find the right style?
With “Scarlet,” the theme and the scale of the story itself is quite big and traditional 2D hand-drawn styles wouldn’t be able to fully capture the intent of what this world and characters are supposed to do. So it was important for us to come up with this new visual language. The fully 3D CG look is something that’s quite foreign to a lot of Japanese audiences, but at the same time, the 2D traditional Japanese animation style is something that I think carries a lot of nuance and a lot of character performances that we wanted to make sure we inherited but also expanded upon while also doing things that weren’t possible exclusively in 2D hand drawn animation. What we ended up with was something that wasn’t fully 2D but wasn’t fully 3D in the traditional sense of how people interpret that type of visual expression. We arrived at this new visual language, and because of that, it allowed us to really expand and communicate certain nuances of characters that a 2D traditional style would not have been able to do, little hints and details communicate something to the audience about what the character has been through.
Looking back, this visual language that we created for the film was quite innovative. The visual language development we set out to do [was a lot of] trial and error. The [research and development] gave me ideas, like “Oh wow, if this is possible, then we can expand what this character’s expression is going to be.” The cell sell-based animation style is very, very anime and it’s great for when you want to abstract ideas, either intended for kids, for families, or huge anime fans. There are ways to communicate shorthand what characters are doing. But for me it was important to also look beyond that audience while still retaining some of the essence of 2D traditional animation. This new look was supposed to be able to to withstand a much larger scale story and a universal theme, and I really didn’t even want to restrict it to the medium of anime or animation. You see a lot of live-action epics that take on big themes and big characters and big stories. And I think that this new visual look and others have the ability to go beyond that expression of all the characters [to have a whole new] range of performances.
It’s so inspiring to see someone of your stature still be taking risks like this. What’s it like to put yourself out there like this and see it pay off?
This is a really interesting question because I think in order to get to where we are right now, this been a huge buildup. All the different films I’ve worked on throughout my career, the different artists I’ve collaborated with is what helped get us to a point where we felt comfortable enough to take a big swing on this scale and develop a new visual language to tell a bigger story than than we have [before]. On the other hand, I think there are audiences who like the traditional anime style and cell-based 2D animation, so perhaps they might not be so into this new visual style, but like everything, I think in order to change the future, there needs to be something that challenges the status quo and that’s good on occasion. Whether or not this will be accepted is something that remains to be seen, but I am confident that what we have put together is something that has this emotional journey and if people have an open mind, they might be exposed to something that they may not have been otherwise.
“Scarlet” opens for a one-week Oscar-qualifying run on December 12th in Los Angeles at the AMC Americana in Glendale and New York at the AMC 34th St. It will open in wider release on February 6th.