Scarlet

Animator-director Mamoru Hosoda (Belle, NYFF59) transports viewers to jaw-dropping fantasy worlds that exist in the dazzling space between two- and three-dimensional realms. In his towering new achievement, Hosoda conjures a phantasmal riff on Hamlet: after attempting to avenge the brutal death of her father at the hands of her power-hungry uncle Claudius in 16th-century Elsinore, the princess Scarlet awakes in the Land of the Dead. In this forbidding purgatory of mountains and desert, governed by a powerful godlike dragon, Scarlet must fight for her own soul and body while still vowing to defeat Claudius. Yet her plans are complicated by the presence of the handsome Hijiri, a saintly hospital nurse from our contemporary world who refuses to accept that he’s dead—or that revenge can end history’s cycles of violence. Combining weighty Shakespearean themes with wondrous anime imagery, Hosoda has made an epic fantasy that weighs the human impulse for revenge against the need for care, forgiveness, and survival. A Sony Pictures Classics release.