Mamoru Hosoda had no idea that there were so many Hamlet movies in 2025 until he was asked about it at the Toronto Film Festival. These include Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet, which explores the tragic inspiration for Hamlet, the modern take set in London’s South Asian community, starring Riz Ahmed, King Hamlet, a documentary about Oscar Isaac facing personal grief during his 2017 performance of the play. In addition, there was last year’s Grand Theft Hamlet, a documentary concerning a performance of the play within a violent video game.

Yet for the legendary anime director, Scarlet (Sony Pictures Classics, opening December 12 for a one-week Oscar-qualifying run) cried out to be an animated Hamlet to confront the war and hate that define our time. “I wanted to do a revenge story,” Hosoda said through an interpreter. “And I think one of the earliest revenge stories that have been written is Hamlet. And there’s definitely a lot of room for creative agency and interpretation there. Perhaps there is some kind of cultural need  to see Hamlet adapted and brought to audiences in different ways right now. There is some deeper meaning to it.

“So I thought about what would change and what wouldn’t change in Hamlet. And, in that process, I wanted to depict the relationship between the characters from 400 years ago and today. And I thought of what these characters were going through back then in medieval times, and what characters in the present would go through, and place the two of them next to each other to see how their relationship would evolve. So I wanted to make it a very contrasting composition.”

While much of Hamlet has been retained, Hosoda gender-swaps the protagonist and gives us the titular, sword-fighting princess (Mana Ashida) on a vengeful quest to avenge the death of her father. In typical fashion, the director then places Scarlet in a hellscape purgatory after she’s been poisoned, so she can endure a violent, bloody rite of passage alongside a compassionate male nurse, Hiijiri (Masaki Okada), from contemporary Japan.

As far as his desire to once again explore different timelines (as he did in The Girl Who Leapt Through Time and Mirai), Hosoda found it useful in connecting the dots between the past and present. “Revenge, war, and modern society that has become two-faced,” he explained. “It’s a game that’s played at the national level, but I think it’s also happening at the individual level.

“For example, when I think about the feeling of Ukrainians and Russians, both of them want to get back at each other. I think it’s all connected to peace. When you adapt Hamlet as a project, even just looking at the Ukraine and Russia situation, it seems like an infinite cycle of revenge.They hit me, so we’ve got to hit back, and then we’re going to hit them back again. I wonder if this type of conflict is just destined to continue forever, or, perhaps, if there is another path to escape this infinite loop. Just looking at the news and doing my own research, it alluded a lot to this hell-like landscape that war, old-fashioned war, brings about. That really got me thinking [about the purgatory civilization called the ‘Otherlands’].”

Meanwhile, the character of Hiijiri was inspired by a nurse who attended to Hosoda when he was hospitalized with COVID-19. She encouraged and helped him and gave him courage, and it got him thinking about how he could flip the Ophelia character from Hamlet. “Scarlet looks at life as something to take away for one’s own goal or mission,” he added. “On the other hand, Hiijiri saves lives for a living. I tried to imagine if these nurses were placed in this type of setting, how would they interact with a character like Scarlet? How would they guide such a character away from death? Maybe there’s a different use or application for all of this energy that you have. That’s how I started to think about Hiijiri as a character.”

When it came to the complex animated style (from Tokyo-based Studio Chizu), this required a contrasting relationship  between 2D and 3D. “This is a story where two completely different things influence each other,” Hosoda suggested. “The expression of 2D and 3D is like the concept of duality. I wanted to make it look like a new expression. The characters look like 2D but it’s actually 3D. However, I tried to make it look new by extending the traditional hand-drawing method.”

To help achieve his own aesthetic, the director consulted with Sony about the Spider-Verse franchise, Fortiche about the Arcane franchise, and Pixar director Domee Shi about Turning Red. “I think animation is the most modern form of expression in the history of foreign countries,” Hosoda suggested. “I would argue that animation has been around for 4,000 years. There have been revolutions in the history of foreign countries, and there should be more revolutions in the history of animation. Everyone has a desire to express something new. I feel the same way. I want to do that to make animation more interesting. And everyone I spoke to believed that there was a lot more potential for animation to express and capture different ideas.”

While discussing AI at the Toronto International Film Festival, Hosoda admitted to being conflicted about its future impact on the animation industry. “I don’t know necessarily what the answer is, but one conclusion we came to was that we just need to create a visual that AI couldn’t possibly create and put it on the screen. You want to make people happy, you want to impress them, you want to surprise them. I hope that these feelings will be reflect in [Scarlet].”

Scarlet opens on IMAX screens February 6, followed by a nationwide release on February 13.