Scarlet Movie Review: Wishful Thinking or Inspiring Hope?
by Jonathan Beltran, in collaboration with “heroofheart” of Geek vs Fan
Mamoru Hosoda’s latest film, Scarlet, set for theaters on early February 2026.
Your backdoor anime hangout had the press media opportunity to watch Mamoru Hosoda’s latest film, Scarlet, at the Animation is Film Festival. The plot goes:
After witnessing her father’s wrongful execution, Scarlet is hellbent on revenge towards her uncle and father’s murder, Claudius. However due to Claudius’s cunning, he poisons her and Scarlet is brought into a purgatory where the living, the dead, time, and space live all at once. Now in this world, she is determined to escape in the hopes of completing her revenge; however when she is killed in the world, she will be permanently dead.
This is Hosoda’s most ambitious and potentially divisive film as it utilizes the 2D/3D hybrid animation style inspired from Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse and Arcane while telling an epic loosely adapted from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. To discuss and dig deeper into the film’s scope, execution, and theme I talk with a fellow geek (or fan) of Hosoda’s filmography - “heroofheart”- of the entertainment publication Geek vs Fan.
FYI - Spoiler Talk begins on the 31:36 mark.
Scarlet will have its theatrical wide release in the beginning of February 2026.
In IMAX beginning on 06 February 2026.
Wide release on 13 February 2026.