Mamoru Hosoda is troubled by a world where children die. The director and father of two made that concern a driving principle of his new film, Scarlet , a fantastical animated adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet that opens at New York Film Festival next week. In Hosoda’s gender-swapped retelling, a medieval princess watches as her father is publicly executed and usurped, and she swears revenge. The director gives her a conscience and companion in Hijiri, a nurse from present-day Japan who attempts to show her that she deserves a life of peace. Nonetheless, her bloodlust propels her through a liminal purgatory called Otherworld, a desert plane of reality ravaged by war, rife with innocent victims, and haunted by rootless spirits like her.

Like his Japanese filmmaking peer Hayao Miyazak

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