While You Can: Scarlet and Dust Bunny

I'm a bad "the guy you know who sees everything and recommends the good stuff online" these days, but it's especially acute with these two movies that I quite liked and which I knew were going to be short-timers. They're fun and deserve the biggest screens you can see them on, and they've got maybe a day or so of that left, as both seem to have got these releases to fill screens before the blockbusters arrive on the 19th.

Scarlet might be back on Imax screens come 6 February, depending where you live; none of the other things being released that day seem likely to bump Send Help and, at least in the Boston area, big anime releases tend to get the big screen, and this release may give Sony Pictures Classics more reason to open it wide: The 12-18 November run is an Oscar qualifying release, but while LA and NYC have traditionally been enough for that, this getting Imax screens in ten cities. There doesn't seem to be an animated feature shortlist, but of the 35 qualified features there are six big-studio ones (The Bad Guys 2, Dog Man, Elio, KPop Demon Hunters, Zootopia 2), two big animes (Chainsaw Man, Demon Slayer), and a few wild cards (this, Arco, Fixed, The Legend of Hei 2, Night of the Zoopocalypse). I don't know how many Academy members/voters there are in the Boston area, or the other places it's released, but it could be the difference between being 6th in the voting and 5th, and thus being able to be advertised as an Academy Award Nominee when it gets its regular release.

I must admit, the idea that Sony has rented out the biggest screen at Assembly Row for a week on the off chance that Frederick Wiseman decides to watch some anime tickles me. It should be there tomorrow (Wednesday), then bumped to a regular laser screen on Thursday, then so long for a month and a half.

Dust Bunny, on the other hand, is more a "grab some screens during a window between big weekends and hope you get lucky" play. It's got a 2024 copyright date on the end, so it's possible Lionsgate/Roadside Attractions weren't really sure what to do with it for a year or so, and I kind of get that. It's a weird one that probably mostly appeals to folks who know who writer/director Bryan Fuller is, and maybe folks figure that television/streaming is its natural home because that's where he's done almost all of his work. It'll look really cramped there, though - it's got a super-wide 3.00:1 aspect ratio and a lot of detail - and I'd kind of love to see if it would hit with a bigger crowd, or a different one. It was kind of hardcore nerds.

It's playing Boston Common & the Seaport on Wednesday, just matinees at the Common on Thursday, and after that, you have to head to the Liberty Tree Mall in Danvers, where it's holding spots until the Christmas releases.

I wonder how both will play with younger viewers, too - Scarlet is PG-13 and Dust Bunny is R, both for violence, and I kind of wonder if that would be reversed if Scarlet used guns and Dust Bunny used knives. They both feel like things that could drop tween/teen jaws.


Hateshinaki Sukâretto (Scarlet)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 12 December 2025 in AMC Assembly Row #1 (limited release, Imax Laser)
Where to stream it (when available)

Scarlet may be writer/director Mamoru Hosoda's best since The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, and it's not like the other films he's made since haven't been some of the best anime coming out of Japan. It's certainly his most ambitious. Those ambitions aren't subtle, but they're earnest, and he's willing to let them wind up a frayed mess by the finale where some might engineer a more pat resolution. Heck, it feels like he can see the audience watching for the moment when he cheats and dances around it.

Scarlet (voice of Mana Ashida) is a princess in 16th Century Denmark, beloved of the people and her father King Amleth (voice of Masachika Ichimura), a pacifist who favors negotiation with his neighbors rather than competition. But, well, something is rotten in the State of Denmark, and Amleth's brother Claudius (voice of Koji Yakusho) usurps the throne and marries Queen Gertrude (voice of Yuki Saito), and while Scarlet aims to take revenge, he strikes first, poisoning her. She wakes up in The Otherworld, a purgatorial afterlife out of time, and when she finds out Claudius is there as well, sets out to finally end his existence. What she doesn't count on is falling in with Hiriji (voice of Masaki Okada), a paramedic from 21st Century Tokyo, who is kind-hearted and even treats the foes Scarlet fights along the way to confront Claudius in his castle near the gate to the next world.

Along the way, Scarlet is a frequently-dazzling piece of animation that mixes its traditional and digital pieces in smart ways: The cel-shaded CGI Otherworld looks kind of uncanny while the hand-drawn Denmark feels real, but not jarringly so; the two styles are just similar enough that one might not necessarily clock a difference in style versus tone, especially during a later visit to what may be the living world. There are more action beats than Hosoda usually goes with, with swordfighting that's exciting enough for one to notice there's quality choreography, and a fantastic dragon that explains its purpose with action rather than any exposition. It's more intentionally multi-ethnic than anime often is - it feels noteworthy that many of the nomads Scarlet and Hiriji encounter are Middle Eastern, both fitting the desert environment and perhaps a reference to how many laborers in Japan are Kurdish and other MENA refugees - and merges its influences well.

The action is intense, but there's also a fair amount of fun amid the intensity, with the Hamlet references playful ("get thee to a monastery!") and a bit more fun for those of us who have seen Hamnet a week earlier. That's kind of important because Hosoda is putting Scarlet and Hiriji through the ringer for a purpose: Hiriji's quiet decency does not quite seem naive compared to Scarlet's grim desire for revenge - he's aware that he comes from a more peaceful era - but it's a constant, non-judgmental reminder that Scarlet has fallen from the girl who truly believed in her father's ideals, and regaining them is hard; she's seen too much and committed to doing too much. We've seen her shed the lovely princess gown and put on armor like she'd decided that was her true self, and her glimpse of Hiriji's world is both inspiring and the cause of some despair - how can there be a place like that when so many suffer?

It's that confusion that makes her final confrontation with Claudius raw and stressful - she's been both laid low by Claudius and Gertrude's betrayal and hurt as she has crossed a barren wasteland, but has also seen the good examples of Amleth and Hiriji, and how they have had an effect on those she would see as enemies. She wants to do the right thing, but knows that any kindness on her part will be met with violence and cruelty by Claudius. One can feel Hosoda trying to find a resolution to this that is both hopeful but honest, and doesn't use the circling dragon as a heavenly deus ex machina that says everything will be put right, and he mostly manages it. It's tricky and messy, but then, one shouldn't be completely reassured that things will work out.

Here's hoping that Sony's gambit to get this in front of some Academy voters so they can market this as an Oscar Nominee in February works; it's a worthy film that deserves the boost.


Dust Bunny

* * * (out of four)
Seen 13 December 2025 in Alamo Seaport #1 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available) (Prime pre-order link)

Somewhere around the middle,Dust Bunny becomes rather a lot, piling more and more on but not necessarily paying things off to make room, writer/director Bryan Fuller maybe being a little too coy about the nature of his genre crossover and not quite having the time to service everything he's got in play without tipping his hand too much. But even when you can see the movie straining, Fuller is filling a Barry Sonnenfeld-shaped void at the movies that I hadn't quite realized was there, in a way that's very much his own. It's instantly recognizable for those who have seen his TV work, and makes you wonder why he hasn't done film before.

The story at least seems simple enough - eight-year-old Aurora (Sophie Sloan) is convinced there is a monster under her bed, and the disappearance of the parents who pooh-poohed the possibility doesn't exactly give the audience reason to suppose that the lint underneath coalescing into something is anything but what it looks like. A neighbor (Mads Mikkelsen) catches her attention, especially when she seems to see him slaying a dragon late at night in Chinatown. She offers him money to kill her monster, but the fact that she has seen his "monster-slaying" activities puts him in a bind, and the pair of them in danger.

That sequence with the neighbor and the dragon and everything around it is a delight, a merger of elaborate production design, whimsical choreography, and well-used visual effects that sets the stage for the film's heightened world and balances the different perspectives of Aurora and the unnamed neighbor without tipping its hand too much. It's full of movement that is fluid but also kind of unnatural. A thing one can't help but notice in this and other scenes at this end of the film is that Fuller doesn't have Mikkelsen or Sloan speak when their characters wouldn't, trusting their particular body language to say what needs to be said and allowing them to demonstrate and withhold in a way that feels natural. The action piece that balances the film on the other end is a different beast, chaotic and with a fair amount of talk to make things clear, but that's kind of right, in its way; the film is setting up and resolving mysteries through action, and each fits that purpose.

The rest of Dust Bunny, filled with contention between the central pair and those in their orbit, is an odd duck. It's the rare movie that gets an R rating for "some violence", and I wouldn't be surprised if the studio spent the last year trying to squeeze it into a PG-13 - I suspect it's the use of guns rather than fantasy weapons that keeps that from happening - and because it feels like the sort of thing that made tweens go for Tim Burton 40 years ago, an ornate darkness with corners to explore where every character worth the audience's affection has innocent and cynical sides in conflict (I'd have little trouble recommending it to my 14/15-year-old nieces). It can't quite square that circle, and you can kind of feel Fuller circling around something about violence being difficult to escape once it's unleashed or monsters inside everyone but not quite landing, seemingly struggling to turn his script into a story that does more than look cool and make you grin at its eccentricity.

That eccentricity is a ball, though, with the visual team going full-on maximal in the extremely wide screen frame - it is very much from the imagination of the creator of Pushing Daisies and Wonderfalls - and the combination of puppetry and digital animation for the titular monster is nifty: It must, at various times be unnerving both believable and unbelievable in turn, and mostly manages that. One can feel Mads Mikkelsen getting into a groove as the movie goes on, his weathered cool a perfect sort of contrast with Sophie Sloan's cherubic agitation. David Dastmalchian shows up to steal a bunch of scenes in the end, and Sheila Atim does fairly nice work as someone who is often a catalyst but seems real enough that she's not just there to make things happen. Sigourney Weaver gets a tough draw, her shadowy but stylish operator is threatening but not quite charismatic.

It's a mess, but the visuals and performances and fun soundtrack tend to be elaborate and charming without ever losing track of how it's a kid's scary story set in a John Wick-like world. I had a blast with it, even when it was treading water; it's all the colorful fantasy invention of a Fuller TV show compacted down to about 100 minutes, and I hope Fuller gets to do more like it on the big screen.