One reason I’ve stuck with the Star Wars franchise is that the original trilogy of movies are so rich, they point to storytelling possibilities far beyond the Skywalker saga space opera.
Star Wars: Visions harks to Luke’s cave encounter in The Empire Strikes Back, an imagined Darth Vader duel in which lightsabers are swung but what’s at stake is the relationship between the two Skywalkers and the future they may or may not share.
The entire saga is heavily indebted to Japanese culture, with Akira Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress serving as a major touchpoint for everything from samurai style to plot points and supporting characters in the original Star Wars. Thus, it felt like a homecoming when Lucasfilm tapped Japanese animation studios to create a series of shorts released in 2021 as Star Wars: Visions.
A second volume, drawing on studios around the world (including Aardman, home of Wallace and Gromit), was released in 2023. A third volume, returning to exclusively Japanese studios, drops on October 29.
Fans who have followed the series this far know what to expect: the unexpected. While there are rewards to the rigorous canon maintenance of Disney-era Star Wars, it’s also freeing to forget about all that and just let each story exist on its own. The vibe is something like Star Wars Lego, but without all the fast-paced gags: Visions leaves room for wonder.
The signature segment of the series remains the first: “The Duel,” a sweeping short by Kamikaze Douga that finds a wandering samurai confronting a Sith Lord in a gorgeously stylized feudal setting. Kamikaze Douga, with ANIMA, returns in Volume 3 with another Ronin story, this one involving swimming Ewoks and a walking casino mounted on two AT-ATs.
It’s another banger, setting the scene for a wondrous journey that makes for the most visually stunning Visions volume yet. Another jaw-dropper comes straightaway in Project Studio Q’s “The Song of Four Wings,” which finds gasshō-zukuri farmhouses on a snow planet patrolled by a Rebel princess blasting electronic music.
You’re starting to get the idea, if you weren’t familiar already. While the breadth of international representation in Volume 2 made for an engaging experience, Japanese creators have a particular knack for making Star Wars iconography their own. (In part, no doubt, that’s because it was really their own to begin with.)
In these stories, the protagonists are often independent warriors balancing their relationships to family, mentors, and community. In episodes like “The Lost Ones” (Kinema citrus Co.), the Empire looms as a totalizing threat to individuals’ independence, claiming all the galaxy as its own.
That resonates with stories of colonization and assimilation known well in Japan, not to mention the United States. These episodes also, though, draw on Japanese storytellers’ gift for blending profound themes with extreme cuteness. Loyal robots in “The Ninth Jedi: Child of Hope” (Production I.G) and “Yuko’s Treasure” (Kinema citrus Co.) make R2-D2 look like an Ugnaught.
None of the episodes are anything less than visually dazzling, but Volume 3 saves the real pyrotechnics for the end: “The Bird of Paradise” (Polygon Pictures) and “BLACK” (david production) both depart from conventional storytelling and demand to be soaked in. The former’s metaphorical connection between literal blindness and spiritual blindness borders is problematic, but it certainly looks amazing.
The Visions project is set to become even bigger, with characters growing into entire limited series of their own in 2026. (Lah Kara from the “Ninth Jedi” stories will be first.) That’s good news for fans of superb animation that takes Star Wars mythology as inspiration, not scripture.
Images courtesy Lucasfilm Ltd.
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