Star Wars: Visions review: proof Star Wars doesn’t need Luke Skywalker

Star Wars: Visions, the first original anime series in Disney Plus, complete the circle of the Star Wars franchise through Japanese animation. For a series whose origins were so heavily influenced by George Lucas’s love for Akira Kurosawa and jidaigeki (“Period drama”), the idea of ​​a Star Wars anime anthology feels as natural as the Force itself.

“We always thought that the vernacular of the anime would work well with Star Wars […] But if you think of Star Wars five or six years ago, we were in a very different place. ” Visions Executive producer James Waugh tells Polygon. “We were relaunching a franchise in a really big way, it was function-based.” It wasn’t until the Disney library had a streaming home that a potential Star Wars anime project finally found its base. “I don’t think a series of shorts was something that really had a destination before Disney Plus,” he says.

Star Wars: Visions makes a tantalizing promise: to bring together some of the most exciting talents working in modern anime, including Hiroyuki Imaishi (Promar), Kenji Kamiyama (Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex), Eunyoung Choi (Kaiba, Ping Pong Animation) and Masahiko Otsuka (FLCL, Gurren Lagann) – and unleash them to tell their own stories in the Star Wars universe, to hell with canon. In addition to offering thrilling action, the resulting nine shorts represent the clearest interrogation of the soul of Star Wars since 2017. The last jedi.

In its 44-year history, Star Wars has spawned more branches and splits than clone troopers on Kamino. But since acquiring Lucasfilm in 2012, Disney and the new Lucasfilm regime have struggled to pin down, let alone expand, the definition of Star Wars. The struggle is most evident in the conflicting productions and the scattered reception of Rogue one and Only. Audiences want more Star Wars stories, but what “more Star Wars” means has never been clearer than, say, the Marvel Studios equation. As a whole, the series is defined both by its iconography and by its unifying themes of hope, perseverance, family love, and courage in the face of temptation and doubt.

While those core principles are more or less undisputed by the fanbase, the details of the stories in which those themes play out create contention. There is a vocal base of fans who simply want new stories featuring Luke, Leia, and Han Solo, and if not that, stories that intersect with or approach the established tradition of Skywalker Saga stories. Even Jon Favreau’s western space TV series The mandolorian, which began as an episodic story focusing on characters entirely new to the franchise, inevitably returned to incorporate Luke Skywalker and Boba Fett in its second season.

There are others who believe that the future of the Star Wars universe lies on the fringes of the unknown and the unknown, stories that introduce entirely new characters whose arcs elaborate and analyze the fundamental elements of the series. Many of those people are involved with Star Wars today; The impetus for Lucasfilm’s High Republic publishing initiative was to create a space in the galactic timeline that could be completely original and free from the burden of connecting with a central story. With how long and embattled the debate between these two fields of thought has been in the wake of the aforementioned sequel trilogy, the one thing everyone seems to agree on is that lightsabers are great.

Each delivery of Star Wars: Visions splits the difference between these polar interpretations of the franchise, telling stories that feel deeply ingrained both in the conventions of anime storytelling and in the animation principles of Star Wars itself. Takanobu Mizuno’s “The Duel” feels like a classic Star Wars showdown through Kurosawa Yojimbo, with a taciturn protagonist with questionable allegiances to the side of Light or Dark, but a moral code resolved to protect a small village from a band of marauders affiliated with the Sith. Everything you could want from a Star Wars fight is here, from the dazzling choreography and scene transitions to a fantastic “oh shit” moment in the style of Darth Maul’s double lightsaber reveal in the form of the lightsaber umbrella of the leader of the Sith bandits. While the short hits the beat of a Star Wars lightsaber duel, the exception is that neither the protagonist nor his adversary fits the description of what one would normally define as a Star Wars “hero.” The protagonist, simply credited as “Ronin”, is not a Jedi, but implicitly a former Sith Knight wielding a red lightsaber. Questions as to why they are hunting Sith Bandits and collecting red kyber crystals are never answered in the short itself, instead prompting the audience to consider alternative motivations of Force users beyond the archetypal dichotomy of what we have come to. to identify as “good” or “evil.”

Hiroyuki Imaishi’s “The Twins” centers on Karre and Am, two genetically engineered brothers by the Empire whose relationship mirrors that of Luke and Leia, but whose disagreement and the resulting clash are reminiscent of Rey and Kylo Ren. Their climactic confrontation is the kind of explosive maximalism, anything goes, that you would expect from the director of Gurren Lagann and Promar, freshly rendered through the visual language of Star Wars. In truth, only Imaishi could find a way to relive the Holdo maneuver, one of the most dazzling (and controversial) moments in The last jedi. The armor designs of both characters evoke comparisons to Darth Vader, arguably the most iconic character in the entire franchise, with Karre later adopting an outfit that bears an uncanny resemblance to Han Solo’s in A new hope.

But despite all the invocations to the classic “light versus dark” fight, “The Twins” is ultimately an inversion, focusing on a conflict of consciousness within the dark side and presented in a visual style that makes make this performance feel bold and exciting. The ending suggests that fate is as much a matter of choice as it is a matter of circumstance, and that one does not necessarily need to be aligned with the light side of the Force to do the right thing.

For every rhythm of family history that is repeated in the nine shorts, there is an exciting and unprecedented twist to the mix. Where else in the Star Wars media will you find a bunny wielding a lightsaber to save her adoptive family, invoking the notion from the sequel trilogy that you don’t have to be the “chosen one” to defend? and save your beloved? some? Or a former Padawan who ends up hiding as the lead singer of an intergalactic rock band, one that echoes the recurring trope of the series found family that feels distilled from the opening scenes of Luke, Leia, and Han meeting for the first time?

In “S0-B1”, a robot boy battles a Sith inquisitor to avenge his creator. Anime fans will probably read it as an Osamu Tezuka riff. Astro Boy. But it is still based on a piece from Star Wars, the idea that the Force is a power that exists in all living things, whether they are organic or inorganic. Each short is distinct in its respective visual style and story, and each share an intimate knowledge and understanding of the basic principles of what makes the franchise what it is beyond Luke Skywalker and his circle of cohorts.

On a broader level, the Visions The shorts are in sync with the way the George Lucas movies and the Disney sequel trilogy end, in which nothing ends. Like Luke at the end of A new hope o King at the end of The awakening of the force, each anime director’s story effectively feels like the first chapter of what their respective sagas could potentially be. While the iconography of lightsabers and the powers of the Force and Star Destroyers taking off in hyperdrive are essential touchstones of the visual language of Star Wars, which is more fundamental to its universe, and in particular, the stories that are told within it, is the notion that the outcome does not matter. In any battle between the Jedi and the Sith, between the light and dark sides of the Force, the past is deeply felt, the universe endures, and the future is constant. This is why The rise of Skywalker, a film that attempted to create an audience-pleasing and nostalgic ending, felt like a creative dead end for the trilogy’s own characters. Star Wars is bigger than the legacies of Luke or Anakin Skywalker; bigger than Leia or Han Solo; bigger than Rey or Kylo Ren. Star Wars: Visions defends the idea that there are heroes scattered throughout the galaxy.

By allowing Japanese anime directors to imagine new corners of the Star Wars universe, Star Wars: Visions It gives the open-ended franchise a clearer path forward: one that goes beyond the serious and literalistic evocations at the beginning of the series and moves toward strange, new, and bold stories. The strengths of the series are greater than the lineage of any family.

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