Star Wars needs more alien heroes

The new Disney Plus anime anthology series Star Wars: Visions It’s an exciting divergence for longtime fans of the franchise. The nine anime shorts for the first season, produced by some of Japan’s most innovative and creative animation studios, vary widely in tone and style. They are set throughout the entire Star Wars timeline, taking radically different approaches to the never-ending war between warriors accessing the Force, either from the Light Side or the Dark Side. In the process of telling these scattered little stories, the Visions the shorts escape the need to obsessively follow the Skywalker line and its impact on the galaxy. But strangely Visions it still echoes one of the great and constant flaws of the film series: it is almost exclusively about human protagonists and human stories.

The diverse galaxy of the Star Wars franchise is one of the things that makes its stories stand out. George Lucas obsessed with the look of the crowded canteen in 1977 Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hopepacked with mysterious and inhuman oddities, and the creators of Star Wars have since risen to the challenge, developing and depicting new species and new worlds. Star Wars canon says the setting features more than 20 million sensitive species, and movies constantly remind viewers of that diversity, cramming virtually every scene in the crowd with alien faces. But time and time again, the movies have reverted to the human leads, leaving out all those alien species as sidekicks or background details.

Back in 1977 when A new hope It came to light, that decision made sense on a purely practical level: it reflected the limitations of George Lucas’s compelling special effects and budget. Many of the aliens in Lucas’s cantina looked like believable creatures in the right light, but it helped that they barely spoke or moved. Non-human characters with the most screen time, such as Chewbacca, Greedo, or R2-D2, did not speak English, a detail that made the galaxy seem more real and vivid, but also saved puppeteers and operators from having to worry. on how to convince lip sync during dialogue scenes.

Larger budgets erased that problem by allowing Lucas to invest more money in more sophisticated puppets, leading to bigger roles for surprisingly inhuman aliens like Yoda and Admiral Ackbar. They, in turn, set the stage for Maz Kanata and The mandalorianBaby Yoda. And as digital effects progressed, CG-dependent characters like Jar Jar Binks and Watto became much more common. But while the non-human characters in the movies became more elaborate and compelling, they all played background roles in human-centric stories, whether the setting was dominated by Luke, Leia, and Han Solo; Obi-Wan, Anakin and Padmé Amidala; or Kylo Ren, Rey, Finn and Poe Dameron.

The move from the franchise to animation made non-human protagonists even easier. There’s no particular reason to favor human characters in animation – Asajj Ventress might be even easier to animate than Obi-Wan Kenobi, because no one cares that Ventress falls into the haunting valley or doesn’t look like enough its live action counterpart. And in animation, non-human characters don’t exhaust anyone’s budget – even in the mid-1980s, Star Wars expanded by telling non-human tales with the animated series. Ewoks and Star Wars: Droids. That’s the strangest part of Visions‘Nearly universal focus on human leads: When it comes to cost or compelling visuals, there’s no compelling reason why, say, Jay in “Tatooine Rhapsody” can’t be non-human like the rest of his bandmates , or why F in “The Village Bride” or Dan in “The Elder” cannot be Twi’lek, Gotal, Rodian or Lasat.

The creators of Star Wars may simply not believe that audiences can fully identify with non-human protagonists. That would be an odd reason to keep aliens out of the way, given that the franchise’s most beloved escape characters have consistently been nonhumans, from the Ewoks in the 1980s to BB-8 or Baby Yoda in recent years. . Star Wars’ most prominent non-human female lead, Ahsoka Tano, has been a part of the franchise since 2008, and is an absolute phenomenon in the fandom. But she’s pretty lonely in the animated Star Wars stories, surrounded by non-human characters who get, at best, a short main arc before disappearing again.

The series’ long list of memorable non-human villains, from Jabba the Hutt to Darth Maul to General Grievous and Grand Admiral Thrawn, suggests that the creators of Star Wars are a bit caught up in a routine of equating relationship and heroism with humanity, and relying on strangeness to make antagonists more threatening. Even the Visions The shorts visualize about half of their villains as non-human characters that concern the human protagonists.

Even the two Visions shorts that feature non-human protagonists – the droid boy TO-B1 in “TO-B1” and the loyal orphan Lop (possibly a Lepi?) in “Lop & Ochō” – both still lean toward that dynamic. When TO-B1 fantasizes about being a Jedi, he imagines himself as human. His story briefly takes advantage of his artificial nature: he loses an arm (a long-standing Star Wars tradition) without any visible ill effects, and he clearly has a long enough life to survive in hiding and carry out his ambitious plans. mentor. But his story never focuses on the fact that he is not human. It is conceived entirely around their relationship with their human creator and their ambition to become the Jedi, who, in their imagination, are apparently all human.

Meanwhile, Lop is adopted by a human clan and wants nothing more than to hold on to those family ties. She repeatedly emphasizes how, despite being an outsider, she empathizes with her foster human father and sister, considers herself related to them even when they don’t feel the same way, and thinks of her planet as her home. The short never allows her to tap into the abilities or strengths only a Lepi would have, nor does it address her non-human nature – she only cares about her emotional ties to human characters.

“Lop & Ochō” is still the closest Visions it really gets to adopt a real alien point of view. That’s not because the Lop has fur instead of smooth fur, or long, hanging ears instead of small round ones. It is because she is a stranger in the human world. They have separated her from her home world, her culture and her biological parents, and have left her to try to integrate with humans who are alien to her and who doubt whether they consider her family. While his short only superficially touches on his feelings of literal alienation, it is a fascinating dynamic that stands out among so many others. Visions stories that simply echo the family conflicts of good versus evil between the Sith and the Jedi. It is no coincidence that the other short that deviates more from that dynamic, “Tatooine Rhapsody”, is the one that gives more prominence to its character of aliens and droid, and focuses on something they want that has nothing to do with the endless Force battles unfolding. he struggled around her.

There is nothing fundamentally wrong with Star Wars stories about humans, or occasionally how non-human droids and organics relate to humans. It’s just an oddly narrow choice to have everybody Star Wars stories are about that dynamic, and Visions makes the narrowness of the choice even more surprising, given the number of stories that hit the exact same notes of humans faced by their Force alignments. There are at least 20 million other perspectives on the galaxy built into the scenario. Why can’t we see more stories from those perspectives?

The initial shorts of Star Wars: Visions do not individually suffer for your humanocentrism. They mostly emphasize visual dynamism and energy, finding creative and colorful ways to portray those familiar star wars we’ve been watching since 1977. But it’s surprising to see how few of the anime studios involved came out of those familiar lines, given that wildly creative and unpredictable anime stories usually get, and how much they normally love non-human points of view.

But by limiting themselves to such familiar character types and models, the studios ended up limiting the stories they could tell as well. Yes Star Wars: Visions continues as a project, the producers could ensure that the next batch of stories is even more dynamic and varied, simply by asking the studios to think beyond these decades-old lines. and more in the immense diversity that makes Star Wars so compelling and memorable. There are so many other fantastic stories waiting to be told, and there’s no reason each of them should focus on a human with a lightsaber in hand.