The nine anime shorts that comprise Star Wars: Visions lovingly evoke the familiar imagery of the hyper-referential Star Wars canon. Quiet establishing shots of starlit cosmos capture the calm before interplanetary storms; a padawan sports young Anakin Skywalker’s rat tail; and even the cute droids have cute droids of their own. The seven Japanese animation studios that contributed shorts to the anthology, which features both English and Japanese audio options, also refresh the Star Wars universe with an eclectic range of styles and tones and a subversive streak.
Those qualities are immediately clear in the first short. Depicted in grainy black and white with splashes of color, Kamikaze Douga’s “The Duel” follows a wandering ronin (Brian Tee) who joins the defense of a village from bandits (shades of Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai). The warrior squares off against a high-heeled Sith (Lucy Liu), drawing his lightsaber to reveal not the green or blue common to Jedi, but a blade of startling crimson.
The shorts pull inspiration from various sources, from Astro Boy, in Science Saru’s bubbly “T0-B1,” about the Pinocchio-Geppetto relationship between a droid (Jaden Waldman) and his creator (Kyle Chandler), to Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, in Studio Colorido’s “Tatooine Rhapsody,” which revolves around an ambitious interstellar rock band. Elsewhere, Geno Studio’s “Lop and Ochō”—a lucid reflection on the horrors of industrialization—seems to have a few video games in its DNA, as hover cars speed along as they do in F-Zero X and the bunny-eared Lop (Anna Cathcart) glides through the sky with an umbrella, suggesting Mary Poppins by way of Link from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
As a whole, the series is an inspired, if not as revelatory, successor to Genndy Tartakovsky’s Star Wars: Clone Wars. The shorts largely share the economical spirit of that micro-series, keeping their world-building lean and efficient. Kinema Citrus’s “The Village Bride” and Science Saru’s “Akakiri” carve out their corners of the universe with particular deftness. The former explores a secluded tribe’s connection to nature and the lasting fallout of war, smartly grounding its narrative in the perspective of a traveler (Karen Fukuhara) who shares the audience’s ignorance, while the latter depicts the impact of the Sith’s oppression with considerable understatement—forgoing information dumps for brief but touching shots of downtrodden civilians, and for an uneasy scene in which a scrappy backroad guide (Keone Young) must quantify the amount of money he’d risk his life for.
There are, though, some overly expository stretches to slog through. Production I.G’s “The Ninth Jedi” begins with a voiceover establishing its post-Jedi landscape—a mysterious royal (Andrew Kishino) is trying to raise the order back from its ashes—only to shortly thereafter display a hologram message that relays that context far more intriguingly. And Studio Trigger’s “The Twins” winks too often at Star Wars history, distracting from its story about sibling Sith hotshots (Alison Brie and Neil Patrick Harris) by quoting one too many lines from the iconic franchise that have congealed, over the years, into clichés.
But the consistency with which Star Wars: Visions doles out sumptuous visuals almost renders words beside the point. Each short contains at least a few moments of striking spectacle: a frenzied, weighty melee in “The Ninth Jedi”; unceremonious reminders of the deadliness of lightsabers in “The Village Bride” and Studio Trigger’s “The Elder,” which follows the investigation of two Jedi (David Harbour and Jordan Fisher) into a disturbance in the Force; a crack of red-violet lightning splitting the skies in “T0-B1.” The series is Star Wars projected through a kaleidoscope, a vivid re-imagining reflecting the colors of new galaxies.
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