Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Star Wars: Visions on Disney+ is Star Wars like you’ve never seen it before. Seriously. The animated anthology series eschews canon and the Star Wars house style and instead spotlights the work of a number of Japan’s top animation studios. With the freedom to do whatever they want and tell any kind of story, Star Wars: Visions expands the definition of what a Star Wars tale can look like.
STAR WARS: VISIONS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: What else could it be? We open on a star field that pans down to a cliff overlooking a tiny village nestled in a forest. This is classic Star Wars iconography.
The Gist: While Star Wars: Visions may utilize some key iconography, this animated anthology series presents the mythology in a brand new way. Lucasfilm recruited seven top-tier anime studios and tasked them with creating nine short films. All of them stand on their own and none of them were required to adhere to any pre-established canon. The animators and storytellers were allowed to play in the Star Wars sandbox, and they could bring all of their other toys along.
The first short film, “The Duel,” comes from animation studio Kamikaze Douga. The short is, in true Star Wars fashion, a new riff on the classic Akira Kurosawa film Seven Samurai. This time around, a rōnin (voiced by Brian Tee) and his feisty astromech droid protect a farming village from bandits leftover from the war against the Empire and their badass, lightsaber-wielding leader (voiced by Lucy Liu).
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Obviously there’s the Star Wars influence, with the Kurosawa parts amped up to 11. But overall, the sketchy, black and white anime style and marriage of sci-fi and samurai aesthetics make “The Duel” feel like the kinda thing you’d find airing on cable after midnight in the late ’90s. That’s the vibe.
Our Take: There’s already a lot of Star Wars out there already and coming up soon, so any new series really needs to stand out from the crowd to grab attention. Just by its very nature, Star Wars: Visions excels at that. By giving the keys to the kingdom over to all of these anime studios, audiences are given short films that take the visuals we’re used to seeing in fan art and early production design sketches and bring them to life. The nine episodes also run the gamut of Japanese animation styles, starting with the very old school vibes of “The Duel” through the midcentury pop of the Astroboy-esque “T0-B1” to the 21st century sheen of “The Twins.”
But I’m getting ahead of myself, because we’re talking about “The Duel” right now. Whether or not “The Duel” is your jam depends on what you’re looking for in an anime-style Star Wars short. There are surely some who will be annoyed at the plot, the same way they were annoyed when Seven Samurai directly influenced an episode of The Mandalorian Season 1. There will probably be some purists confused by the presence of a Sith Lord post-Return of the Jedi and will watch YouTube videos about how Lucy Liu’s warrior probably ties into the Knights of Ren or Joruus C’baoth or something. There may even be people annoyed that this short film only runs 13 minutes.
None of that really matters. As the title implies, this anthology series is about visions—specifically the vision of seven different animation houses and how they see Star Wars. By that metric, “The Duel” is a total success. The animation style, a blend of CG with an overlay of grainy, pencil-shaded texture over it, feels both well-worn and brand new. There’s even a rotoscoping vibe that makes parts of “The Duel” feel like a lost Ralph Bakshi short from 1978.
The other strength is, of course, the runtime. “The Duel” can get away with a simple plot because of the stellar animation, and also because it’s significantly shorter than an episode of The Mandalorian—and that show’s already tightly edited. “The Duel” is the perfect length—and if you don’t like it, there’s something completely different coming up in a few minutes.
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Star Wars: Visions
For the past 15 years, almost all Star Wars animation has looked intentionally uniform. To have a series that utilizes so many different influences and styles all united by a love for Star Wars? The individual episodes will undoubtedly be hit or miss for viewers, but the overall effect is outstanding.
Parting Shot: A nice pan up from the village in the aftermath of the battle towards the stars. A new adventure awaits an entirely new cast.
Sleeper Star: While the nature of an anthology series means that we won’t see more of any of these characters, I have to give “The Duel” major credit for incorporating a lot of popular and obscure alien designs into its brief runtime. A Trandoshan warrior? A Sullustan shopkeeper? An ex-Imperial protocol droid carrying a Gatling gun? Star Wars fans who obsessed over those character guides will love this short for that reason.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Star Wars: Visions has something for every Star Wars fan.
