STAR WARS: VISIONS
DROIDS WITH JEDI ASPIRATIONS, RABBIT-SHAPED ALIENS, A ROCK OPERA SET ON TATOOINE… ANIME SERIES STAR WARS: VISIONS REVEALS A SIDE OF THAT GALAXY FAR, FAR AWAY WE’VE NEVER SEEN BEFORE
A galaxy far, far away as you’ve never seen it before.
IF DISNEY+ EVER spins off Marvel’s What If…? series into other areas of Disney’s vast entertainment empire, here’s a story pitch they can have for free: what if George Lucas had never fallen in love with the films of Akira Kurosawa when he was a USC film student in the ’60s? We’ll never know for sure, of course, but the legendary Japanese director’s movies – The Hidden Fortress, in particular – were such a big influence on the original Star Wars that there’s a good chance Lucas would never have created his famous galaxy far, far away without them.
Now another new show on Disney+, Star Wars: Visions, is bringing things full circle by giving Japanese anime studios the chance to reimagine Jedi, droids and talking rabbits (more on the latter shortly) from a new perspective. The series of nine shorts has invited top animation talent to tell entirely new outer-space stories – and from what we’ve seen so far, it promises to show a side of Star Wars we’ve never seen before. Think The Animatrix with added starships.
“Anime has really influenced Lucasfilm animation over the years,” Star Wars: Visions executive producer James Waugh tells SFX. “[Studio president] Kathleen Kennedy has that sort of pedigree from working with [Studio Ghibli legend] Hayao Miyazaki, so I think we’ve wanted to find a way to do Star Wars through that lens for a long time.
“We played around with countless ideas, and then when Disney+ took shape, it became clear that we could really expand the offering of what Star Wars does, and look at ways to expand the animation presence. Then it was
just a matter of [finding] the best approach to do this. We took a ton of pitches just to kind of see what different creators’ perspectives are on Star Wars, which is always, I think, enlightening,” Waugh adds.
“What we ended up finding was that almost every studio had a love for the franchise, and a story to tell us about how Star Wars inspired them to start world-building and doing animation. We got to a point where there were just so many great ideas that we decided to take an anthological perspective, and do a series of shorts that could showcase the different tones and textures of the work being done in Japan.” Seven studios (including Production IG, the outfit behind Ghost In The Shell and the anime sequence in Kill Bill: Volume 1) have worked on the nine Star Wars: Visions shorts, meaning each one has a different feel – both in terms of animation and story.
“Nobody asked them, ‘Please go for this type of direction,’ because we wanted variety,” says producer Kanako Shirasaki. “[Visions] is coming from each creator, and everyone loves Star Wars so they have huge ideas about what their Star Wars would be like or what they want to do in the Star Wars universe. It’s fascinating to see different stories from each individual [studio] and also the different styles – the artistry is different from each director and studio. If you talk about Japanese animation, most people think it’s like Ghibli because Ghibli is the most famous studio, but Visions, I hope, will help audiences enjoy the varieties of Japanese anime.”
One of the biggest missions Lucasfilm has undertaken since Disney bought the studio from George Lucas is the unification of the sprawling, decades-old Star Wars canon.
Since 2014, most new Star Wars output (whether it’s movies, TV, books or comics) has been part of an all-encompassing, Marvel-style “long time ago” continuity – with stories from the old “Expanded Universe” relocated under the non-canon “Star Wars Legends” banner. Unlike fellow Disney+ Star Wars shows The Mandalorian and The Bad Batch, however, Visions won’t be part of Star Wars continuity, meaning the creative teams can tell their stories without tying themselves in knots adhering to what’s already been laid down in lore.
“I think we treated every single short as an independent short,” says Shirasaki, “even though it’s under the Visions umbrella.”
“We didn’t want to go to the studios and say, ‘Here’s the story we want you to tell,’” continues Waugh. “Lots of studios do that, but we didn’t really feel that we’d be getting the best creativity out of these amazing studios. So we had to find a framework first. We’ve worked so hard to put everything into [Lucasfilm’s] one canon and make it feel like
We wanted to let these creators riff off elements of the Star Wars galaxy
an ongoing story. But what we wanted to do with this was really lean into the animation form, and just say that this is a celebration of Star Wars through the lens of these creators. What we were saying was, ‘We’ll help you find the Star Wars in your story and make sure it has the values and the heart and the things that we care about.’
“But we didn’t want to limit people to continuity. We wanted to let these creators riff off elements of the Star Wars galaxy, to pull them together and let the expressiveness of animation really tell that story. Some of these stories feel like they fit perfectly within canon, and we’ve helped them get there. But some of these are just amazing remixes of powerful Star Wars elements.”
In other words, if you thought The Last Jedi pushed the boundaries of what a Star Wars story can be, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Science Saru’s “T0-B1”, for example, is the tale of a droid who dreams of being a Jedi – “it’s very much a Pinocchio story, really a master/ student story in many ways, which is incredibly Star Wars at its heart,” says Waugh – while Geno Studio’s “Lop And Ocho” features (as far as we’re aware) the galaxy’s first space-rabbit since Jaxxon appeared in Marvel’s 1970s Star Wars comics.
“I honestly didn’t know there was Jaxxon from the comics!” laughs Shirasaki. “I was like, ‘Oh, there was a furry rabbit human in Star Wars?’ So this was like Jaxxon being interpreted by Japanese anime creators, and they’ve made it cuter looking and shorter, because Jaxxon was super tall, and Lop is a much shorter girl. But because the Star Wars universe is vast and wide, I’m sure there are different species in the rabbit/human [vein]!”
Arguably the biggest break with tradition is Studio Colorido’s “Tatooine Rhapsody”, a Star
Wars “rock opera” animated in the popular, decidedly un-star Wars Chibi style – and featuring guest appearances from Boba Fett and Jabba the Hutt (who are, according to Shirasaki, the only established Star Wars characters who feature in the show).
“I think ‘Tatooine Rhapsody’ was one of the first pitches we saw,” recalls Waugh. “I think we were still finding our north star of what Visions, as an overarching statement, would allow for, and it was one of those moments we definitely paused because the style was very Chibi – which we love, but it’s about rendering characters that we know in that form. And then it was very much, ‘Is rock music in Star Wars? We’ve done things with that in the past, like Jedi: Fallen Order and other games and animation, but does this feel right?’
“What ‘Tatooine Rhapsody’ did, though, is unlock for us just how much leeway we wanted to give creators if they could find the character drama, and the heart and soul, of a good Star Wars story,” he continues. “At the end of the day, ‘Tatooine Rhapsody’ is absolutely inspiring, and is really about friendship, which so many of our stories are.
“I, in particular, will be fully culpable!” he laughs. “There was a moment where I said, ‘Are we sure? Is this too far?’ But as we talked to the creators a little bit more and we started seeing the art, it was apparent it was the right choice. I think it gave us leeway down the line as we were taking more pitches to say that, yeah, we can push further than we have in the past. That’s what this project is about.”
Indeed, that desire to push Star Wars in new directions seems to be baked into the show’s DNA. So while Science Saru’s “Akakiri” is, Shirasaki says, “a new interpretation of The Hidden Fortress” – others, such as “The Ninth Jedi”’s story of the daughter of a light-sabersmith seeking out lost Jedi, seem to come from a different galaxy altogether.
“Japanese anime, or animation in general, can do expression that live action films cannot do,” says Shirasaki. “You can definitely see a very exaggerated fighting choreography style in Trigger’s ‘The Twins’ [an alternative take on the Luke/leia story, focused on a pair of siblings born into the Dark Side]. It’s very interesting to see how each studio pushes the envelope in different ways. It could be in [the use of ] colour, or it could be how they animate a character’s face or expression.”
And while Visions isn’t part of official canon, it has the potential to be a testing ground for other branches of the Star Wars empire that definitely are. So could we see elements of Visions’ bolder experiments filtering back into the universe at large – just as Legends characters like Grand Admiral Thrawn have found their way into official continuity?
“I don’t know as of yet,” says Waugh. “It’s a little too early. But there’s some stories like Trigger’s ‘The Elder’ which very much fits within our High Republic setting. It’s a story about a young eager Padawan and this master patrolling the Outer Rim of the galaxy. It’s a completely honest Star Wars story, and those characters fit within the timeframe.
“Could the band [from “Tatooine Rhapsody”] return? Maybe… I have no doubt that people will be pitching us their desire to continue that storytelling. In ‘The Ninth Jedi’ there’s a great droid that is just super unique and [very much] Production IG’S voice, that totally fits within our universe, and could see itself in the galaxy. Right now, there’s no official plans to expand any of these out, or take any elements from them. But as unique as these stories are to anime, they’re so honest to Star Wars that I can see that happening.”
Star Wars: Visions is on Disney+ from 22 September.