Josh Reviews Star Wars: Visions — Season Three
Star Wars: Visions is an animated anthology series in which each episode was created by a different animation studio. In the first season, the episodes were all created by Japanese studios. In the second season, they expanded their focus and presented shorts created by animated studios from across the world: Ireland, England, France, South Korea, India, and more. Here in season three, they’ve returned to all Japanese studios. The episodes utilize imagery from across the Star Wars universe, but the stories are non-canonical, meaning the Japanese animators and storytellers were free to take their stories and characters in any direction they wanted.
I enjoyed the first two seasons of Star Wars: Visions, and these nine new episodes in season three are fun to watch as well!
I’m a little disappointed they went back to only using Japanese animation studios. I like the work of most of these Japanese animation studios, but I really dug the global reach of season two, and how wildly different the animation styles were. I missed that here in season three. There was a bit too much sameness in terms of style and approach in these new episodes. There were some fun experiments — the last two shorts are pretty wild — but overall I wish these shorts felt more different from one another.
I was surprised that three of these nine new shorts are sequels to shorts from season one. The Duel: Payback is a sequel to The Duel; The Ninth Jedi: Child of Hope is a sequel to The Ninth Jedi, and The Lost Ones is a sequel to The Village Bride. While I enjoyed being back in the feudal Japan looking world of The Duel, the other two sequels left me fairly cold. I’d much prefer that these shorts be new stand-alone stories. I thought that’s what this series was all about! Spending three of these nine shorts on sequels to older installments felt like a mistake to me.
Let’s dive in!
The Duel: Payback — The Duel was one of the standout shorts of season one, so I can understand why they wanted to return to this story. As I’d written above, I thought this was the most successful of the three sequel stories included in this season. I liked the idea that this time the former Sith hunting Sith has to face off against a Jedi Grandmaster whose thirst for vengeance has turned him, if not fully evil, then at least morally questionable. I still like the look of this universe, and we got some great fights in this short.
The Song of Four Wings — A young princess must rescue a cute alien and destroy an Imperial mining facility in cute short. I enjoyed this one. I liked seeing the droid become a mech suit, and the animation on the battle with the AT-ATs was great.
The Ninth Jedi: Child of Hope — Young Kara stumbles across a huge derelict ship maintained by a single droid, unable to reach his injured Jedi master. I like the concept, and I liked the look of the huge cathedral-like ship. It was a bummer that this short didn’t move forward any of the characters or concepts introduced in the first Ninth Jedi short. This felt like a disconnected side-quest. At the end of this short, Kara & co. are still exactly where they were at the end of the first short, on the run and looking for her father. Apparently The Ninth Jedi is getting a full-fledged spin-off series, but I can’t say that this short left me super-excited for that.
The Bounty Hunter — Sevin is a bounty hunter working to earn the credits necessary to repair her medical droid, whose personality is occasionally overwritten by an assassin droid. I liked Sevin and loved the split-personality droid. There was some cool animation in this one, nice and fluid with some awesome action. I wish the story wasn’t so paint by numbers. It’s immediately obvious that the wealthy businessman who offers Sevin a job is a villain, and that the kids in his care are slaves. If the story had been more cleverly written, this could have been much cooler.
Yuko’s Treasure — A young orphan protected by a droid in the shape of a large bear is menaced by mercenaries looking for treasure they believe his dead parents have or had. This was a fun story. The bear droid was a bit overly cutesy, but I liked the idea of this type of caregiver droid for a little kid. I loved hearing Steve Buscemi’s voice as the bad guy!
The Lost Ones — After helping survivors of a planet decimated by a Carbonite cloud, the on-the-run Jedi F is captured by the Empire. This short had a lot of great elements, though I wish I felt they worked together better as a satisfying, complete story. I loved the idea of the weaponized Carbonite cloud; that was a cool concept. And the end-battle between F and her former master, now turned evil, was a great action sequence. I wish we got to know the characters in this short better — from F to the crew trying to clean up on the Carbonite-frozen planet to the kids on the refugee ship.
The Smuggler — A young smuggler must help a prince being hunted by the empire escape their clutches. Here too, there were a lot of great elements in this story; I wish they fit together better into a more satisfying story, and I wish we got to know these characters better. The main smuggler character felt particularly flat to me. But I loved the old woman who was revealed as a hidden Jedi; I loved that her lightsaber was stored in her robotic arm! This felt like a pilot for a longer series, which was interesting, but left it not fully satisfying to me as a stand-alone short.
The Bird of Paradise — An overconfident Jedi padawan is blinded in battle and must go on a physical and spiritual journey to survive and regain her connection to the Force. This was my favorite of all of these shorts! I loved the concept, in that we got to see this young woman, Nakime, struggle and eventually achieve a fuller understanding of the lessons her master had been trying to teach her about being at peace and connected to the Force. This was a fascinating story, and I loved how it was structured to take place over many days as we follow each step of Nakime’s spiritual journey towards enlightenment. The animation was absolutely gorgeous. The action scenes were intense, and I particularly loved the metaphorical aspects of the animation, as we see Nakime gradually move from blindness to a more complete sense of the world around her. This was a terrific short!
Black — Coming off of The Bird of Paradise, my favorite short, comes Black, which is even more ambitious, though I didn’t think it worked nearly as well. In this bizarre, stream-of-consciousness short, we’re following what might be the final moments before death in the mind of a Stormtrooper, or perhaps in the mind of many stormtroopers! There is no linear story in this one, just an array of imagery, some of which is familiar (we see Star Wars battles around the Death Star, and at Hoth), while some is more mysterious. There are many ways to interpret what we’re seeing. I respect the experimental nature of this short. It definitely breaks from the “sameness” I was feeling from many of the other shorts this season! But I’ll admit that after several minutes of this, I tired of it, and I found the jazz score to be somewhat grating. This was a cool attempt, it just didn’t quite work for me.
So that’s it for Star Wars: Visions season three! I wonder if there will be more? I’d be happy to watch future installments…
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