TV Review: Star Wars: Visions, season 1

TV #5 of 2022:

Star Wars: Visions, season 1

This anime series from last year is an anthology of short films (13-22 minutes each), from a variety of different Japanese production studios, with no particular plot or character links between episodes beyond a weird shared fixation on kyber crystals. It’s been getting some rave reviews, but I personally haven’t cared much for the experimental diversion away from Star Wars in its more usual form.

The creators have been given pretty substantial liberty to remix and reinterpret the canon, which could potentially be exciting but in practice simply reminds me again and again that none of this can be understood as taking place within the established continuity of the franchise. It’s not even a tangential spin-off like the Star Wars: From Another Point of View books or Marvel’s recent What If? show that’s designed to probe interesting hypotheticals to deepen an appreciation of the familiar either; with one exception these tales are set on unknown worlds with all-new casts. There are Jedi and Sith and an Empire by name, yet they are operating under rules so altered that you’d be hard-pressed to ever justify why.

The scant length cuts against the effectiveness of these pieces too, as even at their strongest they tend to feel like a simple proof-of-concept rather than a satisfyingly complete presentation. (Do you remember that Flash animation of Genryu’s Blade that went viral in the early 2000s? It’s basically a whole string of quick offerings like that, except with nominal trappings of lightsabers and such.)

Part of the problem is presumably that I’m not a big fan of this medium to begin with, and I will concede that the visuals here are generally quite striking. If you’ve been dying to see Star Wars rendered as an anime, this will probably scratch that itch! But as with the novels that retell the movies in faux-Shakespearean language, it just seems like a hollow gimmick in the end. Only “Tatooine Rhapsody” — the sole effort to incorporate any preexisting narrative framework or individuals, detailing a rock band’s encounters with Boba Fett and Jabba — and “T0-B1” — an Astro Boy riff about a droid who wants to learn the Force — really work for me; the others I’d call empty spectacle at best.

★★☆☆☆

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