The Heart of Star Wars in "Star Wars: Visions"

Star Wars: Visions made me love Jedi again, and I think that’s the most impressive that any piece of Star Wars media could do right now.

This show is honestly so pretty.

Let’s back up.

Followers of this blog (or just people who know me in general) are probably all-too-aware of my long and complicated relationship with Star Wars. Growing up, it was my franchise. My Harry Potter, my Percy Jackson, it was the thing I read, the thing I watched. Revenge of the Sith was one of my first-ever theatre experiences. It was probably low-key the thing that got me into reading at all? What I’m saying is I did the Star Wars thing a lot. Played the games, listened to the soundtracks, the whole nine yards. Through it all, I look back and see a pretty clear consistency.

I’ve never been that in love with the Jedi.

The Ninth Jedi probably reminds me the most of Genndy Tartakovsky's 2D Clone Wars show, which is maybe the highest compliment for a Star Wars spin-off.

Like, yeah, I was a kid and liked pretending I had the Force and that my cardboard wrapping paper tube was a lightsaber. Obviously. But when I think of the stories that really grabbed me as a kid, through my adolescence and to now, they were never stories about the Jedi, per se. Part of it is that I always love an underdog. Sure, Iron Man and Thor are cool and all but give me Falcon or Hawkeye, give me the dude with no powers who has to try their best. James Bond is suave but Ethan Hunt gets beat up more and that’s more fun to watch. Maybe it’s the need to be unique. Or, maybe it’s the product of growing up in the Prequel era of Star Wars. We saw the height of the Jedi Order, and it kind of sucked. They were arrogant, legalistic jerks whose overbearing approach to their own religion made them blind to the actual problems growing around them. I missed the age where the Jedi were mystical heroes of good and watched them instead become space cops and generals. The Jedi were cool in concept but flawed in practice.

What drew me as a kid weren’t the Jedi Academy books or the lightsaber heroics. Instead, I jumped to the stories of bounty hunters, X-Wing pilots, clone troopers. The people in the trenches of life. Mace Windu single-handedly fighting an army was fun but a bunch of silent spec-ops troops moving through the city was enthralling. Corran Horn was at his best when he was with Rogue Squadron. Speaking of, the best parts of the big team-up arcs that closed out the Expanded Universe (i.e. New Jedi Order, Legacy of the Force, and Fate of the Jedi) were when we got to hang out with Wedge Antilles and crew. All the fancy Force stuff could honestly go.

This episode has a lightsaber microphone and a Hutt bassist, keep telling yourself it isn't totally awesome.

Maybe this is a big part of why The Last Jedi never really bothered me on any fundamental level? Like, in my mind the Jedi needed to be critiqued and this was a perfect avenue to do it. Yeah, the Jedi Order was stupid and ownership of the Force is a bad idea. Luke Skywalker is way more interesting as a broken, complicated man than as basically a Force god who can do no wrong (look, the Expanded Universe got weird). The Jedi just were never that tremendously interesting to me because they were already on top of everything and there were more interesting human stories to be had by all these other people.

But I want to get back to what I said before because I think there’s a key transition point here, and that’s from the Original Trilogy to the Prequels. George Lucas in A New Hope took a whole lot of inspiration from samurai and the ronin, drifting wanderers who travelled the world and, ideally, did good wherever they went. At least that’s the samurai idea. Jedi in the Original Trilogy have this very mythic feel to them. When Old Ben Kenobi activates his lightsaber in the Mos Eisley Cantina, there’s an immediate hush in the room. Vader is referenced as the last follower of some old religion, and Luke has to search far and wide for anyone who can teach him the heart of the thing. In the Prequels, however, we see the Jedi Order as this big, corporate thing. The Force becomes more about bloodlines than about cosmic destiny. People are indoctrinated essentially from birth. There are tests and trials and obscure rules, and it grows increasingly uncomfortable. The wonder is sucked out of it, replaced by regulation. The Sequels try and flounder in attempting to put that wonder back in. The Last Jedi seems to suggest that we need to do something new, that the Jedi failed and we need to find a new approach to this whole Force thing. But then Rise of Skywalker puts us back in this weird genetic lineage structure where Rey is “all the Jedi” and is powerful more for her bloodline than from her essence. I don’t come out of that movie being excited that she’s tapped into the Jedi tradition, if anything, I’m sad.

I feel like T0-B1 gets underrated for just how gorgeous its soft animation style is, especially when things begin kicking off towards the end.

The last couple of years haven’t really offered me anything I’ve liked from Star Wars, and I’m tempted to conclude that I’m just no longer the audience. The Mandalorian is fun but is more interested in being a catalyst for cameos than in telling its own story. Nothing in the future movie slate really excites me – except for Patty Jenkins’ Rogue Squadron movie. Give me Wedge. Let me see some X-Wing combat. The Last Jedi deeply excited me because they were doing something genuinely new while trying to explore the themes at the heart of this franchise, but at this point, it seems like an ouroboros of what’s already been done.

And then Vision happened. I kind of always knew it was happening but it was never on my radar, even as it was about to release. Visions, for those of you who don’t know, is an anthology of short films, no more than 20 minutes in length. They’re not canon, not bound by the infinite list of rules and lore that bog down the Star Wars universe. They can do whatever they want whenever they want. Someone basically went to a bunch of the best animation studios in Japan and said “Hey, show me your best Star Wars stuff.” It’s. Amazing. Nine separate anime shorts set somewhere vaguely in this franchise, all working at their absolute best. It’s got some of the biggest Japanese voices out there, and while the English cast is also pretty stacked you really ought to watch this with the original audio for the full effect (but why are the English subtitles just a CC’d version of the dub, Disney+? Where’s my proper translation Disney+??). These shorts are all fantastic. If you don’t like the one you’re watching, give it fifteen minutes and see how the next one is, because it’ll probably be for you. Covering a wide variety of tones, genres, and art styles, this series absolutely rules.

These captions are winding up being a lot about art style but look at this!! Look at the cool 90's hand drawn style mixed with the insane colour-grading at work!

A few fun facts about Visions:

• Every episode except like, one or two features a fun droid companion. Because I guess every single Japanese studio wanted to make their own fun droid companion, and who can blame them?

• Similarly, there are multiple “I have a bad feeling about this” drops, “May the Force be with you,” and even a joke about going to “a galaxy far, far away”; clearly everyone involved has wanted to do something like this for a long time.

• Every episode has a sick lightsaber reveal. Lightsaber katanas, lightsaber whips, all sorts of things going on here.

• There’s one episode that basically reads like a love letter to The Last Jedi? At least to me. Two closely connected people grab at a crystal with the Force and rip it in half. Someone jumps into hyperspace and cuts a Star Destroyer in half. It’s amazing.

• Lop and Ocho looks like it’s going to be overly cutesy or whatever, and then becomes a gripping conversation about imperialism and industry?? Some huge Ghibli vibes.

• There’s an episode about a garage band and I don’t care what anyone says, it is rad.

• Akakiri is a weird episode and I didn’t really get it but, uh, wow, they really ended their anthology on that note, didn’t they? Akakiri as a whole is kind of doing its own thing compared to the rest of this show.

• Kara is the best and we desperately need a full-length series based on The Ninth Jedi.

• T0-B1 and his titular short are adorable but also take one of the coolest visual turns in the whole series.

• Oh, and speaking of visuals, The Duel is so incredibly gorgeous to look at.

TL;DR, this show rules and you should watch it immediately.

Even just the blue outlines here says so much about Karre as a character.

But I want to focus on one bit in particular because it made this whole thing connect for me.

So the fourth episode is a little treat called The Village Bride, and it is my absolute favourite thing in this anthology and made me emotional in ways I was never expecting. It, like a lot of the episodes in this, is about a wandering Jedi operating in the shadows while evil forces lurk about in the light. It has the same vibe as a Studio Ghibli movie or Avatar: The Last Airbender. It sets up this quiet village on this unnamed world, and their occupation by opportunists seeing advantages at the tail of the war. It’s quiet and melancholic, but the gorgeous soundtrack gives it this kind of haunting bittersweet quality. Slowly, we build up our core cast and get to know the tensions of this small village. The short is only seventeen minutes in total, but in that time, it builds a beautiful world exploited by outside forces. There’s this deep sense of tragedy to the whole thing. Our protagonist, who’s presumably sat back trying not to get involved in the trials of the real world, deeply feels the wrongness of it all. She sees a broken situation, cycles of violence with no end in sight. It’s heartbreaking.

Then all the dominoes fall. The unsightly ruler comes back to reap from the village, taking the chief’s daughter and threatening to kill her sister as well. Everything is coming apart. But, out of nowhere, our protagonist. She saves the daughters’ lives, and her companion makes short work of the raider’s army. Watching his plans be foiled before his eyes, the exploitative leader thunders, “Who are you? What sort of monster are you?”

Seriously, I'm tearing up just thinking about it.

“I am a Jedi,” she says. She activates her lightsaber, the village watching behind her. I don’t know if it’s the gorgeous score, the beautifully minimalist visuals, or what. But every single time, something stirs deep inside of me.

See, The Village Bride, and really this anthology as a whole just gets something about the Jedi that I feel like I never saw growing up. All of these shorts focus on the Jedi – but they all work. They all get something fundamentally about this franchise. They almost universally dwell on these themes of hope, of justice, of standing up for those who can’t stand for themselves. All these different studios were asked to find the core things that make Star Wars, Star Wars. And their answer, their vision of this franchise, is one of people who set out to make a difference, who defy the powers that be to help the least of these. There’s, again, just this innate sense of hope. Of trust that good will prevail if there are people who are dedicated to seeking it out. It’s this unrelenting optimism that even in the shadow of powerful evil there is light. Like, that’s what Star Wars is all about, and I miss Star Wars feeling like that. There’s a deep sense of corporate cynicism that seems to run through a lot of the past few years of this franchise, but Visions stands totally opposed to that. These brief, fifteen-minute shorts are able to capture an essence of Star Wars we've nearly lost. They really feel like raw, pure nuggets of Star Wars, lovingly packing all the tropes into tight, compelling narratives. If Rise of Skywalker was this franchise at its most cynical, its most self-defeating and corporate, then Visions is the franchise at its most earnest, wide-eyed, and hopeful.

I really hope this is setting the stage for stories like this to come.

Visions makes me excited for the future. All of these shorts feel like pilot pitches for full-length shows, and I kind of want all of them. I want to see more of F, and more of Lop, I want to see what happens with Kara and Juro, I want to see Ann and Karre’s whole dynamic explored more. But if nothing else, I get nine different mini-glimpses into what this universe could be, all of them filled with this deep sense of love and pride in the franchise. Visions is what Star Wars should feel like, and I love every moment of it.

There are so many different things I could talk about. The insane action that gets pumped into The Twins. The adorable earnestness that pours from Tatooine Rhapsody and T0-B1. The subtle ways that The Ninth Jedi plays on your expectations and flips the script on you. Everything about the final fight in Lop and Ocho. This whole show is just filled with incredible moments big and small that come together into perhaps the most succinct and deeply-felt love letter to Star Wars. Visions absolutely rocks, and if you haven’t given it a shot yet, you should.