An Intersection: Star Wars Visions
Oct. 30th, 2021 09:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerAnnouncements animation studios in Japan would be making some official Star Wars shorts did raise a particle of interest in me regardless of all the allusions I’ve made to pulling a personal ripcord and dropping away from Disney-stamped movies back to the ones that had been there before, a kettle of complications in itself. New computer-animated shows and “The Mandalorian” hadn’t got me watching, regardless of certain discourses wrapping right back around to “they’re inoffensive and therefore competently done; surely, things will build from there.” The possibility my interest in “Star Wars Visions” amounted to “but it’s anime!” was something to chew on.
I’d certainly been tickled by the manga adaptations of the “Imperial Trilogy” Dark Horse brought over here years ago, to the point of wishing there’d be comparable adaptations of the “Republic Trilogy,” or at least an “unflipped” release of the existing manga. Still, I do hope I’ve kept hold of just enough sanity to have escaped ever really thinking “wouldn’t it be so cool if there was an anime version of everything!” (Not that long ago, I was pointed to some bits of recent “American-animated takes on the ‘original trilogy’” cut together to the opening themes of certain big anime series with katakana credits added; I wasn’t that amused.) Perhaps I managed to decide “drawn animation has its own inherent limitations” in time to not fall away from one rather commercial instance of it when pushed by some more unconscious form of that realization.
Still, I might have got to thinking there could have been a much earlier link between Star Wars and anime for me. I remember little more of “Battle of the Planets” than going over to the kids next door to watch it via their cable TV. (Returning to the one moment that did stick in my head took watching through almost all of ADV’s DVD box sets of Gatchaman decades later.) A few years later, when transforming robot toys started really showing up right around when Star Wars merchandising began winding down after Return of the Jedi, one TV show trying to squeeze into that new fad did happen to wind up with a spinoff that sketched a continuous line in my memory between watching Robotech and becoming fully aware of “animation from Japan” (if, as I keep saying, after rather longer than for some people).
Some of the people who’d moved on to anime sooner than I managed had started getting interested in it with “Star Blazers,” which had shown up on TV about the same time as Battle of the Planets. After I’d sorted out those two shows had been the first new major “imports from Japan” on (North) American TV since the string of cartoons in the 1960s that made “Astro Boy,” “Speed Racer,” and “Gigantor” mean something even to now, I wound up tempted to suppose they’d been brought over to try and claim a slice of the contemporary mania for “outer space action-adventure.” “Battle of the Planets” alone does seem an obvious attempt at resonance with “Star Wars” even before more awkward animation added a hemisphere-headed robot (which I don’t quite seem to remember from my early years). For all of that speculation from personal anecdotes, though, there are also times I wonder if I stayed interested in anime longer than at least some people just because “anime discussions” seemed a little less likely to toss in quick off-topic jabs at the new Star Wars movies than discussions of live-action “effects movies” and even written science fiction...
In any case, I got around to watching the shorts of Star Wars Visions.
I’m not that enthused with the proclamations that “Star Wars is just this thing with a new coat of science fiction paint” (more than one thing has been pointed out, which might begin to hint at just how many references are folded into it), and yet it was easy enough to see “an emphasis on traditional Japanese costumes and settings with some Star Wars trappings applied” in these shorts as “still very much Star Wars.” I might even have contrasted some of the costumes with the “jackets and trousers” that do seem to take over with too narrow a focus on the earliest movies. That sense of style could have been a lead-in of sorts in Kamikaze Douga’s “The Duel,” although one part of “the duel” is a sudden twist about just who’s fighting that might wind up being shrugged off. Studio Colorido’s “Tatooine Rhapsody” seemed to bring in the most recognizable characters along with the (possibly repurposed) podracing grandstands; I was willing to think some willingness to embrace whimsy helped.
I’d seen a certain amount of negative reactions to Trigger’s “The Twins,” with a sort of “that studio’s getting carried away again” air to it. As a twist on “family struggles” it was sort of interesting even if the opening turn back to good for one of its initially “Vader-esque armoured figures” seemed lightly sketched; after that, though, things did get to the point of “not really registering hard vacuum” and “the jump to lightspeed becoming an ultimate weapon.” I had to resort to different handwaving for why it only worked in this specific case than I’d at least considered for The Last Jedi, which had then been more or less overturned by an apparent “retcon” in The Rise of Skywalker. There were more positive comments about Kinema Citrus’s “The Village Bride” and Production I.G.’s “The Ninth Jedi,” and I was willing enough to see them as quite reasonable even with “a yellow lightsabre blade” just happening to get tossed into the first of those shorts. The second might have had a good bit of “a new saga begins in another time and place,” rather more interesting to me than “your beloved heroes are back... but they were unsuccessful on personal and professional levels, so hey, how about these puppets?” It did, though, toss in its own peculiarity with an impression of lightsabre blades being recoloured to match the shifting and settling allegiances of their wielders. I wondered for a moment if this was to be taken as an elaborate in-universe explanation for “Luke’s father’s lightsabre” not being touched up in A New Hope the way Obi-Wan’s and Darth Vader’s had.
Science Saru’s “T0-B1” had been talked up as calling all the way back to Mighty Atom/Astro Boy, and did have another bit of whimsy in its obvious efforts at charm. I was surprised to find Trigger contribute another short with “The Elder,” but could definitely see its older Jedi as a take on Qui-Gon’s unconventional wisdom even if its younger Jedi didn’t offer Obi-Wan’s by-the-book contrast. Geno Studio’s “Lop & Ocho” was about as surprising as the shorts got; there was a lot more weight to the story than I might have been lulled into first supposing by it including a furry rabbit-girl alien. It did, though, tilt towards “all you have to do is get determined in a crisis and you, too, can wield the Force.” Science Saru closed things out with another short named “Akakiri” that might have called back all the way to The Hidden Fortress, but it did conclude everything with a “down ending” and left me with half-rueful memories of seeing “watching in jumbled order” mentioned. I just might have been left with a few odd thoughts of the wearily conventional wisdom of what numbered “Episodes” are supposed to be loved above all others and the order I’d watched the shorts in.
Star Wars Visions might not have helped me towards a “how I learned to stop worrying and love this newest era” attitude, but I’m not regretting its specific experience either, and maybe that ought to count for something. Not that long after it had shown up, though, there was an announcement Disney was going to be streaming a few upcoming anime series on its private label service, and a certain amount of concern in response the company had just discovered there was money in anime and was about to start vacuuming all of it up. Nobody quite mentioned how Sony owns Crunchyroll, Funimation, and some anime production in Japan, and a while later concern kicked up over some Chinese investment in the industry. I can get to thinking about certain “reasons for watching anime,” whether they might just lead to burnout faster, and how there are rather more, if rather different, forms of “animation beyond the mainstream” and “entertainment beyond the mainstream” out there. I can also get to thinking about my personal interregnum between Robotech and Macross Plus (or “spanning from ‘Saber Rider and the Star Sheriffs’ to Sailor Moon”), and whether that’s affected my thoughts of the time between Speed Racer and Battle of the Planets. I do understand 1970s anime from giant robots to “World Masterpiece Theater” shows was being dubbed into languages other than English; making too big a deal of “it’s better when anime is insulated from foreign compromises!” could certainly go too far.
I’d certainly been tickled by the manga adaptations of the “Imperial Trilogy” Dark Horse brought over here years ago, to the point of wishing there’d be comparable adaptations of the “Republic Trilogy,” or at least an “unflipped” release of the existing manga. Still, I do hope I’ve kept hold of just enough sanity to have escaped ever really thinking “wouldn’t it be so cool if there was an anime version of everything!” (Not that long ago, I was pointed to some bits of recent “American-animated takes on the ‘original trilogy’” cut together to the opening themes of certain big anime series with katakana credits added; I wasn’t that amused.) Perhaps I managed to decide “drawn animation has its own inherent limitations” in time to not fall away from one rather commercial instance of it when pushed by some more unconscious form of that realization.
Still, I might have got to thinking there could have been a much earlier link between Star Wars and anime for me. I remember little more of “Battle of the Planets” than going over to the kids next door to watch it via their cable TV. (Returning to the one moment that did stick in my head took watching through almost all of ADV’s DVD box sets of Gatchaman decades later.) A few years later, when transforming robot toys started really showing up right around when Star Wars merchandising began winding down after Return of the Jedi, one TV show trying to squeeze into that new fad did happen to wind up with a spinoff that sketched a continuous line in my memory between watching Robotech and becoming fully aware of “animation from Japan” (if, as I keep saying, after rather longer than for some people).
Some of the people who’d moved on to anime sooner than I managed had started getting interested in it with “Star Blazers,” which had shown up on TV about the same time as Battle of the Planets. After I’d sorted out those two shows had been the first new major “imports from Japan” on (North) American TV since the string of cartoons in the 1960s that made “Astro Boy,” “Speed Racer,” and “Gigantor” mean something even to now, I wound up tempted to suppose they’d been brought over to try and claim a slice of the contemporary mania for “outer space action-adventure.” “Battle of the Planets” alone does seem an obvious attempt at resonance with “Star Wars” even before more awkward animation added a hemisphere-headed robot (which I don’t quite seem to remember from my early years). For all of that speculation from personal anecdotes, though, there are also times I wonder if I stayed interested in anime longer than at least some people just because “anime discussions” seemed a little less likely to toss in quick off-topic jabs at the new Star Wars movies than discussions of live-action “effects movies” and even written science fiction...
In any case, I got around to watching the shorts of Star Wars Visions.
I’m not that enthused with the proclamations that “Star Wars is just this thing with a new coat of science fiction paint” (more than one thing has been pointed out, which might begin to hint at just how many references are folded into it), and yet it was easy enough to see “an emphasis on traditional Japanese costumes and settings with some Star Wars trappings applied” in these shorts as “still very much Star Wars.” I might even have contrasted some of the costumes with the “jackets and trousers” that do seem to take over with too narrow a focus on the earliest movies. That sense of style could have been a lead-in of sorts in Kamikaze Douga’s “The Duel,” although one part of “the duel” is a sudden twist about just who’s fighting that might wind up being shrugged off. Studio Colorido’s “Tatooine Rhapsody” seemed to bring in the most recognizable characters along with the (possibly repurposed) podracing grandstands; I was willing to think some willingness to embrace whimsy helped.
I’d seen a certain amount of negative reactions to Trigger’s “The Twins,” with a sort of “that studio’s getting carried away again” air to it. As a twist on “family struggles” it was sort of interesting even if the opening turn back to good for one of its initially “Vader-esque armoured figures” seemed lightly sketched; after that, though, things did get to the point of “not really registering hard vacuum” and “the jump to lightspeed becoming an ultimate weapon.” I had to resort to different handwaving for why it only worked in this specific case than I’d at least considered for The Last Jedi, which had then been more or less overturned by an apparent “retcon” in The Rise of Skywalker. There were more positive comments about Kinema Citrus’s “The Village Bride” and Production I.G.’s “The Ninth Jedi,” and I was willing enough to see them as quite reasonable even with “a yellow lightsabre blade” just happening to get tossed into the first of those shorts. The second might have had a good bit of “a new saga begins in another time and place,” rather more interesting to me than “your beloved heroes are back... but they were unsuccessful on personal and professional levels, so hey, how about these puppets?” It did, though, toss in its own peculiarity with an impression of lightsabre blades being recoloured to match the shifting and settling allegiances of their wielders. I wondered for a moment if this was to be taken as an elaborate in-universe explanation for “Luke’s father’s lightsabre” not being touched up in A New Hope the way Obi-Wan’s and Darth Vader’s had.
Science Saru’s “T0-B1” had been talked up as calling all the way back to Mighty Atom/Astro Boy, and did have another bit of whimsy in its obvious efforts at charm. I was surprised to find Trigger contribute another short with “The Elder,” but could definitely see its older Jedi as a take on Qui-Gon’s unconventional wisdom even if its younger Jedi didn’t offer Obi-Wan’s by-the-book contrast. Geno Studio’s “Lop & Ocho” was about as surprising as the shorts got; there was a lot more weight to the story than I might have been lulled into first supposing by it including a furry rabbit-girl alien. It did, though, tilt towards “all you have to do is get determined in a crisis and you, too, can wield the Force.” Science Saru closed things out with another short named “Akakiri” that might have called back all the way to The Hidden Fortress, but it did conclude everything with a “down ending” and left me with half-rueful memories of seeing “watching in jumbled order” mentioned. I just might have been left with a few odd thoughts of the wearily conventional wisdom of what numbered “Episodes” are supposed to be loved above all others and the order I’d watched the shorts in.
Star Wars Visions might not have helped me towards a “how I learned to stop worrying and love this newest era” attitude, but I’m not regretting its specific experience either, and maybe that ought to count for something. Not that long after it had shown up, though, there was an announcement Disney was going to be streaming a few upcoming anime series on its private label service, and a certain amount of concern in response the company had just discovered there was money in anime and was about to start vacuuming all of it up. Nobody quite mentioned how Sony owns Crunchyroll, Funimation, and some anime production in Japan, and a while later concern kicked up over some Chinese investment in the industry. I can get to thinking about certain “reasons for watching anime,” whether they might just lead to burnout faster, and how there are rather more, if rather different, forms of “animation beyond the mainstream” and “entertainment beyond the mainstream” out there. I can also get to thinking about my personal interregnum between Robotech and Macross Plus (or “spanning from ‘Saber Rider and the Star Sheriffs’ to Sailor Moon”), and whether that’s affected my thoughts of the time between Speed Racer and Battle of the Planets. I do understand 1970s anime from giant robots to “World Masterpiece Theater” shows was being dubbed into languages other than English; making too big a deal of “it’s better when anime is insulated from foreign compromises!” could certainly go too far.