A New Intersection: Star Wars Visions 3
Jan. 3rd, 2026 03:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmer“But it’s anime!” played its own certain role in unbending to the point of taking in a bit of “recent Star Wars.” I even emerged from “Star Wars Visions” supposing some of its nine animated shorts would be interesting to go back to. However, I hadn’t got around to that by the time a second Visions series, animated by studios from around the world, was announced. Whether or not my reactions to those new shorts amounted to a lower batting average than the original group, I still supposed I might go back to at least one of them... but still hadn’t by the time a third Visions series, returning to Japanese animation studios and even promising to follow up on some of the original shorts, turned up. Still, I did manage to find the time to watch these latest productions.
Things began this time where they had before, with Kamikaze Douga and Anima’s “The Duel: Payback.” Once again a considerable amount of “original trilogy” iconography had a thick coat of just that sort of design an anime fan such as myself would associate with “traditional Japanese swordfighting tales” applied. At this point I knew just who the protagonist really was, but after duelling an opponent also armed with a red lightsabre someone with a blue lightsabre shows up. Before beginning the new episodes I had managed to realise most of them had become about as long as “regular anime episodes,” and this did allow for more story than just “setup for an apparently cool fight.” Towards the end of all of it, though, I did get to wondering about a lecture to a now-pathetic new opponent about how both sides will just sort of always be there and he’s not really what he started out as any more either. I’m more inclined to thoughts such as “all will be tempted, but all but unopposed tempters doesn’t quite seem like ‘balance’ to me...” There’d been an almost absurd amount of lightsabre blades on display before. On the other hand, there’d been some Ewoks too.
“The Song of Four Wings” from Project Studio Q pretty much straight off looked like computer animation. I also noticed it looked to be set during the Rebellion itself, with an overly “cool” princess-type setting out on a lone patrol, save for her music-playing R2 unit. After origami cranes somehow folded to have four wings had showed up, however, things did in the end get to a bit of “mecha musume” that just might have pushed the general escalation of things to where the quotation marks around “cool” faded a bit, and I also realised the “four wings” weren’t just “an alien touch” but an evocation of the X-wing.
One of the bits of the original Star Wars Visions I’d had the most thoughts about going back to, and something I’d seen other people like too, returned relatively early here with Production I.G.’s “The Ninth Jedi: Child of Hope.” There’d even been news of a full-blown series to follow. Although I still didn’t manage to go back to the original short before watching its first sequel, it wasn’t that hard to figure things out. The young Jedi of the title managed to get blown into space in a way that offered one theory as to the general bravado of the good guys in not wearing spacesuits. Once she’d recovered from that she did wind up lifting, or at least shifting, an enormous mass using the Force, but still required help to rejoin her companions.
“The Bounty Hunters” from Wit Studio had a fairly obvious title, but the bounty hunter and her assistant who actually turned up were interesting characters in a reasonable sort of story (although there’s the question of whether “reasonable” quite applies to “taking iconography from a less-mined source and then taking it over the top,” regardless of how I did appreciate that too). When I started watching “Yuko’s Treasure” from Kinema Citrus I supposed the scruffy little kid being taken care of by a large teddy-bear droid in a Tatooine that did have a certain amount of “post-Special Edition” visuals was one more girl, only to then be informed by the dialogue I’d “misgendered” him. That story also managed to work in the end.
A third short from the original series was revisited in another work from Kinema Citrus, “The Lost Ones.” The familiar yellow-lightsabre-wielding surviving Jedi, now assisting others more openly, started off dealing with a sort of “natural carbon freezing” in a town that looked rather Earthlike and European to me. When things got away from that and became more complicated they wound up calling back to a bit of Star Wars that had me wondering how much she’d had to sacrifice for the first time that time.
Trigger returned as well, but with a story different from either of its varied contributions to the original series, with “The Smuggler.” That smuggler just happened to be a woman in a story presenting a distinct amount of “original trilogy” iconography, but in this particular case there was a touch I’d pondered myself before. If, so I’d told myself, the roles assigned to men back then were now to be assigned to women, it might be interesting for the role of “royal authority” assigned to a woman back then to be gender-swapped as well... Still, before things were over there’d been another familiar case of having cake and eating it too with another undercover surviving Jedi getting to show off late in the story.
Polygon Pictures seems one of the more well-regarded Japanese animation studios working with computer animation, although from what I can gather there are up-and-coming competitors to it now too. Where “The Song of Four Wings” had been “cel-shaded,” “The Bird of Paradise” looked more like the conventional sort of computer animation quite present “over here.” I suppose I was tempted to conclude while watching that this tale of a Jedi padawan learner blinded in a lightsabre battle and trying to find her way out the forest looked to have less of the design an anime fan such as myself would call “traditional Japanese.” I was also stuck wondering whether its final take on “the dark side within” had a bit more “simple acceptance” than my own take on a distinct set of source material would have it.
As I approached the end of these episodes I did have the vague yet pleasant feeling that the batting average had improved for me. However, I also had the impression they hadn’t attracted quite the same attention as the original shorts. It therefore got my attention when I saw “Black” from David Production brought up in Anime News Network’s year-end review, and just before I got around to watching it myself (such that I tried to skip past whatever was being said). The animation was impressive. The story seemed to amount, or so I guessed, to the dying reveries of a stormtrooper with one arm and part of his helmet broken away so that he became an individual, and while this was a shorter episode than the ones preceding it I have to admit it got to feeling kind of interminable as I harboured certain suspicious about those trying to justify having carried a childhood interest out of those years, but only to the point of winding up endlessly claiming “someone else” ought to do something with “the idea.” Otherwise, I was left wondering both how well The Ninth Jedi would do at still greater length and whether I would, indeed, ever find the time to watch that limited selection of “decent episodes” from three blocks of them.
Things began this time where they had before, with Kamikaze Douga and Anima’s “The Duel: Payback.” Once again a considerable amount of “original trilogy” iconography had a thick coat of just that sort of design an anime fan such as myself would associate with “traditional Japanese swordfighting tales” applied. At this point I knew just who the protagonist really was, but after duelling an opponent also armed with a red lightsabre someone with a blue lightsabre shows up. Before beginning the new episodes I had managed to realise most of them had become about as long as “regular anime episodes,” and this did allow for more story than just “setup for an apparently cool fight.” Towards the end of all of it, though, I did get to wondering about a lecture to a now-pathetic new opponent about how both sides will just sort of always be there and he’s not really what he started out as any more either. I’m more inclined to thoughts such as “all will be tempted, but all but unopposed tempters doesn’t quite seem like ‘balance’ to me...” There’d been an almost absurd amount of lightsabre blades on display before. On the other hand, there’d been some Ewoks too.
“The Song of Four Wings” from Project Studio Q pretty much straight off looked like computer animation. I also noticed it looked to be set during the Rebellion itself, with an overly “cool” princess-type setting out on a lone patrol, save for her music-playing R2 unit. After origami cranes somehow folded to have four wings had showed up, however, things did in the end get to a bit of “mecha musume” that just might have pushed the general escalation of things to where the quotation marks around “cool” faded a bit, and I also realised the “four wings” weren’t just “an alien touch” but an evocation of the X-wing.
One of the bits of the original Star Wars Visions I’d had the most thoughts about going back to, and something I’d seen other people like too, returned relatively early here with Production I.G.’s “The Ninth Jedi: Child of Hope.” There’d even been news of a full-blown series to follow. Although I still didn’t manage to go back to the original short before watching its first sequel, it wasn’t that hard to figure things out. The young Jedi of the title managed to get blown into space in a way that offered one theory as to the general bravado of the good guys in not wearing spacesuits. Once she’d recovered from that she did wind up lifting, or at least shifting, an enormous mass using the Force, but still required help to rejoin her companions.
“The Bounty Hunters” from Wit Studio had a fairly obvious title, but the bounty hunter and her assistant who actually turned up were interesting characters in a reasonable sort of story (although there’s the question of whether “reasonable” quite applies to “taking iconography from a less-mined source and then taking it over the top,” regardless of how I did appreciate that too). When I started watching “Yuko’s Treasure” from Kinema Citrus I supposed the scruffy little kid being taken care of by a large teddy-bear droid in a Tatooine that did have a certain amount of “post-Special Edition” visuals was one more girl, only to then be informed by the dialogue I’d “misgendered” him. That story also managed to work in the end.
A third short from the original series was revisited in another work from Kinema Citrus, “The Lost Ones.” The familiar yellow-lightsabre-wielding surviving Jedi, now assisting others more openly, started off dealing with a sort of “natural carbon freezing” in a town that looked rather Earthlike and European to me. When things got away from that and became more complicated they wound up calling back to a bit of Star Wars that had me wondering how much she’d had to sacrifice for the first time that time.
Trigger returned as well, but with a story different from either of its varied contributions to the original series, with “The Smuggler.” That smuggler just happened to be a woman in a story presenting a distinct amount of “original trilogy” iconography, but in this particular case there was a touch I’d pondered myself before. If, so I’d told myself, the roles assigned to men back then were now to be assigned to women, it might be interesting for the role of “royal authority” assigned to a woman back then to be gender-swapped as well... Still, before things were over there’d been another familiar case of having cake and eating it too with another undercover surviving Jedi getting to show off late in the story.
Polygon Pictures seems one of the more well-regarded Japanese animation studios working with computer animation, although from what I can gather there are up-and-coming competitors to it now too. Where “The Song of Four Wings” had been “cel-shaded,” “The Bird of Paradise” looked more like the conventional sort of computer animation quite present “over here.” I suppose I was tempted to conclude while watching that this tale of a Jedi padawan learner blinded in a lightsabre battle and trying to find her way out the forest looked to have less of the design an anime fan such as myself would call “traditional Japanese.” I was also stuck wondering whether its final take on “the dark side within” had a bit more “simple acceptance” than my own take on a distinct set of source material would have it.
As I approached the end of these episodes I did have the vague yet pleasant feeling that the batting average had improved for me. However, I also had the impression they hadn’t attracted quite the same attention as the original shorts. It therefore got my attention when I saw “Black” from David Production brought up in Anime News Network’s year-end review, and just before I got around to watching it myself (such that I tried to skip past whatever was being said). The animation was impressive. The story seemed to amount, or so I guessed, to the dying reveries of a stormtrooper with one arm and part of his helmet broken away so that he became an individual, and while this was a shorter episode than the ones preceding it I have to admit it got to feeling kind of interminable as I harboured certain suspicious about those trying to justify having carried a childhood interest out of those years, but only to the point of winding up endlessly claiming “someone else” ought to do something with “the idea.” Otherwise, I was left wondering both how well The Ninth Jedi would do at still greater length and whether I would, indeed, ever find the time to watch that limited selection of “decent episodes” from three blocks of them.