Visions Review: The Anime Approach Delivers Striking VisualsExBulletin

In “The Twins”, an episode of Star Wars: Visions, siblings Karre and Am go head-to-head.

Lucasfilm Ltd.

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Lucasfilm Ltd.

In “The Twins”, an episode of Star Wars: Visions, siblings Karre and Am go head-to-head.

Lucasfilm Ltd.

Let’s put that aside: it’s uneven.

The.

Any anthology series has episodes that work better than others. Star Wars: Visions is a series of anthologies; some of his episodes work better than others.

Which episodes work best for you will depend entirely on what you Star wars deductible for.

Is it the epic space battles? You won’t find them here. These episodes tend to tell smaller stories set on different planets, including a few that will be far too familiar to fans of the franchise, so if you’re a fan of space combat in space trenches, look elsewhere.

Likewise, if you are a fan of Star warsHis penchant for charming thieves and daring rescues and narrowly escaping the swashbuckling derring-do that has its genesis in George Lucas’ avowed love for the film series continues to work.

But if you’re here for characters who seriously strike up the most hoki dialogue on “The Force” and “The Dark Side” and “Stretch Out With Your Feeeeeeelings” aka, the Jedi Stuff is pulling a space chair. This series is for you. (I count myself in that cohort, so it’s conspicuously for me too.)

There is a nature to wrap up in the series: George Lucas has often spoken of the Star wars the debt of the saga to the films of Akira Kurosowa as The Seven Samurai and The hidden fortress.

Disney invited major Japanese animation studios to tell Star wars stories, and largely letting them go to work without forcing them to adhere to the franchise’s strict canonical timeline. This fact is responsible for the best aspects of the series, its striking visuals, and its lack of references to specific characters and events in the established game. Star wars saga.

First the visuals: it’s invigorating to see the familiar pitfalls of Star wars universe inflected by a different cultural aesthetic; each episode attractively feels like they’re just riffs on the original Ralph McQuarrie Star wars conceptual designs that have so long been dutifully and endlessly reiterated through movies, TV shows, and comics.

It’s more than turning lightsabers into lightkatanas and calling it a day. Each episode of Star Wars: Visions represents a fundamental and radical visual re-imagining through an anime lens, whether it’s elaborately rendered landscapes, dark Ronin-style Jedi or a cute, Astro Boy-like a droid who longs to learn the ways of the Force. From the architecture of secluded hamlets and intimidating palaces to the elastic expressiveness of the characters’ facial expressions, the series represents a fusion of influences with the potential to take the franchise in new directions …

… visually, at least.

But even if the creators have had carte blanche, they remain saddled by Star wars‘strict and limited narrative conventions. The Jedi are good, the Sith are bad. They fight. Quite a lot. Lather, rinse, repeat.

You can be shot from side to side, of course a few episodes deal with that but above all, the vast Star wars the galaxy is black and white (or if we’re talking lightsabers, red and blue), and if you come here looking for something more than tidy morality games, you’ll spend it wandering the deserts of Tatooine until you are eaten by a krayt.

There’s an argument to be made that by establishing characters outside of the established timeline, but having them play very familiar characters, no, painfully familiar conflicts, the series gestures towards some sort of universal cycle of Sith-Jedi clashes, some sort of Ragnarok or Yuga cycle, only with robes and rat tails. May be. The simplest answer, of course, is that it’s impossible to get out of the franchise’s simplistic moral worldview.

To be fair, lively Star wars series like Rebels and The clone wars managed to find shades of space gray in the reductive Manichean Star wars universe, but then they each had multiple seasons to do so. Most episodes of Star Wars: Visions, on the other hand, point somewhere around the 20 minute mark.

This underlines another limitation of the series: although marketed as a succession of discrete “animated shorts”, no episode seems dramatically complete. Instead, they resolve their immediate plots and conclude by gesturing towards larger, unresolved conflicts that the villain escapes, a war begins, a mystery the answer to which awaits our heroes somewhere among the stars.

The inevitable result, of course, is that each episode feels like a carefully crafted and promising pitch for an ongoing series, so many pilot episodes, bending together for the pickup.

Whether it is like this or not, this is how it is. For the record, I would be on board for series based on episodes 5 (“The Ninth Jedi”), 7 (“The Elder”) or 9 (“Akakiri”).

If you’re ready to approach the series as a testament to the limitless visual potential but limited narrative potential of this venerable franchise (seriously, grab a drink every time someone mentions kyber crystals), you’ll be preparing to come out of exactly that. that he is ready to offer you, and nothing more.