Somewhere, Vision Persists

A third season of Star Wars: Visions recently premiered on Disney+ to not half as much hype as the first season. Which is too bad because it's a vast improvement on the second season. Unlike the second season, which was a series of Star Wars animated vignettes from various small animation studios from around the world, the third season has gone back to the first season format of employing just seasoned Japanese animation studios, including Production I.G. and Trigger among others.

Production I.G.'s vignette is one of the best, and one of the ones that actually feels like it could fit within the canon continuity. A Jedi girl is trapped on a derelict spacecraft where she befriends a small droid. In the short run time of the episode, an effective warmth develops between the two characters and by the end the viewer is invested in the stranded droid's devotion to its master and the girl's desire to escape and reunite with her friends. That one was written and directed by Shiotani Naoyoshi.

The Studio Trigger vignette, "The Smuggler", was written and directed by Otsuka Masahiko, who made several episodes of the new Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt. Obviously the tone differs a great deal from that series but "The Smuggler" also centres on an earthy female protagonist, essentially a female Han Solo. It's pretty good. All but two of the vignettes centre on a female character so I guess they were still going by the "Force is Female" mandate. One way in which they substantially differ from Disney Star Wars, though, is that the Japanese writers and directors seem not only to like Jedi but actually understand them. The young American writers who have emerged from an academia that has routinely taught them to despise religion struggle to portray a spiritual order in a positive light but Japan is still a country in which just about everyone visits temples and shrines on New Years, people's homes typically have small shrines, and you can see signs of the country's spirituality everywhere.

So there's real heart behind the Jedi's faith in "The Lost Ones" from a studio called Kinema Citrus. Written by Haga Hitoshi and directed by Haga alongside Takahito Oonishi, this one ended up being my favourite. A Jedi woman rescues some civilian children from a crumbling village. Not realising she's a Jedi, they repeat some of the anti-Jedi propaganda they've been indoctrinated with, and she takes it grace and without bitterness. She sees past their prejudice to give them words of wisdom and comfort.

The season is bookended by the two stories that don't feature female protagonists, the last vignette being the more interesting of the two. Simply called "BLACK", it's a Bill Plympton-style fever dream of scribbled animation, apparently depicting the rambling thoughts of a stormtrooper over the course of his violent demise. I certainly appreciated its boldness. It was written and directed by Ohira Shinya, a Ghibli animator who worked on several Miyazaki Hayao films, including his most recent film, The Boy and the Heron.

Star Wars: Visions is available on Disney+.