Star Wars: Visions Blends Star Wars With Anime, and It Mostly Works

Eric Cunningham

Eric Cunningham is the editor-in-chief of Elections Daily. He is a lifelong resident of western North Carolina and graduated from Appalachian State University. You can follow him on Twitter at @decunningham2. @decunningham2.

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6 Responses

  1. Pinky says:

    This is the first Star Wars thing I’ve heard about that’s interested me in a long time. I’m not a subscriber, so I’ll probably never see it, but it could be pretty good.Report

  2. Oscar Gordon says:

    I’ve started it, about halfway through the set. While I enjoy the obvious samurai themes, I kinda wish there was more variety of themes. I know it’s a common criticism that Star Wars focuses way too much on the Jedi/Sith/lightsabers because of the rule of cool, but The Mandolorian has also shown that you can have compelling stories with nary a lightsaber in sight.Report

    • The interesting thing is I think that the lightsaber and crystal stuff is so big here because it’s big in Japan. Samuri, of course, but also think of things like Final Fantasy – heavy focus on crystals. It’s just a thing there. These studios likely went in with the idea this was the only thing they’d ever do for Star Wars, so why not go big? The later episodes do diversify themes to a good degree though if you stopped early on.

      T0-B1 is basically Pinnochio, The Elder is very much focused on the concept of age and time, Lop and Ocho is about family, and Akakiri is about fate. These ones are very much not samurai stories.

      I am surprised there wasn’t anything with mecha with aerial dogfights – those would seem like a natural fit, especially in a clone wars setting. I can imagine they could do some cool stuff with anime-style droid armies. If there is a season 2, it would be fun to explore that at least.Report

  3. North says:

    It was an interesting grab bag. Some of the shorts were genuinely good, even inspired, but some were brutally bad. The bad ones, mind, were mostly bad in that they combined Lucas-isms with Anime tropes in a kind of forehead slapping way.

    Still some of them were really good.Report