TV/Film Review: Star Wars Visions (Season 2):

 


Star Wars Visions 2 years ago was a revelation - 9 animated shorts using the Star Wars setting (albeit in non-canon ways) made by Japanese Animation (anime) studios which used the setting (itself a Western take on Eastern tropes) in different ways that were unique, stylish as all hell sometimes, and fascinating in themes and characters. One of those shorts - The Village Bride - is one of my favorite bits of Star Wars media maybe ever, and another, The Duel, was expanded into the wonderful non-canon Star Wars novel, Star Wars Visions: Ronin by Emma Mieko Candon. It was a great addition to the Star Wars canon (even if non-canon) and I'd hoped that it would not be a one and done series.

And it wasn't....as here we have a second season of Visions, but this time the season is very different than season 1. Now, instead of 9 Anime shorts produced by Japanese studios, we have 9 shorts by international studios (or well, 8, as I'll get to below) from around the world, with only one being animated by a Japanese studio. The result is really fascinating as the 9 studios each showcasing their own spin on Star Wars, such that their individual cultures really show through in how they tell their stories. And as a result we get some stories that are really interesting, as well as stylishly animated in various ways from 2d art to 3d animation to stop motion, and more than worth your time. I'm gonna explore each of the shorts, and rank them, after the jump.

In my review of Season 1, I ranked the shorts into four different tiers, with all the tiers being good, but stories in a higher tier being ones I enjoyed better than the lower tier stories. I'm gonna do the same this year. Again, none of these are bad - I enjoyed them all - but I tend to favor stories that aren't just generic Star Wars esque stories. Also note that I am not really ranking shorts within tiers.

Tier 1:

The Spy Dancer by Studio La Cachette (France)
I am Your Mother by Aardman (United Kingdom)

Two very different shorts make up my favorites from Season 2, the ones which I will likely rewatch the most of all of them. But both are incredibly good in their very different ways.

The Spy Dancer is the perfect epitomy of what Star Wars Visions is all about: showcasing Star Wars from the perspectives of different cultures. In this French-produced short, the war against the Empire, and a small resistance by performers on a world being conquered by the Empire is essentially compared to the French Resistance against the Vichy France. Here the titular dancer Loi'e leads a troupe of people using their performances to spy on the Empire, through methods like placing trackers, even as the younger girl among them (Hétis) urges Loi'e into more direct resistance instead. But everything is thrown awry by the presence of an Imperial Officer holding a cane belonging to the officer who stole Loi'e's child away from her years ago at the start of the conquest. A gorgeously animated short, with tremendous emotional resonance as we discover what happened to Loi'e's child, with a hopeful but still dark ending. Just tremendous.

I am your Mother is by the same studio as Wallace and Gromit and Chicken Run, well known animated comedies, and is itself a comedy - the only one in this batch here. And it is beyond hilarious and charming as a mother who embarrasses her pilot daughter runs a race with her against all the other pilots and their mothers (with special cameo from Wedge Antilles). Just a ton of fun, and exactly what we hoped for when Aardman was announced as a studio for Visions.

Tier 2:

The Pit by D'art Shtajio (Japan), written by Lucasfilm (US)
In the Stars by Punkrobot (Chile)
Screecher's Reach by Cartoon Saloon (Ireland)
The Bandits of Golak by 88 Pictures (India)


Tier 2 contains a number of stories that made an emotional impact on me, but I kind of wanted more or something different within them.

The Pit is honestly a weird inclusion in Star Wars Visions, because it feels like it came from a different anthology - while this was animated by a Japanese Studio, it was written by an African American (and the voice actors are the most famous Americans of the series) during a protest movement here and is clearly dealing with themes of slavery, oppression, and trying to bring that all to light. I'd love an African American based anthology of Star Wars works honestly, as this demonstrates really well what themes one could touch on - It's excellent, even if I kind of cynically didn't buy the way the short transforms from insanely dark and depressing to a hopeful ending as the characters are rescued.

In the Stars is a gorgeously animated short of the last two survivors of a people, many of whom seemingly have the force, trying to survive on a planet the Empire has taken over for their water....with the older sister wanting just to survive, but the younger sister wanting to fight back like their mother. It's just beautiful, with strong themes of colonization and environmental devastation, with a delightful ending.

Screecher's Reach and The Bandits of Golak both have similar endings - the protagonist girl (teen in Screecher's Reach) is taken away by a force user for training. But both are very different shorts and have their own powerful merits - Screecher's Reach features a girl deciding to face what is supposed to be just a ghost story, but turns out to be some form of dark jedi spirit in a cave...so she can get away from a life of working for what seems to be an industrial factory using child labor. It's a dark short really, as our heroine is forced to leave her friends to get away and it's ambiguous whether her savior is a Jedi...or a Sith, and honestly I lean towards the latter.

 By contrast, The Bandits of Golak isn't ambiguous or nearly as dark, as its Indian themed short has its little girl not able to resist using the force and drawing the attention of an Inquisitor, only to in the end be saved by a Jedi.  But its central relationship between force-sensitive girl Rani and her older brother Charuk, fleeing the Empire to keep Rani save is incredibly heartwarming and charming as Charuk would do anything to keep Rani safe and happy, making it even more heartbreaking when she is taken away for Jedi training.  Just real great emotional development here in a well developed and very Indian flavored short.  

Tier 3:

Sith by El Guiri (Spain)
Aau's Song by Triggerfish (South Africa)

My tier three shorts are ones which are really well animated and certainly very interesting, but just felt incomplete or lacking to me.  First off is Sith, which is just gorgeously animated, as it features a painter/artist as its main protagonist (she's never named in the short) who well, as you'd expect from the title has a dark past: she's a former Sith who left her Master to try to find the light through her artwork....except her Sith master has other ideas and comes for her, leading to a wonderfully animated fight which concludes with the idea that the protagonist can only complete herself not by trying to deny her darkness in favor of the light, but embracing both her light and her darkness (with one really cool lightsaber).  It's a fascinating concept that some Star Wars media has tried to do things with before, but while the low dialogue and narration deliberately tries to leave the background for it all and the development to the viewer to figure out, and I think that works for the setup but not for the protagonist's final revelation of how she finds her balance.  It's like the short is missing some 2 minutes in the middle somewhere which hints at what she needs for balance.  

Aau's Song does the opposite - it actually has a Star Wars esque intro text (even if it doesn't scroll) to explain the setting, as it settles on a stop motion-esque 3d animation showing an alien girl whose song seems to purify sith-tainted kyber crystals, which her people mine for the Jedi.  And again its beautiful animation as the heroine finds herself called to the crystals, gets in trouble, and saves the day via her song...which draws her to the attention of the Jedi who is visiting and will then take her away for training.  And it's a cute story....but I kept feeling like it could've been something more if there was more development of how these people lived and what Aau's life was supposed to be like, or the relation between her and her father, or the jedi and her people, etc.  There was a setup there that's pretty interesting, but I just felt like it was lacking...although I did think that the concept and art was unique enough to put it ahead of my Tier 4 story.

Tier 4:

Journey to the Dark Head by Studio Mir (South Korea)

A lot of people I see on social media put this as their favorite, and well I can kind of get it - because this reminds me of The Twins from the first season - a really well animated short featuring an excellent jedi battle that was also very conventional in ways. Yeah there's some ideas here about how war can't be stopped by simply cutting off the head of a statue representing the enemy and how each side in a conflict will always contain both dark and light. And there's the classic character dynamics of a pair - a Jedi Toul and a pilot/mechanic/monk Ara kind of - who don't want to be on a mission together having to work together to achieve their goal as a dark jedi intervenes. But well, while the tropes here are well worn, they're very bare bones and the short doesn't do the legwork in character development (kinda like my complaints about Rogue One) to make it really have an impact for me. We see Ara and Toul butt heads for like 30 seconds, and then they're forced to work together and suddenly are very aligned - character development here just happens because the tropes say they should, not because it's actually developed or natural. And it shows, which makes this well animated short enjoyable, but forgettable honestly.