Siblings were separated by the machinations of mystical warriors and galactic realms. Indigenous peoples terrorized by TIE fighters before striking back gloriously. Parent and child on opposite sides of an ideological divide.
The stories of Star Wars: Visions are familiar and recall the tragedy and pulp fantasies of George Lucas’ long-running franchise. And yet this animated series gives Star Wars a new feel, both through the angles of the episodes on these archetypal stories, and perhaps more importantly, through the diversity of the visual palette, of the many animation houses that the individual visions shorts. Season 2 continues to eschew the Skywalkers and Palpatines saga in favor of smaller episodes that reinterpret the Star Wars universe. But it also has new looks. visions is no longer just an anime anthology: it’s gotten so much bigger.
“We always saw visions because they really have the potential to be a broader canvas,” producer James Waugh tells Polygon. The anthology setup, as he sees it, is the perfect “framework that enabled the best creators in their craft and their media to explore and celebrate Star Wars in new ways.” That’s exactly what Season 2 commits to, bringing in a mix of animation styles and production houses from around the world.
Similar to season 1 of visionsthe individual directors and studios naturally impose their own history and house style on it Star Wars. Many of the best moments of visions’ second The season leans heavily on those distinctive points of view, bound together in a community of sorts, on common themes of lost and rediscovered family, colonized or reclaimed homes, across cultures, both on screen and off.
Image: Cartoon Saloon/Lucasfilm Ltd.
Image: 88 photos/Lucasfilm Ltd.
Each of these new windows on the world offers a different interpretation of the Star Wars myth, making season 2 of visions an even more exciting range than season 1. Waugh says he realized it with visionsfirst season that these were stories “that you could really only get from filmmakers who came from Japan, who had unique perspectives on the world, but also cultural influences, religious influences, historical contact points, or points of reference.” That led to Season 2’s mission statement, looking to “expand some visions can be with this volume, and see what new voices we can bring in.
Folding in all these cultural backdrops, with creators drawing on their own historical encounters with fascism, makes for a more politically charged season. Many of the artists’ first stops are inspired by the idea of imperial occupation, arising from the effects of resistance or plight on freedom. “Screecher’s Reach”, “The Bandits of Golak”, “In the Stars”, and “The Spy Dancer” all envision different corners of the universe under the Imperial thumb. Each of these shorts takes a different and compelling approach in depicting the ways in which people can escape that oppression – sometimes based on folklore, sometimes on real-world parallels.
Take the haunting evocation of Irish folklore in the Cartoon Saloon-produced ‘Screecher’s Reach’, directed by Paul Young. Through expressive animation, it turns a familiar heroic test of courage into something more sinister and disturbing. Gabriel Osorio’s “In The Stars” is another highlight that shows how visions broadens his canvas. Produced by Chilean studio PunkRobot in stop-motion-style 3D digital animation, it has a tangibility that feels important, drawing clear influence from Chile’s history of colonialism and oppression as it depicts the surviving daughters of an extinct tribe .
Removed from the context of the Skywalker Saga, visions takes the opportunity to simply tell lower-stakes stories in the form of Star Wars, which feels like a fresh approach – perhaps even more so after the mythology-heavy season 3 of The Mandalorian. As in the previous season, some fans are interested in the stories that the constant momentum of the other works of the franchise does not allow. How do people live in this galaxy if it is not at war, or if the people are not focused on resisting tyrants?
Where Season 1 answered that question in “Tatooine Rhapsody,” this season has Aardman Studios’ “I Am Your Mother,” featuring something rarely explored in the Star Wars franchise: a mother/daughter story. Director Magdalena Osinska follows a pilot cadet who hides her upcoming family day from her rambunctious mother and plays much of her story for laughs, through a series of visual gags and callbacks to both Star Wars and Aardman Studios history . (Many viewers have already pointed to the appearance of the ski robot from Aardman’s 1989 short Wallace and Gromit A grand day out.)
Aardman’s captivating stop-motion animation sits comfortably alongside work like “Aau’s Song” from Cape Town studio Triggerfish – another stop-motion work, but of such grand scale and natural beauty that I began to wonder if this was made like that of PunkRobot season 2 short “In the Stars” which is a beautiful 3D stop motion style digital animation. It’s not, and the felt puppets in “Aau’s Song” absorb the episode’s vivid lighting into a wonderfully hazy glow, as it tells the story of Aau, a child gifted with a magical song.
As someone who spent much of his childhood growing up in South Africa, it was an uplifting experience to hear the accents reflected here and see the Cape Town-inspired people and vistas (with maybe a little bit of Peru too). what is so incredibly striking about it Star Wars: Visionsglobal approach. While the franchise has always taken bits and pieces of inspiration from different cultures in its fiction, it has rarely done so from those people’s point of view.
Image: D’Art Shatjio/Lucasfilm Ltd.
Those real-world inspirations in visions Season 2 gives the show a sense of urgency that the franchise felt deprived of, perhaps with the exception Andor. That sense of variance at the core of the series is reminiscent of what made the franchise so exciting, when George Lucas seemed to be able to switch between fantasy genres and hard sci-fi all in one scene. visionsMany different appearances feel traditional and forward-thinking at the same time, in terms of how it evolves the franchise’s iconography and its thematic interests while preserving what makes this universe so compelling.
All those angles can leave fans wanting more – almost any of these episodes could grow into a riveting feature film in its own right. But maybe that’s why visions is so captivating. This series creates stories of ephemeral beauty, stories that don’t overwhelm their welcome or diminish their (sometimes incredibly haunting) impact. Without having to continue with these stories, creators can come to an excitingly bleak conclusion, leaving room for the next Star Wars snapshot.
Where the show will go from here, who knows. (Waugh wouldn’t rule out revisiting Season 1’s approach: “Not to say we won’t be doing anime anymore — we love anime.”) That ability to take real Star Wars to every medium, to every interpretation of every country, is what makes visionscomprehensive approach feels so special. It’s like the franchise is finally capable of anything.