“I thought, finally! I’d been waiting for this,” says Takashi Ozazaki, a character designer for Kamikaze Douga studio, which is producing one of nine short films that make up Star Wars: Visions, the beloved franchise’s first entry into anime.
A “first look” reel for the new anthology—which was announced in December 2020–debuted on Saturday during Anime Expo Lite, a virtual replacement for the annual Anime Expo in Los Angeles.
The new clip shows characters dressed and designed in the style we expect from Japanese animation but in settings familiar to the Star Wars universe. Cornerstone props, including lightsabers and a Mandalorian helmet, make an appearance.
“There are so many genres at play,” Lucasfilm Executive Producer Joshua Rimes says in the three-minute video, a reminder that it is about as difficult to answer “what is anime?” as it is to define, “what is jazz?”
The series will debut on Disney+ on September 22.
It’s been clear since 1977 that Star Wars creator George Lucas found inspiration in Japanese filmmaking. Take, for example, the general commonalities between samurai and Jedi, and the resemblance of Darth Vader’s helmet to one worn by Date Masamune, a regional ruler in Japan through the early 17th century. Lucas has been upfront about how his first movie borrowed elements from Akira Kurosawa’s 1958 film The Hidden Fortress, a tale of a princess with a destroyed homeland, a dashing ranger, and two characters, one short and the other tall, tagging along. (In other words, the O.G. C-3PO and R2-D2 are named Tahei and Mataschichi.)
Later, Lucas served with Francis Ford Coppola as executive producers and “presenters” of Kurosawa’s 1980 epic Kagemusha. He also aided in financing one of Kurosawa’s last films, 1990’s Dreams.
The growing market for anime in the United States reached unprecedented heights earlier this year with the success of Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba the Movie: Mugen Train. Even with many theaters maintaining social distancing measures and seeing reduced ticket sales in early May, the film grossed nearly $48 million domestically. Its opening weekend haul of $19.5 million at the domestic box office wasn’t just a record for Japanese animation, but also any foreign language film. Moreover, the film is the continuation of a series (available on Netflix), meaning anyone who bought a ticket (unless they were dragged by a friend) was likely already steeped in its complex lore.
Star Wars: Visions is not the first Hollywood IP to “go anime.” It follows in the footsteps of Batman: Gotham Knight, a 2008 direct-to-video anthology in which six stories of the Dark Knight Detective were produced by four different Japanese animation studios. The most famous example is probably 2003’s The Animatrix, an expansion of the Wachowskis’ Matrix universe released between the second and third Matrix films.
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