Return to Samurai Roots: Inside ‘Star Wars: Visions’ 3rd Volume Anime Redux

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The Star Wars universe continues to grow with the animated anthology Star Wars: Visions, the third volume of which was released October 29. Untethered from the family drama of the Skywalker Saga, the series allows a variety of animation studios to redefine the boundaries of Star Wars, with a wealth of different directors exploring this universe and its themes through thrillingly varied lenses.

The first volume focused on anime-style storytelling — with production from the likes of acclaimed studios such as Production I.G, Studio Trigger, Science Saru and many more, with some studios submitting multiple shorts by different directors. The second season expanded even further and added a wealth of international studios, including the United Kingdom’s Aardman, South Africa’s Triggerfish, Chile’s Punkrobot and Ireland’s Cartoon Saloon. Now, the anthology returns to anime, with a mix of new and returning studios, including some that are picking up where they left off with their prior shorts.

Lucas Lingua Franca

James Waugh, one of the show’s trio of executive producers, highlights that the core of the show was born from both a love of anime and a desire to see what Star Wars would look like in the hands of other creatives. “The real joy was seeing, like, how you [can] take a specific cultural perspective and see it through the lens of creators and through the lens of Star Wars,” he says. As for why anime became the first focal point of Star Wars: Visions, Waugh says it was a result of pure anime fandom and the fact that anime was the “lingua franca” around Lucasfilm.

“The initial idea came from how we all loved anime. It was sort of a shorthand, I think, for a lot of us when we were talking about just animation techniques, filmmaking techniques, even when I’m working with the game teams on story development,” Waugh says. He highlights the work of Dave Filoni as an example of how this love pervades Lucasfilm, noting Filoni’s inspirations in Japanese culture and filmmaking techniques. “We all sort of grew up on the same things that we’re still passionate about. So that really started Visions from this aesthetic and style of voice that we loved, and wanted to see Star Wars be realized in.” Waugh says Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy was also key in getting Visions (and later, Visions Presents) off the ground, as well as pushing for a creators-first ethos.

“It became really clear that we didn’t want to act as a Western studio that just sort of went there and said, ‘We want your aesthetic, here’s the story we want you to tell and here’s the canon you need to follow.’”

— Exec producer James Waugh

 

The anthology format felt like the best framework to achieve that goal with the producer team. Waugh says that they didn’t want to simply hand over a list of demands to be produced. “It became really clear that we didn’t want to act as a Western studio that just sort of went there and said, ‘We want your aesthetic, here’s the story we want you to tell and here’s the canon you need to follow,’” Waugh says. “We wanted to empower [the creators] as much as possible and allow for things that normally might not fit.”

The new volume continues along that track, and Waugh notes that they were more hands-off than usual with the short-form industry legend Shinya Ohira and says that Vision Presents, an avenue for spinoff series like The Ninth Jedi, gives the artists a bigger canvas.

Anime Tour de Force

Perhaps the most telling example of the different flavors that anime studios brought to Visions is Volume One’s The Duel, produced by Kamikaze Douga and directed by Takanobu Mizuno, who returns for a follow-up story in Volume Three titled The Duel: Payback. Each short is forward-thinking but informed by the past, and Mizuno underlines how they pulled from both the history of samurai films and modern 3D animation.

“In the previous film, The Duel, we aimed to create a Star Wars work that maximized the influence of Akira Kurosawa’s jidaigeki films,” Mizuno says. In order to get the look of a monochrome jidaigeki film, the team sought out analog backgrounds resembling sumi-e paintings.

Achieving what Mizuno calls an “analog flavor” was also tricky with current mainstream digital painting, according to the director, because using this style meant the production was unable to use all the “digital conveniences” available to them. “For example, using a free-moving 3D camera in space required a lot of effort, so the number of cuts where a 3D camera could be used was limited.” Mizuno adds that for The Duel: Payback, they solved this through collaboration. “We were able to co-produce with Anima, a studio with advanced 3D CG technology, which allowed us to create backgrounds that fused analog and 3D CG to a greater degree than before. Thanks to complex camera mapping, it became possible to animate backgrounds with the texture of sumi-e paintings in a three-dimensional way.”

The analog paintings themselves were born from consultation with Yuji Kaneko of the background art studio Aoshashin. “He was very cooperative and offered many suggestions,” Mizuno says. “For the character textures to blend naturally with Aoshashin’s backgrounds, we used a method we had been researching for some time: adding subtle fluctuations to 3D CG to give it the warmth of hand-drawn art. Additionally, we applied 2D hatching textures to add shading.” The team only added color to the glowing elements of the piece, such as lightsabers and blasters.

Besides this old-school samurai film feel, one thing that stood out about The Duel was its wild lightsaber designs. Mizuno says that these were all ideas from character designer Takashi Okazaki. “I heard that the parasol-shaped saber used by the bandit boss in The Duel was inspired by the hidden umbrella weapon in Lady Snowblood,” he says. Okazaki came up with an even wilder weapon design in The Duel: Payback in what Mizuno calls a sudden flash of inspiration. “I remember being very excited when we first saw it. After that, we had to consider how to actually create this complex design,” Mizuno adds.

The pursuit of an explicitly analog feel was also a priority for director Masahiko Ōtsuka (a founder of Studio Trigger) on The Smuggler, a follow-up to the director’s previous work, The Elder, on Volume One of Visions. However, Ōtsuka says that while the production was tempted to revisit characters from The Elder, they had too many new things they wanted to explore. And some personal ambitions too. “One of the reasons I overturned my retirement and made a comeback of directing is that I regretted not being able to join the sound mix process at Skywalker Sound, which I had been looking forward to, because of the pandemic. This time, I was able to work with them too,” Ōtsuka adds.

The visual direction was inspired in part by the breadth of styles in Volumes One and Two. “Various ways of approaches and expressions of the other shorts inspired me so much. At the same time, I noticed that each work incorporated the look created by up-to-date digital techniques. That made me think that it would be interesting to create a work with the look of older, analog Japanese anime, enhanced with digital tools.”

Expanding the Star Wars Legacy

To make the art feel authentic to the analog anime style, the team mixed in designs from older Star Wars films while bringing in new elements to keep it fresh and emphasizing the unique background art to contribute to the mood. Aside from the look, Ōtsuka also sought to foster a different tone.

“In The Elder, I gave the battle scene heavy tension and chose an animation style with a more realistic feel, because of the concept of aiming toward a Star Wars with [the tone of] Japanese period drama.” Conversely, The Smuggler looks to a more nostalgic atmosphere. “This time, I wanted to bring in rather light conversation and exhilarating action like in Episode IV, with the lively spirit of Japanese anime from the late ’70s to early ’80s in my mind,” he says, also noting that this is when Star Wars was still quite new to audiences.

The aesthetic variety even just between two shorts is, in Waugh’s eyes, critical to making Star Wars: Visions stand out and what will continue to give it life. He cites Aardman’s I Am Your Mother from Volume Two, with its basis in director Magdalena Osinska’s background as a Polish immigrant, as the sort of story he was proud of telling with Star Wars: Visions. “There’s so many more studios in the world that I want to work with. The Magda story is a great example of why it’s best to let these creators tell their story and not be bound by the burdens of just telling a canon Star Wars story and making it fit into that big mythology.”

It seems that, paradoxically, the best way to make the Star Wars universe feel expansive is by focusing in on the personal.

 

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Star Wars: Visions, Volume 3 premieres today (October 29) on Disney+.