There’s a story, it might be apocryphal, about how George Lucas went to Toshiro Mifune to offer him the role of Obi-Wan Kenobi in “Star Wars.” It makes sense, right? It’s widely known how Lucas was inspired by, and cribbed heavily from, Akira Kurosawa’s “The Hidden Fortress,” the star of whom is Mifuni of course, and what with the robes and the swords and that “Obi-Wan Kenobi” is nobody’s idea of an obvious nom de plume for Sir Alec Guinness, Mifune. And as the story goes, as Mifune’s daughter tells it, he turned Lucas down because “he was concerned about how the film would look and that it would cheapen the image of samurai.” He wasn’t wrong. “Star Wars” does reduce the Samurai and Bushido to vague pop pronouncements about elegant weapons for more enlightened ages – but I didn’t understand that as a three-year-old who didn’t speak English watching a movie in the theater for the first time.
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“Star Wars” was the single most important American mythology for me for the majority of my life. My office is full of the vintage toys I wasn’t allowed to have as a child—vain attempts at rescuing something aspirational from an essentially lonesome, frightened childhood. Asians appear in the prequel trilogy as Nimoydians: obsequious, devious, a naval species engaged in a blockage. It was painful to see how this universe I so wanted to be a part of viewed me. Then the long wait to ‘Rogue One‘ where a word of Mandarin destroyed me. The central saga, however, failed Asians again, dangling the hope of Rose before keeping her home to do homework in ‘The Rise of Skywalker.’ I stopped loving ‘Star Wars‘ then, at the moment it became clear to me that this thing wasn’t for me. That’s okay. I’m an old, ugly man, and the world is full of things that are.
Now, here’s Disney+’s interesting experiment, “Star Wars: Visions” a collection of nine short anime films created by Japanese creators and telling standalone stories in an extended ‘Star Wars’ universe. There’s beauty here, a moment or two across the nine episodes that are genuinely stunning. But there’s also the lingering apprehension whenever a white, American studio allows representation in one of their tentpole, billion-dollar properties. I’m not privy to the conversations that went on behind the scenes of these shorts, but each of them seems to be explicit pastiches of anime films and styles rather than wholly original constructions. It does cause one to wonder—it did me anyway—if there were guardrails presented for “songs” to “cover” for this project: who wants the Miyazaki? The “Cowboy Bebop,” the “Last Airbender” the “Astroboy,” the Kawajiri? Nothing wrong with parameters for an experiment, of course, but maybe something a little pear-shaped about the idea of this being an “experiment” in the first place. Especially when this exercise is essentially finally returning a franchise built on an appropriated foundation to the culture from which it so liberally borrowed. Reparations aren’t supposed to come with conditions.
That being said, the first short, Takanobu Mizuno’s ‘The Duel’ is incredible. Black-and-white in a pencil-line/traditional manga style, its main organizing source material is Kurosawa’s “Yojimbo” what with its tale of a Jedi ronin, wandering into a remote village right before a Sith armed with a lightsaber parasol, alights to wreak havoc. I adored the time element of the repair of an astromech droid being key to the Jabba’s Barge resolution of a river battle. The animation is lovely and the action is kinetic. The same could be said of all of the shorts, honestly, this is a professional and expensive-looking production. Top-notch from the top down. The seventh episode, Masahiko Otsuka’s ‘The Elder’ is also exceptional, taking its stylistic cues from Kawajiri’s ‘Ninja Scroll‘ in telling the tale of a Jedi and his Padawan encountering an ancient post-Sith Stih on a mountaintop on a remote planet. Most of the shorts take place in a post-Jedi/post-Sith timeline where bands of “good” guys try to mine kyber crystals to recapture some ancient notions of chivalry or, indeed, Bushido.
‘The Duel’ is great because of its sense of peril and melancholy poetry. Episode 9’s ‘Akakiri,’ directed by Eunyoung Choi, has some of that poetry as well along with the season’s most “down” resolution as a Jedi turns to the dark side to save a life. It’s tremendous stuff excavating ideas of how fluid are distinctions of light and dark in ways that the main series seldom attempted. A trio of heavy-hitters, of real killers. For the rest, they range from lightweight piffle like Taku Kimura’s “Tatooine Rhapsody” to frenetic Power Puff madness like Hiroyuki Imaishi’s “The Twins.” The Miyazaki shrine, Hitoshi Haga’s “The Village Bride” takes too long to get going and I found its politics – and its resurrection of the prequels’ battle droids – to be puerile and grating, and I guess I’m just not a fan of the Astroboy aesthetic of “T0-B1” by Abel Gongora. Yuki Igarashi’s ‘Lop and Ocho,’ however, is a compelling set-up for a feature as an escaped slave of the empire is adopted by a family on a planet being strip-mined for its resources. It’s good, but feels very much like a pitch reel – and Kenji Kamiyama’s ‘The Ninth Jedi’ is a visual stunner with lightsabering galore, but ends up as a fairly conventional, and noisily-plotted, bit a little too in love with its bombast and spectacle.
“Star Wars: Visions” is a showcase for animators and potentially a portal for neophytes to explore a few anime masterpieces with the proper curation and guide. I wonder if it would’ve been smart to include references with each short: if you liked this, you should see “Ghost in the Shell” or “Akira” or “Wicked City.” The cynic in me, though, worries that people watching this are essentially incurious and that the whole project will be seen as a pat on the head or a sop that doesn’t actually resolve a horrifying track record. Be that as it may, for the anime fan, it’s an interesting trainspotting game and for the ‘Star Wars’ fan, well, it’s more ‘Star Wars’—and then there are those three episodes, ‘The Duel,’ ‘Akakiri,’ and ‘The Elder,’ that I’ve already watched a couple of times each. Gorgeous. And the sort of proof of concept that Bandai’s Tamashii Nations prestige action figures represent: a marriage that makes sense between a source and the products that evolved from it without, until now, attribution. If “Star Wars: Visions” does nothing else, it at least tells the story that, if only in part it’s an important part, that the long time ago and the galaxy far away was maybe the Tokugawa era in feudal Japan. [C]
“Star Wars: Visions” debuts on Disney+ on September 22.
