(no subject)

I am way behind on writing up my Voyager watch with innerbrat, and I do intend to tackle the backlog soon -- we're now about halfway through season 3 -- but for the last couple months we've also been pairing our Voyager watch with episodes of Star Wars: Visions, so now we're done I'm going to get that out the way first.

So Visions is an anime anthology series in which a bunch of different Japanese animation studios give their takes on the Star Wars universe -- each episode runs about fifteen to twenty minutes, and presents a set of original characters who from some long-time-ago and some far far away galaxy. The episodes exist explicitly outside the strict constraints of The Star Wars Timeline As Established By Disney, operating strictly on a vibes principle: as long as there are Jedi, an Empire, and/or a bunch of aliens and starships, anything more or less goes.

Conceptually, this is really neat, especially given how liberally George Lucas borrowed from the aesthetics of Japanese cinema and samurai iconography when creating the Jedi in the first place, and the animation on most of the projects is gorgeous. It does mean that more than half of the creators tackling the project seem to have thought, "Great! Time to make a short samurai film with lightsabers in it!" -- all of which were generally lovely, and which is absolutely a fair take on the project brief, but I did hit the point where I'd get really excited any time one of the shorts seemed like it might hypothetically not feature a Jedi protagonist ...

This ended up being none of them, for the record. None of them did not feature a Jedi protagonist. But this, too, is very Star Wars.

( The Duel )

( Tattooine Rhapsody )

( The Twins )

( The Village Bride )

( The Ninth Jedi )

( TO-B1 )

( The Elder )

( Lop & Ochō )

( Akakiri )