Now streaming on Disney Plus, Star Wars: Visions is a reimagining of the Star Wars universe from the perspective of nine different anime directors at seven of Japan’s top anime studios. IGN Japan spoke with three of these directors – Hitoshi Haga from Kinema Citrus (The Village Bride), Takanobu Mizuno from Kamikaze Douga (The Duel) and Hiroyuki Imaishi from Studio Trigger (The Twins) – about their respective episodes to dig a little deeper into the lore and the inspiration behind them.
Warning: this article contains spoilers for Star Wars Visions.
The Village Bride director Hitoshi Haga is best known for his work on Made in Abyss. He said that his episode of Visions began with the desire to show what a wedding ceremony might look like in a galaxy far, far away.
“I wanted to depict a wedding from the beginning,” he said. “Weddings involve a variety of customs, and I wanted to explore what some of these customs might look like on different planets in the world of Star Wars.
Haga continued, “Initially, the idea was that the 10-minute episode would show the bride and groom climbing a mountain and undertaking various rituals, such as reading their wedding vows and folding their costumes. That was the start, but later we decided to include a Jedi and a lightsaber to make it feel like Star Wars.”
The Jedi in question is F, a fallen Padawan who is visiting a remote planet after losing her master following the Great Jedi Purge. Haga explained that The Village Bride is set between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope, with ties to the animated series The Clone Wars and Rebels.
“The female Jedi and her master fought in the First Battle of Geonosis, but her master died and she was injured, and she still carries the wounds she received that day on her face. The failures of the Jedi Council in the period during Episodes I to III, The Phantom Menace to Revenge of the Sith, have left her with serious doubts about the meaning of being a Jedi. That’s her backstory.
“She is a Padawan who has lost her master, lost her Jedi Council, and now she has come to see that the Force can be used not only for fighting and for pursuing justice, but also for living one’s daily life as a Jedi. These are the thoughts she is struggling with as she searches for a new path as a Jedi.”
Just as Star Wars creator George Lucas drew massive influence from the films of Akira Kurosawa back in the 1970s, many of the directors of Visions drew from similar jidaigeki (Japanese period drama) sources. Haga cited 1970s TV series such as The Unfettered Shogun and the 1969-2011 mega-hit serial Mito Komon as references.
“I was quite conscious of Kurosawa’s films, of course, but more than that, I considered the jidaigeki genre as a whole,” he said. “Just like in The Unfettered Shogun and Mito Komon, I wanted to show that justice wins in the end. It’s like the wanderer who goes from place to place solving conflicts that you would see in something like Mito Komon – only here the conflict is resolved with a lightsaber.”
The Duel director Takanobu Mizuno, who previously worked on Batman Ninja, also drew inspiration from Japanese period movies for his Visions episode. Specifically Yojimbo, the 1961 classic samurai film by Akira Kurosawa starring Toshiro Mifune as a wandering ronin who becomes involved in a gang war. Set 20 years after the fall of the Empire, we see a bandit army of former Stormtroopers pillaging a village with their Bandit Leader, a one-time Sith Inquisitor – and a lightsaber-wielding wanderer known only as Ronin steps in to help. The parallels are obvious, especially with The Duel’s mostly black and white animation and carefully added film grain, making for one of the most striking episodes in the Visions omnibus.
“In Yojimbo, Toshiro Mifune’s central character was very cool, but the supporting characters around him were also hugely appealing,” said Mizuno. “In The Duel, Ronin is based on Mifune, while the Sullustan owner of the teahouse is based on Eijiro Tono, who played the innkeeper in Yojimbo who helps the hero. The Japanese voice actor, Cho, had to ad-lib all of his Sullastese dialogue, which made us laugh a lot in the studio.”
This gave Kamikaze Douga the opportunity to explore the gray zone between the light and dark sides of the Force, as Ronin is neither a Jedi nor a Sith – just a swordsman with no master but himself, who gets involved in the fray and helps the besieged villagers purely because doing so aligns with his own objectives.
“The General Director Junpei Mizusaki and (character designer) Takashi Okazaki came up with that idea,” said Mizuno. “Rather than portray the battle between the light and dark, we wanted to show a story that unfolds in some random corner of the universe. Ronin is not acting for justice – he’s just out to collect [Kyber] crystals, and he’ll fight anyone who happens to get in his way. The kindness of his act as he helps the villagers is just a coincidence. I wanted viewers to be unable to guess which period the story takes place in, so I brought in all kinds of elements from here and there around the Star Wars series and mixed them up.”
The idea of a wandering ronin lends itself perfectly to a full series, and Mizuno seems interested in the idea of making more Star Wars if the opportunity were to arise – as would character designer Okazaki, who is perhaps best known as the creator of the Afro Samurai series.
“Mr. Okazaki has apparently already been thinking about what’s next in the story, and he has said that he would definitely like to continue,” said Mizuno. “I’d love to continue working on this too. I’ve never really shown any of my work to my parents before, but this is Star Wars, so I had to tell them – and they were pleased for me.”
Directed by Promare and Kill la Kill director Hiroyuki Imaishi at Studio Trigger, The Twins is one of the flashiest episodes in Star Wars Visions. It is also jam-packed with homages to the movie series, not least in its title, which directly refers to the Dark Side twin clones Karre and Am while also nodding to the original Star Wars twin protagonists Luke and Leia.
Regarding the two central characters, Imaishi explained, “Star Wars has long been about the conflict between the light and dark sides, but I didn’t want to do that. I’ve never seen a story where two Dark Lords fight each other, so that’s what I wanted to depict.”
In The Twins, the two siblings, who have been cloned with the express purpose of causing Sith naughtiness sometime after the events of The Rise of Skywalker, face conflict when brother Karre learns that their current course of violence will lead to the death of sister Am. To save her, he sabotages the pair’s own plans – leading them to cross lightsabers in the stars.
“The two characters are not divided by light and dark,” explained Imaishi. “Karre opposes Am, but he does not want to fight for justice or defeat evil so that good can prevail. He wants to choose his own path. Rather than blindly obey the fate he has been given, he is trying to do what he wants to do. And part of his motivation is saving his sister, Am.”
Viewers will notice that Am – voiced deliciously by Alison Brie in the English dub – wears a costume that looks similar to that of Darth Vader, and this is no coincidence. Imaishi explained, “In the main movie series, there have not been any female Sith characters so far. I thought that if I introduced a beautiful blonde female Dark Lord, female fans all over the world may feel inspired to cosplay as a Darth Vader-type character with pride. If we can have a female Jedi in the movies with Rey in The Force Awakens, then now we can have a female Darth Vader.”
Imaishi, too, hopes for a chance to continue his Star Wars story, which ends with Karre crash-landing his X-Wing on Tatooine and vowing to save his sister. “I have already been thinking about what happens next in the story, and I would love to make more if Disney and Lucasfilm let me. The opening crawl of the original Star Wars was so rich and deep that it ended up becoming its own movie, Rogue One. The Twins, too, would continue with an equally epic scale.”
Star Wars Visions is out now on Disney Plus. Check out IGN's full review for the series and find out why Visions isn't part of the official canon… yet.
Ryuichi Taniguchi is a freelance writer for IGN Japan. This article was translated and co-written by Daniel Robson, Chief Editor of IGN Japan.