Star Wars: Visions was billed as a celebration of Star Wars in the many forms it has taken over the decades, but also as a showcase of animation talent in the anime industry. With that intention, Disney brought on board all sorts of wonderful and surprising animators and directors, and each of them managed to create something that stands out and can act as a bridge to even more boundary-pushing animation from those creators. In the spirit of Visions, let's take a look at the creators of some of the shorts and find some other works that will surely delight anyone who is a fan of their forays into the Star Wars universe.
Visions begins with Takanobu Mizuno's striking Star Wars alternate history story "The Duel", immediately notable for its striking use of CG to create a rugged look as well as its intense action. Mizuno has done quite a bit of work in CG animation in his time. This includes a short ad for the Japanese research lab SACLA and a Suda51-written short film called "Tsukikage no Tokio" for the Japan Anima(tor)'s Exhibition, which, like Star Wars: Visions, is a sort of anthology meant to showcase all sorts of talented animators. Those are worth checking out if you can find them, but in the meantime you can hop on Netflix and watch Sound & Fury, a visual accompaniment to the 2019 Sturgull Simpson album of the same name. Sound & Fury has a very loose plot - amounting to a sort of Mad Max-esque post-apocalypse featuring a roaming samurai - but it is mostly a kinetic showcase of 3D animation, showing how talent like Mizuno have been able to push 3D to look and feel like the traditional 2D animation people have come to expect from anime. Mizuno himself directs the second part of Sound & Fury, but the entire thing is worth watching if you're into the kind of action and style in "The Duel".
Studio Trigger has two shorts featured here, one each by Trigger's founders Hiroyuki Imaishi and Masahiko Otsuka. Imaishi directs "The Twins", his love letter to Star Wars at its most excessive and bombastic. Fitting, because those are adjectives that can be used to describe Imaishi's approach to creation in general; if you enjoy the energy "The Twins" brings to the screen, his breakout hit Gurren Lagann is sure to hit many of the same notes for you, bringing with it stylized mecha battles that ramp up in scale and absurdity as the series goes on.
Trigger's other episode here, "The Elder", is from Otsuka, who has been a mainstay at Trigger - currently their CEO - and their old haunt Gainax for a long time. According to the official Star Wars website, "The Elder" might even be Otsuka's "final film for Trigger", making its story resonate all the more. You can see Otsuka's work in all sorts of Gainax and Trigger productions, including half of the classic coming-of-age series FLCL's run. He also penned the screenplay for the original Little Witch Academia film, which eventually inspired a full series on Netflix. Much like "The Elder," Little Witch Academia deals with themes of inspiring knowledge and the passing of the torch between generations.
The understated but powerful "The VIllage Bride" comes from Hitoshi Haga, a skilled animator who has credits in the industry as far back as the classic 1995 series Golden Boy. You can see him at his best as an animator on the surreal Satoshi Kon films Perfect Blue and, in particular, Millenium Actress, which prominently features his skill in digital photography. More recently, Haga directed episodes 1, 6, and 9 of the compelling adventure anime Made in Abyss, which shares a sense of melancholy and appreciation for natural visual splendor with "The Village Bride". As a bonus treat, the ever-talented musician Kevin Penkin composed the soundtrack for both "The VIllage Bride" and Made in Abyss, so if you liked that Visions entry, there is more where it came from.
Among many sci-fi anime fans, "The Ninth Jedi"'s Kenji Kamiyama needs no introduction. If you're unfamiliar, you might have seen his work on Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, the TV series imagining of Masamune Shirow's perennial manga Ghost in the Shell that ran on Adult Swim. If you enjoy the tight plotting of "The Ninth Jedi", Stand Alone Complex is a solid recommendation; featuring a near-future setting with political strife that in many ways mirrors real-world issues, it can even be enjoyed without having read the manga or watched films it is based on. Of course, Kamiyama has had an extensive career, including completely original projects - Eden of the East is also sci-fi that tackles current issues, but in a more contemporary setting, and if you're more into fantasy, his series Moribito: Guardian of the Spirit features many of his same sensibilities. While it hasn't come out yet, for fans of classic sci-fi he's even directing the upcoming Blade Runner: Black Lotus, an anime series set in the Blade Runner universe.
Like Trigger, the ever-inventive Science SARU brought two very different shorts to the Visions collection. The first is "T0-B1", the Osamu Tezuka tribute from skilled flash animator Abel Gongora. While he doesn't have a full series directorial credit yet, you can see some of his work in various anime; he directed and storyboarded the stunning second opening animation for the urban tokusatsu anime Garo: Vanishing Line. With Science SARU, you can see his beautifully integrated flash animation in Netflix's visual splendor Devilman Crybaby and the 2019 Masaaki Yuuasa-directed film RIde Your Wave.
Finally, the other Science SARU short "Akakiri" comes from their CEO and founder Eunyoung Choi, who has been working to bring us cutting-edge adult animation ever since joining fellow Science SARU founder Masaaki Yuasa's team for the 2006 psychadelic horror Kemonozume as an animator and episode director. When it comes to Choi, you really can't go wrong - from the fast-paced comedy and drama of time-travel story The Tatami Galaxy to the masterful sports anime Ping Pong the Animation, Choi has had her hands in many of the absolute best anime to come out in the past decade. Perhaps the best place to start, though, would be in last year's Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!, a celebration of animation itself that was on Best TV of 2020 lists from both The New York TImes and The New Yorker, which she produced - definitely a highlight for fans who came to Visions for the wide display of talent on hand.