A little over a year and a half after the visually breathtaking Star Wars: Visions Volume 1 landed on Disney+, the anthology series has returned with a force, delivering a stunning collection of tales from around the globe. These shorts not only showcase a wide variety of animation styles, but they exemplify why Star Wars allows new voices to breathe life into a galaxy far, far away. The franchise has long borrowed from other cultures, but through Visions audiences are welcomed into a world where those cultures are authentically displayed through the lenses and mediums that know them both.
As with Volume 1, the second volume comprises nine standalone short films, each of which explores familiar, yet wholly new aspects of the Star Wars mythos. Unlike its debut selection of shorts, which specifically focused on Japanese animators and their stories, Volume 2 features shorts from around the world—expanding the universe further with themes and animation styles inherently linked to cultures that aren’t often given free rein to explore a franchise like Star Wars.
While Star Wars is slowly starting to bring diverse voices into its creative spaces for large-scale projects, such as its Disney+ series (with creative talent like Deborah Chow, Rick Famuyiwa; and on-camera talent like Amandla Stenberg, Omid Abtahi, and Diego Luna) and the newly announced Rey-centric film directed by Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, the franchise is still largely rooted in Eurocentric ideas. These ideas often steal from cultures, stripping away vital context because they aren’t given an opportunity to be told by voices that understand them. Except for a series like Andor, which does smartly cover themes like colonization and its devastating impact, these themes are rarely given the kind of attention they deserve—until now. Colonization and the far reach of its touch is a running theme throughout many of the shorts in Volume 2, which makes sense when the idea of rising up against power-hungry regimes is an intrinsic part of Star Wars.
As one may expect from stories set within Star Wars, many of the Visions shorts deal with unpacking the concept of good versus evil through their own unique vision—pun intended—of what that means for their corner of the galaxy. For some, it’s a duality that exists within all of us; for others, it’s battling peer pressure; and for a few, it’s as literal as the Dark Side and Light Side. Another key theme that runs throughout several of the shorts is this idea of family, both in the form of friends who became family and through siblings and parents. Star Wars has always been strongly linked to fathers, but with Volume 2 motherhood is brought to the forefront in “I Am Your Mother,” “The Spy Dancer,” and “In the Stars.”
It’s hard to isolate just one or two of the Volume 2 shorts to shower with praise because each one of them is a breathtaking journey into the unknown, filled with new animation styles to fall in love with and fresh stories to long for more of. Each short has the potential to become someone’s favorite, just as each story has the potential to inspire the franchise to reach new horizons.
“Sith,” which is the first short in the collection, is perhaps one of the most memorable shorts in Volume 2. Written and directed by Spanish animation studio El Guiri’s co-founder Rodrigo Blaas, “Sith” explores the beauty of the Dark Side and the vibrancy of what it means to turn away from that darkness. The animation feels alive in a way that the form very rarely does, capturing this painted texture and utilizing that to play with color, light, and movement. The story begs for a continuation, giving the audience just enough to whet their appetites while allowing them to imagine what came before the first paint stroke—and what comes after.
“The Pit,” penned by Lucasfilm’s LeAndre Thomas and brought to life by the animators at D'Art Shtajio, brings to Star Wars a classic story of people rising against oppression, but the message it tells also feels like a call to action. Art does not exist on its own. All stories are informed by the time in which they are created, and with Thomas’ script, you feel the visceral emotions of the past three years—there’s anger and sorrow and despite everything: hope. It plays with this idea that even though some may fall, more will rise to the occasion. It’s a powerful story.
Julien Chheng’s “The Spy Dancer,” which is whimsically brought to life by France's Studio La Cachette, tells an extremely poignant story about motherhood and the heinous actions of the Empire. While there is no shortage of strong women in the galaxy, there’s something extremely unique about the way this short utilizes its lead’s unique abilities to unravel the mystery at play.
With so much of Star Wars being rooted in stories about mostly male characters, a real catharsis can be found within this collection of stories because so many of the shorts focus on female characters. At the heart of Cartoon Saloon’s "Screecher's Reach” is a heartbreaking story about a young girl named Daal (Eva Whittaker), who has to shed her friendships in order to meet her destiny, while “I Am Your Mother” is about a budding young pilot named Anni (Charithra Chandran) who is embarrassed by her mother; in “In the Stars,” sisters Koten (Valentina Muhr) and Tichina (Julia Oviedo) carry the burden of being the sole survivors in a ravaged land; and in both “The Bandits of Golak” and “Aau’s Song,” their emotional anchors are Force-sensitive girls who burn bright with potential.
Star Wars: Visions Volume 2 delivers some of the most inspiring Star Wars stories of this decade, simply by blending together the beauty of a story-rich globe and setting it free among the stars. There are fewer lightsabers on display, as compared to Volume 1, which gives the stories freedom to soar beyond the familiar artifacts and instead craft their own visuals which are intrinsically linked to who they are as storytellers. When a franchise is filled with a far-reaching galaxy like Star Wars, it makes so much sense to explore the corners of it that aren’t filled with Skywalkers.
Rating: A
Star Wars: Visions Volume 2 premieres exclusively on Disney+ on May 4.