Today brings the premiere of Star Wars: Visions on Disney Plus, the anime-inspired anthology series that takes the franchise in a bold and ambitious new direction. Nine short films from six Japanese studios tell brand new stories in a galaxy far, far away, diving into genres that we’ve never seen the franchise tackle before.
Not everybody is going to be enamored with every installment, but if you’re a fan of either animation or Star Wars itself, then there are at least a couple of episodes you’ll love. In a new interview with CNET, Lucasfilm’s VP of Franchise Content and Strategy, and Visions executive producer, James Waugh admitted that the series may end up influencing live-action projects somewhere down the line.
“Every piece of Star Wars influences future Star Wars storytellers in some form or the other. So are there plans to integrate Visions into the timeline saga storytelling? Not currently, but I have no doubt that we will see things that were in Visions become part of the fabric of Star Wars over the next decades. Right now you can continue the storytelling, there’s a novel [Star Wars: Visions: Ronin] coming out by Emma Mieko Candon, who’s a really talented author. Like everything Star Wars, we’ll want to build an ecosystem of storytelling around Visions and these characters. We’ll have to see what people fall in love with.”
Seeing a live-action version of “The Duel” will almost certainly shoot to the top of people’s wish-lists; Visions’ opener is a stark black-and-white tale heavily influenced by the work of legendary filmmaker Akira Kurosawa, who himself was a major inspiration for George Lucas when he was first putting Star Wars together on the page all those years ago.
There are several candidates contained within Star Wars: Visions that would be awesome to see unfold on a bigger scale, but we’ll just have to wait and see how Disney Plus subscribers react to the show before we start looking too far ahead to wonder about what comes next.
