Star Wars: Visions season 2 has episodes like “I Am Your Mother” that show what the franchise can be, even if the producer says it might return to anime later.
Brothers and sisters parted by the machinations of mystical warriors and galactic empires. Indigenous populations terrorized by TIE fighters before gloriously striking back. Parent and child on opposite sides of an ideological divide.
The tales of Star Wars: Visions are familiar, recalling the tragedy and pulp fantasies of George Lucas’ long-running franchise. And yet this animated series makes Star Wars feel new, both through the angles its episodes take on these archetypal stories, and perhaps more importantly, through the diversity of its visual palette, from the many animation houses that produced the individual Visions shorts. Season 2 continues to eschew the saga of the Skywalkers and the Palpatines, in favor of smaller episodes reinterpreting the Star Wars universe. But it also has new looks. Visions is no longer just an anime anthology: It’s become so much bigger.
“We always saw Visions as really having the potential to be a broader canvas,” producer James Waugh tells Polygon. The anthology setup, as he sees it, is the perfect “framework that allowed for the best creators in their craft and their mediums to explore and celebrate Star Wars in new ways.” That’s exactly what season 2 commits to, by pulling in a mixture of animation styles and production houses from all over the world.
As with season 1 of Visions, the individual directors and studios naturally superimpose their own histories and house style on Star Wars. A lot of the best moments of Visions’ second season draw heavily on those distinctive viewpoints, which connect in a kind of communion, over common themes of lost and rediscovered family, homes colonized or reclaimed, across different cultures, both on-screen and off-.
Each of these new windows on the world offers another interpretation of Star Wars myth, giving season 2 of Visions an even more exciting reach than season 1. Waugh says that he realized with Visions’ first season that these were stories “you could really only get from filmmakers that were from Japan, that had unique perspectives on the world, but also cultural influences, religious influences, historical touchpoints or reference points.” That led to the mission of season 2, looking to “expand what Visions can be with this volume, and see what new voices we can bring in.
