To protect a village…

Star Wars Visions is an animated anthology series comprising nine anime style original short films from the who’s who of Japanese studios.

This first episode is produced by Kamikaze Douga, the studio behind Batman Ninja and Tales of Crestoria and gets us off to an incredible start with The Duel.

From the opening moment I knew we were in good hands. It pans across a black and white landscape, a village, droids in the fields. Electronic lights are coloured in reds and yellows, lending a stark contrast to the densely drawn monochrome wider world.

Through it all comes a set of bandits, running people off the road and leaving a nameless visitor staring down at them with what we know is an inevitable confrontation on its way.

This has everything. Fidelity to Star Wars, bandits, Kurosawa, the cowboy dramas which inspired Kurosawa and those which took their inspiration from him in return.

And I’ll say this now – The Duel is the best lightsaber fight in all of Star Wars. It’s clear, thrilling and because there’s no hero who has to make it to another film, the stakes are real. We don’t know who will survive although we yearn with all our selves to have the nameless hero win.

The construction is beautiful to watch, the artwork stunning and the attention to detail wonderful. It is, at once, every nameless hero story we’ve ever encountered while at the same time being entirely its own entry into such lofty company.

I watched this with English dubbing and the voice work was great.

On the basis of this fifteen minute short I am very excited about the rest of the episodes. This felt like pure Star Wars and in some ways I question where you go from here! Given the studios involved I’m excited by the potential variety to come – animé is a complex culture in its own right with as many niches as shows and with all of that to draw on together with the deeply symbiotic relationship it has with western visual SF I hope and expect there to be nine truly different takes on the universe.

For the time being though, this one episode makes the entire venture worth it alone.

Rating? 10 nameless strangers out of 10

Stewart Hotston