Star Wars Visions S2: The Bildungsroman of Star Wars?
The second anthology of animated shorts reflects the frustrations and hopes of a younger generation.
The Short Take:
A second season of Visions brings yet another collection of stunning, innovative, and emotionally resonant animated shorts. I see more thematic cohesion among the episodes this time around.
Image Credit: StarWars.com
The Long Take:
Season 1 of Star Wars: Visions was a breath of fresh air that I had never thought I needed from this franchise. Unburdened by canon continuity, the creators of those first films were free to make stories that felt fresh and new while still retaining many classic touchstones fans could recognize.
Pretty quickly into my viewing of Visions Season 2, which brought us 9 more animated shorts made by all new studios, I felt confident that all the qualities I valued in Season 1 were very much at play again in Season 2. The shorts explore new aesthetic frontiers. They introduce brand new characters and make me care about them in mere minutes. They tap into those primal feelings I associate with Star Wars: hope, rebellion, and the internal and external struggle between light and dark.
This new batch of stories does not merely give us more of the same, however. While the studios called upon for Season 1 were mostly known for anime or anime-inspired styles, Season 2 diversifies to incorporate studios that use stop motion animation, 3D CGI, and even the painterly, vibrant style that mixes CG with hand-drawn techniques, popularized by Into the Spider-Verse. The new collection is also a lot more international. Instead of all Japanese studios, S2’s line-up includes studios from Spain, France, South Korea, India, Chile, the UK, and South Africa. The cultural lens though which we view Star Wars in each film was much more noticeable, especially with 88 Pictures’ “The Bandits of Golak.” This makes Season 2 more of a “Star Wars around the world” project than the translation into another genre project of Season 1.
Image Credit: Polygon
The diversification of style and cultural influence makes this season feel more like a celebration of the art of animation. Many shorts here demonstrate how the medium of animation can push narrative boundaries. One of the more visually breathtaking pieces, El Guiri’s “Sith,” for example, manifests the Force as smears of paint, in a way that would be nearly impossible to pull off in live action. Meanwhile, “Screecher’s Reach” by Cartoon Saloon showcases how layers of hand drawn 2D animation — not unlike what I recall from the castle scenes in their Oscar-nominated Wolfwalkers — can create a subtextual critique of social systems that reinforce hierarchies of power.
What stands out about Season 2 of Star Wars: Visions most, however, is its thematic cohesion, which I can’t recall being as recognizable in the first season. I couldn’t find any information about the extent to which all the different studios worked with Disney/Lucasfilm or what parameters Disney/Lucasfilm did or did not give to their writers and artists, so if anyone knows anything about that, feel free to share that in the comments. But, to me, it almost feels as if these studios were working from a shared prompt about how a younger generation might hold onto hope as the older generation destroys the world with tyranny, war, and environmental devastation.
Almost all of the protagonists are children or young adults who go up against older authority figures or institutions. A Sith apprentice defects and tries to live peacefully in the light. A child laborer takes a big risk because she yearns for a better life. Two orphaned sisters must steal back water from The Empire to survive. A budding ace pilot confronts her class anxiety in a parent-child race. A young disciple of a clairvoyant society questions their role in the ongoing war. A boy and his force-sensitive sister must travel alone to reach a safe haven. A young girl disobeys her father to heed the call of kyber crystals in need of purification.
There are only two films that do not fit into this abandoned and/or rebellious youth pattern: Studio La Cachette’s “The Spy Dancer” and “The Pit” by D’art Shtajio, because they’re told through the perspective of a parental figure — a mother and a father, respectively. They both, however, still prominently feature brave children trying to make their way through a war-torn galaxy.
Image Credit: Slash Film
I see this running thread as a reflection of intergenerational tension in our own world. I immediately think of Greta Thunberg and who she represents — young people angry and frustrated with how generations before them are leaving a worse world behind. Many of the Visions episodes reminded me of Andor and that series’ ability to highlight the cultural and environmental destruction caused by The Empire’s colonization of various planets. Imperial Officers wore down The Dhani, hoping to discourage more and more of them to abandon an annual sojourn called The Eye. On Narkina 5, The Empire’s occupation has polluted the waters and ruined fishing there. I hear echoes of these planets’ plights in films like Punkrobot’s “In the Stars,” in which we see plant life shriveling up and dying due to an Imperial invasion. Or Triggerfish’s “Aau’s Song,” that features an entire planet devoted to healing kyber crystals after Sith have bled them all.
Image Credit: StarWars.com
When I think back to all these characters bearing witness to a galaxy under The Sith’s or The Empire’s rule or, in some cases, rise to power, I realize that they’re all coming of age in the midst of turmoil and at a formative moral crossroads. Multiple stories revolve around a Force-sensitive child having to choose between living a normal life and following the path of the Jedi or Sith.
There is much loss and pain at these inflection points; this is eerily similar to a literary genre called the bildungsroman, which comes from the German for novel (“roman”) of education (“bildung”). Broadly, a bildungsroman is a novel that chronicles a character’s psychological and moral formation, usually as the result of traumatic childhood events, from which they mature. Classic examples include Dickens’ Great Expectations, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, and J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. Obviously, since Visions are typically under 20 minutes, we often do not have time to see the second half of the bildungsroman; how they will mature and grow as the result of the events we see is implied rather than shown. Screecher’s Reach stands out in this regard; perhaps I need to call ones like that a slice of bildungsroman or a mini-bildungsroman. Journey to the Dark Head, on the other hand, feels like a full bildungsroman since we see Ara as a child and then later as a young adult.
The bildungsroman trope is not new to Star Wars — far from it. One could argue that the Original Trilogy is a bildungsroman for Luke Skywalker as he goes from naive farm boy to Jedi Knight, learning hard truths about his family and the galaxy along the way. The Sequel Trilogy hints at a bildungsroman for Rey, but we never see the start of it; we meet her after her traumatic childhood. In a full-length Star Wars film, however, the focus usually fixes on one central hero. Visions, in contrast, allows us to see many children across the Galaxy, all facing similar tragedies and, in some cases, triumphs.
The message that there is always hope, even when everything seems bleak or when someone’s path takes a dark turn, is stronger and more convincing when it’s not just one Luke or one Rey who is special, but when it’s a boisterous girl playing a flute, a curious girl who likes to sing, a Jedi Padawan without a master, a former Sith apprentice, an orphan in a workhouse, a Twilek pilot trying to fit in at school, or genocide survivors trying to preserve their culture. (Or, perhaps, a broom boy.)
Image Credit: StarWars.com
In Journey to the Dark Head, Toul says to Zara that, “Nothing is fixed. Light and dark will always coexist. And if nothing is set in stone, that means there will always be hope.” That, to me, is the central idea that connects all of these beautifully disparate stories. That at the inflection point of a bildungsroman, when a child becomes an adult in the crucible of tragedy, anything is possible.
Stay tuned for part 2 of this review, in which I rank all of the short films in Star Wars: Visions Season 2, giving my reactions to each of them individually.
Star Wars Visions S2: The Bildungsroman of Star Wars?
I struggled to get through Season 1 of Visions, but I loved (most) of season 2. I especially appreciated the cohesion of the different stories that you hit on in your long take!