StarWarsVisions EP James Waugh: “We wanted this to be a survey of all the nuance & tones & textures of anime. We didn’t want this to be one note. I think there’s an expectation of what anime is versus the diverse array of storytelling in the medium.”
that presents nine “Star Wars” shorts by seven Japanese anime studios — it did not take much to convince the actor to say yes. “Star Wars: A New Hope” was the first movie Oka ever saw in theaters. It was the first VHS tape he ever purchased. His first job out of college was at Industrial Light and Magic, and some of his earliest credits are as a visual effects artist on George Lucas’s “Star Wars” prequels.
“This has been something that we wanted to do forever,” says executive producer James Waugh, who also serves as Lucasfilm’s vice president of franchise content and strategy. “We all have that vernacular of referencing different movies and scenes [from anime]. I think the question was how do you do that with ‘Star Wars’ in the right way?”One of the biggest sticking points was just how Lucasfilm should go about incorporating anime into the world of “Star Wars.
“It took Disney Plus, really, to give us the opportunity for a platform that changed the way we were thinking about ‘Star Wars’ storytelling,” Waugh says. “Then it was just a matter of how do we do it in a way that was going to be as authentic as possible, and really let the studios own the storytelling as unique expressions of ‘Star Wars’ — which we just hadn’t explored within the creative strategy we were working through at the time. That’s what unlocked the ‘Visions’ framework.
Some studios submitted a single pitch for consideration, while others pitched several ideas. Then Lucasfilm and Qubic sorted through how to create the widest assortment of approaches to achieve their desire for as comprehensive a survey of anime as possible. While each short takes on its own unique flavor, they all share a preoccupation with one of the singular objects within the “Star Wars” franchise: the lightsaber, as a totem of power, symbol of familial tradition, or literal catalyst for the short’s central story. It’s so striking that it could seem as if Lucasfilm and Qubic decided to use the lightsaber as a kind of unifying motif for “Visions.
“Because I speak Japanese fluently, I understand what they’re saying and where the inflections are and where the emphasis is and what tone it is,” Oka says.
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