Star Wars: Visions launched in 2021 by giving nine anime studios the chance to create short films based on Star Wars, leading to wildly different spins on the franchise. In one zany episode, a Hutt starts a rock band, while another features a frenetic duel between twin Sith. The series got even more ambitious in season 2, when it opened up to studios around the world and featured a goofy family race from Aardman and a dark, twisty tale from The Secret of Kells and Song of the Sea studio Cartoon Saloon.
So it’s unfortunate that season 3 of Star Wars: Visions is a step backward in multiple ways. It narrows the scope back to Japanese animation and also returns to the first season for a trio of sequels: “The Duel: Payback,” “The Ninth Jedi: Child of Hope,” and “The Lost Ones.” That last pivot feels like part of a frustrating trend from Disney, which can’t seem to let anthology episodes stand on their own.
When What If…? was announced in 2019, it was presented as an anthology show that would allow the Marvel Cinematic Universe to mess around with its own canon. But the show quickly abandoned the promise of its concept by just focusing on multiversal team ups. By the end of the series in 2024, few episodes of What If? actually stood alone. The zany “What If… Thor Were an Only Child?” led to an episode about Darcy and Howard the Duck having a kid who then grew up to be a hero that teamed up with characters from other episodes to protect Uatu. The evil Doctor Strange in the show’s best episode — which delivered a story in 36 minutes that was much more satisfying than Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness — got the chance to redeem himself later in the season only to become the bad guy again in season 2. The series wound up growing its own ponderous canon rather than staying a fun playground to show different spins on favorite characters.
The miniseries Eyes of Wakanda seems like an anthology show, following different agents of the isolationist African nation throughout time as they try to recover vibranium and other highly advanced technology. But while each episode follows different characters, they eventually build to become a direct prequel to Black Panther. The show winds up so focused on reinforcing the importance of Erik Killmonger in changing Wakanda’s relationship with the rest of the world that it doesn’t deliver satisfying stories about one of Marvel’s most fascinating settings.
The huge amount of interconnected content released across its Marvel and Star Wars brands since the launch of Disney Plus has turned keeping up with your favorite franchises and characters into homework. An anthology show should be an antidote to that. Instead, Star Wars: Visions season 3 asks viewers to remember what happened in a trio of episodes from four years ago to connect with several of the entries in the new season.
Sure, you probably don’t have to rewatch The Duel to appreciate the Sith-hunting Sith fighting an overzealous cyborg Jedi in The Duel: Payback. The Jedi F just continues to be a wandering do-gooder in “The Lost Ones,” the sequel to season 1’s “The Village Bride.” But the sequel to The Ninth Jedi is only made worse by being part of a continuity. The episode mostly involves the aspiring Jedi Lah Kara helping a sad droid while the other heroes of the previous episode stand around a starship not contributing anything but cryptically referencing their plan. The “to be continued” at the end of the episode feels like a drag rather than an exciting tease.
If Disney executives want to expand on some of the stories from Star Wars: Visions, they would be better off following the model of Marvel Zombies, which got a four-episode miniseries to expand on a single episode from What If? season 1. The Ninth Jedi is getting its own miniseries and the story should have just been continued there rather than in this season of Visions. Animated shows like Star Wars: The Clone Wars and Star Wars: Rebels have been fertile ground for Star Wars to introduce new characters and expand on the universe in ways that have eventually made it into live-action. There’s nothing wrong with using Star Wars: Visions to see what sorts of stories resonate with audiences, but that shouldn’t come at the cost of experimentation in future seasons of the anthology.
Visions remains at its best when it just tells self-contained stories in wildly different styles. The two best episodes of season 3 are the meditative and vibrantly colorful “The Bird of Paradise,” which follows a Jedi apprentice struggling to survive after being blinded in a fight, and the nightmarish fever dream “BLACK” set against the backdrop of the destruction of the Death Star II. Neither could (or should) be turned into a series, but they represent the creative potential of the anthology format. Disney has enough serialized shows. It shouldn’t lose sight of what makes Star Wars: Visions special.
Star Wars Visions season 3 is streaming now on Disney Plus.