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Star Wars: Visions - Anime Anthology Series

Christopher said:
Also, unless that droid was a Force user, they seem to have forgotten the idea from the original episode that these new lightsabers change color to reflect the Force power and alignment of the wielder.
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Not sure what the problem is here... that kind of thing wouldn't apply to a droid.

As to whether the droid is a Force user: the answer would be no, because:
1) if he was a Force user, he wouldn't have needed Kara to move the rubble; and
2) it's a droid!
 
"The Bounty Hunters" had a decent concept, I guess, but it didn't do much for me. "Yuko's Treasure" was generally unremarkable, and it seemed gratuitous to set it in Mos Eisley/Tatooine and reuse so many familiar settings.

"The Lost Ones" was okay, though not as conceptually novel and interesting as "The Village Bride" was. It seems to fit fairly smoothly into continuity, evidently taking place in the early years of the Empire, except I don't buy its conceit that carbonite gas will automatically freeze everything it touches, rather than requiring an apparatus (and Wookieepedia confirms that an apparatus is required and uses liquid carbonite, not gaseous).

With some of these, particularly when I rewatched "The Village Bride" today, I sometimes understand enough of the Japanese words to recognize that the English subtitles say something different. I wish they had more faithful subtitles instead of just the closed captions for the English dialogue, which is often rewritten to fit the speech rhythms. I also noticed that sometimes there are captions for English dialogue where there's no speech in the Japanese version, like in "Bride," where the battle droids were much chattier in the subtitles than in the Japanese audio.
 
I watched The Bird of Paradise today, and I liked it a lot. The story was good, but I loved the animation, especially as it got more surreal as it went along. I'm not always a fan of surreal stuff when it starts getting to weird and abstract, but this was just surreal enough to different, but still worked and made sense.
 
"The Smuggler" was fun because Chita was an appealing character, and it was well-animated, but in some ways it felt like a rehash of A New Hope -- a charismatic smuggler hired to sneak an ex-Jedi and a chosen one off-planet to avoid Imperial entanglements, getting chased by the Empire anyway, and ending up at Yavin IV (though skipping over, ahh, one or two things that happened in between in the original). That last bit would make it hard to reconcile with the canonical continuity, though I suppose Gleenu's commitment to serve the prince and his planet over other causes could account for why she didn't join the Rebellion.

I was kind of hoping that for once we wouldn't see a lightsaber, that Gleenu would just turn out to be a badass royal bodyguard instead of a Jedi. Why should the Jedi get all the glory? Also, when the prince seemed to be going out of his way to draw attention and encourage Imperial pursuit, I thought the twist was going to be that he was a kagemusha, a decoy for the real prince. I would've found that more interesting than the fairy-tale ending they went for, but I guess I'm not the target audience.

It's funny how the characters are using conventional Japanese interjections like fuzaken na ("Don't joke with me" or "You're kidding me") or chikushou (literally "animal," but basically "Damn it/you" in usage), but the closed captions are using SW-universe oaths like "Bantha dung" and "Dank ferrik."
 
JD said:
I watched The Bird of Paradise today, and I liked it a lot. The story was good, but I loved the animation, especially as it got more surreal as it went along. I'm not always a fan of surreal stuff when it starts getting to weird and abstract, but this was just surreal enough to different, but still worked and made sense.
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My favorite of the season so far. Beautifully made, and I love that it focuses more on a Padawan's emotional and philosophical journey toward understanding the Force than on action. The philosophy and story tropes are very Japanese, yet it also feels very Jedi, underlining how much the latter is derived from the former. I said last time that I would've liked to see more focus on non-Jedi, but this is a story that uses Jedi meaningfully, because it's an exploration of Jedi philosophy rather than just an action story about a telekinetic sword-wielder.

The droid was named Daruma, and based on the shape of a daruma doll, a representation of the founder of Zen Buddhism and a talisman of good luck and perseverance, often given as a token of encouragement. I can see how that fits the story.

There were no clues to the larger context beyond the existence of Jedi and Sith, so I suppose this story could take place at any time in SW history when the Sith were active. It makes it easier to fit (as an intellectual exercise) than some of the others.
 
I tried to watch Black yesterday, and I only made it about 2 minutes into it before I turned it off. It was just way to weird and abstract for me. Where Bird of Paradise was the good kind of surreal, this was very much the bad kind.
 
JD said:
I tried to watch Black yesterday, and I only made it about 2 minutes into it before I turned it off. It was just way to weird and abstract for me. Where Bird of Paradise was the good kind of surreal, this was very much the bad kind.
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I just watched the whole thing -- it's about half the length of the others, 12-odd minutes -- and it's definitely abstract. Intriguing and creative, but not really the sort of art I can get into. It's kind of disturbing, I guess intentionally so, juxtaposing seemingly random images of Stormtroopers fighting and dying with upbeat jazz music, with a brief interlude of the Stormtrooper enjoying happier times with a lover or wife. I guess maybe the idea was to interrogate how Stormtroopers tend to be treated as cannon fodder disposed of en masse, by confronting us with the disorienting, overwhelming violence and bleakness of it all from their perspective. And maybe the incongruously jaunty music was to comment on how all that death gets trivialized and treated as entertainment. But I could be projecting onto it, trying to impose some kind of coherent message on something more surreal. Then again, maybe that's the point of abstract art, that it leaves the interpretation up to the viewer.
 
Oh damn... Well, Disney does own the IP and I suppose it could be argued they can take whatever they want to use from the fandom but the optics here in this context are ... unseemly.
 
Tuskin38 said:
Apparently one of the season 2 episodes copied choreography from a fan film

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Except, not Disney. Disney just didn't do due diligence.

Welcome to why my friends stopped doing fan films. They didn't like not owning their work.
 
137th Gebirg said:
Oh damn... Well, Disney does own the IP and I suppose it could be argued they can take whatever they want to use from the fandom but the optics here in this context are ... unseemly.
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Disney in this case aren't the ones who copied it, that would be 88 Pictures. I don't expect LucasFilm's people to have memorized every single fan film out there to recognize it was copied.

The creator is just seeking clout, or is just ignorant. They claim they haven't watched any of the post-Disney stuff, which is why they're only posting about it now, I guess someone else told them about it.
 
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I've seen that kind shot in a lot of action movies, so it's not like it's some super unique shot that had never appeared anywhere before that fan film.
 
I'd say calling that plagiarism is a bit of a stretch. Even if it was conscious and not just a case of them both drawing on a common influence, it's fairly common for cinema to borrow/pay homage/steal shots from other works. Some have been "borrowed" so many times it's just become part of cinema's visual vocabulary; the Vertigo dolly-zoom, the Old Boy corridor fight pan, the Akira slide, the The High Noon crane shot, the Tarantino trunk shot, to name but a few.
Indeed, Star Wars has multiple examples of doing just this, including several shots from The Searchers being replicated in both ANH and AotC.

All that being said; in this case I wouldn't be shocked if this was done mostly in the name of expediency. Everything else about the short screams that it was done by a small team with limited resources. Indeed, a LOT of the assets appear to be off-the-self from Lucas Animation's own library, which is likely why they opted to also borrow the signature Clone Wars/Bad Batch character style, even when making their own character assets.
 
JD said:
Which one of the languages on the list of Disney+ is Japanese? I usually prefer to watch this kind of stuff in the original language, but I've been watching all of these in English so far, since I'm not sure which language is Japanese. At least these have good English language casts, who have been really good in the episodes I've watched so far.
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The one that says "Japanese" on the pull down menu.
 
On mine they're all in the language being picked, not English, so I can't tell which is which. Some else posted up thread what it looks like in Japanese (kanji?), so I was able to find it and watched the last few episodes with the Japanese audio track.
 
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