'The Ninth Jedi' Is a 'Star Wars' Remix at Its Grandest Scale

Five years ago, Star Wars made one of the boldest steps it's ever taken in the last decade-plus of its Disney ownership: the launch of Star Wars Visions, an anthology series in an era of Star Wars defined by an "everything is canon" rigidity that dared to ask what the galaxy far, far away could look like if you broke that rule.

Five years later, and Visions is perhaps no longer quite so novel as a concept. Its first season exclusively revolved around shorts created by Japanese animation studios; its second went international and dabbled in mediums like claymation and 3DCG. Its third went back to Japan in a move that almost felt like kind of a retreat, especially with several of the shorts being sequels to ones from the first season (but still contained some gems, like David Production's "BLACK," which I believe to be one of the most challenging pieces of official Star Wars media ever made).

That makes Star Wars Visions Presents—a new spinoff series that takes shorts from Visions and gives them the run of a full season of episodes to develop a story instead of around 15 minutes—an interesting challenge. Part of the appeal of Visions in the first place is that it allows creatives to get in, smash Star Wars about a bit, and then get out of dodge without having to worry about where their creation goes next. Visions loses some of its unique appeal of presenting something that feels thoroughly new to you when you're taking a past idea and revisiting it for expansion. Or in the case of the first Presents series, a third time, as The Ninth Jedi, by famed director Kenji Kamiyama (Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex, War of the Rohirrim, and the upcoming Mobile Suit Gundam series XARX-ZERO) and animation house Production I.G. take us back to a setting and characters already established in shorts from seasons one and three.

On the one hand, The Ninth Jedi offered a setting that fans yearned for more of, a future Star Wars where the Sith and Jedi had all but died out, the art of crafting their traditional weapon almost extinct save for a lone sabersmith and his daughter, Kara (Chinatsu Akasaki/Kimiko Glenn). On the other hand, what happens to Vision's remit to give us something truly new out of Star Wars if we treat its shorts less as creative wholes and more as pitches for fuller, familiar stories?

Star Wars Visions Presents: The Ninth Jedi largely sidesteps this existential debate by using this broader remit to not do new Star Wars again, but to take its ideas and remix the entire Skywalker Saga into a grand, sweeping animated adventure—and pays it off with perhaps the best on-screen Star Wars we'll likely get this year.