“Star Wars: Visions” arrived on Disney+ on September 22, 2021, with nine short films and no obligation to behave. Lucasfilm handed seven Japanese animation studios the keys to its biggest property and told them, in effect, to drive it their own way. The result is the most interesting thing the franchise has done on television in years, and also the most uneven.
The anthology format is the whole point. Each episode is a self-contained narrative, produced by a different studio, set in or inspired by the Star Wars universe. Kamikaze Douga, Studio Colorido, Geno Studio, Trigger, Kinema Citrus, Production I.G and Science Saru made the first volume, with Trigger and Science Saru each contributing two shorts. No episode requires the others. No episode requires the films.
Trailer, via Star Wars.
Seven Studios, Nine Shorts
That structure cuts both ways. A viewer gets nine swings at something new, and the misses cost only fifteen minutes each. The premise, as Lucasfilm frames it, is animation “through the lens of the world’s best anime creators” — a new perspective on Star Wars, made outside the constraints of the franchise’s traditional stylings. Each director and studio got creative freedom while working under guidance from Lucasfilm’s executive team, and the shorts were asked to keep faith with the themes and emotional identity of the saga.
The lineup of studios is worth naming on its own, because it explains the range:
- Kamikaze Douga
- Studio Colorido
- Geno Studio
- Trigger
- Kinema Citrus
- Production I.G
- Science Saru
That is a roster with genuinely different house styles, and “Star Wars: Visions” does not sand them down. The lightsabers look different depending on who drew them. So do the faces, the pacing, the humor and the silence.
What the Freedom Actually Buys
The anthology’s real argument is that Star Wars is a mythos, not a house style. Once you accept that, the cultural lens stops being a marketing phrase and starts being a method. The first volume is Japanese animation, full stop — not Japanese animation filtered through a Western pipeline until only the surface remains.
That is why the strongest shorts feel like they could not have been made any other way. They borrow the iconography — the sabers, the droids, the Empire-shaped menace — and then bend it toward whatever the studio already does well. Some shorts play it straight and reverent. Others treat the material as raw stock for comedy or horror or quiet character drama. The variance is the product.
It also means the volume has no floor and no ceiling. Nothing here runs long enough to become a slog, and nothing runs long enough to build the kind of accumulated weight a feature gets. The best shorts end before you are ready. The weakest end and you are already thinking about the next one.
The Second Volume Went Wider
Lucasfilm did not leave the idea alone. The second volume, released May 4, 2023, expanded the series to studios around the world. El Guiri of Spain, Cartoon Saloon of Ireland, Punkrobot of Chile, Aardman of the United Kingdom, Studio Mir of South Korea, Studio La Cachette of France, 88 Pictures of India, D’art Shtajio of Japan alongside Lucasfilm of the United States, and Triggerfish of South Africa and Ireland all contributed.
That is a genuinely global lineup, and it is the correct direction for an anthology built on the promise of different cultural lenses. A series that claims to celebrate the mythos from many angles should not stay in one country. The second volume made the claim honest.
The third volume, released October 29, 2025, went back to Japanese animation. Some studios from the first volume returned to make sequels to their own stories. Others were new and made new stories. Across three seasons, the show has produced 27 episodes.
Where the Anthology Format Costs You
Here is the trade the series makes, and it is worth being blunt about it. “Star Wars: Visions” gives up continuity, recurring characters and long-arc payoff. In exchange it gets range. Whether that is a good deal depends entirely on what you want from Star Wars.
If you want a saga, this is not one. If you want a showcase — a place to see what animation studios do when they are handed a famous sandbox and a short deadline — it is close to ideal. The shorts are self-contained by design, which means the series never has to protect a timeline or service a sequel hook.
The cost is that nothing accumulates. There is no episode you have to have seen to understand the next one. That is liberating for the creators and slightly weightless for the viewer. You can watch the volume in any order, and you can skip one without consequence, and that freedom is also a warning that no single short is load-bearing.
A 7.9 Out of 10, and Why
The published critical score for “Star Wars: Visions” sits at 7.9 out of 10, with a Metacritic score of 79 out of 100. That feels right, and the reason is structural rather than artistic. The anthology’s best shorts are excellent. Its weakest are forgettable. Averaging those two facts produces exactly this kind of number — high enough to recommend, short of the top tier because consistency was never the goal.
The series earns its score on the strength of the idea and the execution of its best entries. It loses points because an anthology is only as strong as its floor, and nine unrelated shorts guarantee a floor somewhere below the ceiling. Lucasfilm’s guidance kept the shorts inside the emotional identity of the saga. The studios’ freedom kept them from looking like each other. Both of those things are true at once, and the tension between them is the show.
What matters most here is not any single short. It is the proof that Star Wars can survive being handed to people who are not obligated to imitate it. That is a bigger deal than any one episode, and it is the reason the format kept going — wider in the second volume, back to Japan for the third.
The part worth watching is whether Lucasfilm keeps trusting the format. Three seasons and 27 episodes is a real commitment to an experiment that has no recurring cast, no throughline and no guaranteed audience. The score says the experiment worked more often than it failed. The structure says it will keep working exactly as long as the studios are allowed to be themselves.
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