Star Wars: Visions is an anime anthology series created by Lucasfilm and originally released on September 22, 2021. As an anthology series, the episodes of Star Wars: Visions are all independent from each other, both in plot and production, however even with the narrative and stylistic variety in the series, one episode stands out from the rest visually: the first episode, “The Duel” directed by Takanobu Mizuno and produced by the animation studio Kamikaze Douga.
Read MoreThe focus of these notes is the animated feature film, Strange Magic (Gary Rydstrom, 2015). Based upon a screen story by George Lucas, who also executive produced the film, it was the last of a group of narratively unconnected animated features that he had an involvement with since the 1980s: namely, Twice Upon A Time (John Korty & Charles Swenson, 1983), The Land Before Time (Don Bluth, 1988), and Star Wars: The Clone Wars (Dave Filoni, 2008).
Read More**This post contains spoilers for the first and second seasons of The Mandalorian**
I am not a Star Wars superfan. In fact, though I was born in 1979, my sister and I hadn’t seen the original Star Wars movies until the mid-90s, in high school, when our best friends Scott and Kent realized we had some cinematic deficiencies. They showed us E.T. (Steven Spielberg, 1982), the Star Wars movies, and Star Trek: The Next Generation (Gene Roddenberry, 1987-1994). I had watched the Star Wars prequels and sequels, but I was not obsessed with them, or with anything in the science fiction/fantasy genre, for a long time.
Read MoreIn his business memoir, Bob Iger, the (former?) CEO of The Walt Disney Company, raised a question in connection with Disney princesses: “[w]hat are the attributes of a Disney princess in today’s world and how should they manifest in our products?” (Iger 2019, xx). Iger’s query outlines both the commodification of the Disney princess, and the notion that her portrayal must reflect the societal changes of the 21st century.
Read MoreCommenting on the fan/ critic division of Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (George Lucas, 1977), Todd Berliner (2017) observes that: The original Star Wars (1977) has become one of the most widely and intensely loved movies of all time. Film scholars, however, lambasted Star Wars for its simplicity. Peter Lev calls it one of the “simple, optimistic genre films in the late 1970s.” David Cook says it privileges “a juvenile mythos.” Jonathan Rosenbaum calls the movie mostly “fireworks and pinball machines,” a deliberately silly film that offers only “narcissistic pleasures.”
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