Television series

Star Wars: Visions

An anthology of Star Wars shorts, each one handed to a different Japanese animation studio and given free rein over story, style and tone. Samurai duels, kaiju rampages, coming-of-age tales, all set loose in a galaxy far, far away. No connected plot, no continuity to track, just fifteen-odd minutes of gorgeous, often wildly different visual invention per episode.

TVMaze rating7.4

If you liked this

Love, Death & Robots2019

The blueprint for what Visions does with Star Wars: a rotating cast of animation studios and directors let loose on short, self-contained stories, swinging wildly between tones, genres and styles from episode to episode.

But It's grimmer and more R-rated than anything in a galaxy far, far away, and quality swings hard between segments.

Love, Death & Robots poster

The Animatrix2003no page yet

The direct ancestor of this whole project: Japanese animators reimagining a beloved Western sci-fi universe as short films, years before Visions made it a Star Wars tradition. Same idea, different franchise.

But You'll want at least passing familiarity with the Matrix trilogy to get the most out of some segments.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars2008

If Visions has you hungry for more animated Star Wars but you want continuity and a real story to sink into, this is the canon-approved deep dive with genuine emotional weight.

But It's a much bigger commitment, over a hundred episodes across seven seasons, with a slow, kid-show-y start.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars poster

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Seven Samurai1954

George Lucas has said outright that Kurosawa's samurai epics shaped Star Wars's DNA, the hidden-fortress structure, the wandering hero, the code of honor. Visions' samurai episodes loop straight back to this source.

The film that quietly invented half the tropes Star Wars runs on — the reluctant hero, the ragtag band, the honor-bound duel — told with a clarity and patience modern action rarely bothers with.

But It's over three hours, in black and white, subtitled, and moves at a completely different rhythm than anything in Visions.

Seven Samurai poster
More like this (8)

Cowboy Bebop1998

The gold standard of stylish, genre-hopping space adventure anime, packed with mood, music and melancholy — proof Japanese animation can make science fiction feel achingly cool and human at once.

But Slower and jazzier than anything in Visions; it's mood over spectacle, and patience pays off more than action does.

Cowboy Bebop poster

Samurai Champloo2004

From Bebop's director, a hip-hop-scored samurai road trip that mixes genres as freely as Visions mixes styles, feudal Japan colliding head-on with modern swagger and anachronism.

But The anachronistic soundtrack and humor might feel jarring if you want your samurai stories played completely straight.

Samurai Champloo poster

Star Wars: Rebels2014

Another animated corner of the Star Wars galaxy, this one a proper serialized adventure with a scrappy crew, Force mysteries and a tone splitting the difference between Clone Wars and old-school swashbuckling.

But Character designs and humor skew younger, and it leans harder into franchise lore than Visions ever does.

Star Wars: Rebels poster

Batman Ninja2018no page yet

Japanese animators let loose on a Western superhero icon, transplanting Batman into feudal Japan with the same gleeful genre-blending energy Visions brings to Star Wars — pure, unhinged anime spectacle.

But It's louder, sillier and less emotionally grounded than Visions, more concerned with maximalist action than mood or character.

Trigun1998

A gunslinger wandering a sun-blasted desert planet, equal parts comedy and existential dread — a classic anime take on the lone-hero-in-a-lawless-galaxy story Visions keeps circling back to.

But The animation is dated by modern standards, and the pacing takes a while to reveal its darker ambitions.

Trigun poster

Redline2009

An absurdly kinetic, hand-drawn racing anime built from thousands of hours of animation — if you loved the visual audacity of Visions' best segments, this is craftsmanship taken to its outer limit.

But Plot is thin and the story mostly exists to string together races; style is basically the entire point.

Redline poster

Kwaidan1965

Before anime anthologies existed, Japanese cinema was already doing what Visions does: handing a shared theme to different visual imaginations and letting each segment stand alone as its own small world.

A gorgeous anthology of four ghost stories, shot on deliberately artificial, painted soundstages — proof that the anthology format Visions uses has a decades-deep, wildly inventive lineage in Japanese cinema.

But It's slow, theatrical and eerie rather than exciting, closer to a fireside ghost story than a space battle.

Kwaidan poster

Grave of the Fireflies1988

Visions occasionally lets its quieter, sadder episodes breathe, stories about loss and sacrifice rather than lightsabers. This is what happens when an anime studio follows that instinct all the way through.

One of the most heartbreaking films animation has ever produced, a wartime story about siblings trying to survive — essential viewing for what Japanese animation can do when it aims for the heart, not spectacle.

But It is unrelentingly sad with no levity or hope offered as relief; go in prepared, not expecting entertainment.

Grave of the Fireflies poster

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Production

Recommended by

Return of the Jedi, Love, Death & Robots