“I Have a Bad Feeling About This”: Star Wars: Visions Review

A Disney+ show called Star Wars: Visions was released on September 22, 2021. The show is anime-based and in the Star Wars universe. The show features nine episodes with an average running time of 17-minute episodes with the shortest episodes being 14 minutes and longest being 23 minutes. A note because it’s an anime: it does have English audio.

The show possibly went under the radar because it peaked when the show released and search traffic dropped within the first week and a half, based on Google Trends data. Another spike was right before the release when the trailer came out. The US results were better for the show than the worldwide results, with the US trend dropping slower, but that could also be a way lower total peak.

Every episode of this show is an isolated story. However, as the title of this article suggests, every episode includes, “I have a bad feeling about this.” Not surprising for the Star Wars universe, another overarching element of the show is lightsabers: every episode features a lightsaber. Even though the episodes have these shared elements, the isolation between the episodes are still seen because each episode was made by a different studio. The first episode, for example, has a unique gray-scaled art style with some exceptions to create contrast. The other episodes have mostly similar art styles, but they change with movement and fighting.

The first episode features what looks to be a Jedi, called a wanderer, and his droid, which is an R2 unit. The wanderer is put in a situation where he must save the village from a threat.

My personal option of the first episode is that the episode is a good mix of Japanese art style and Star Wars. The wanderer has a samurai look, which gave me a connection to Star Wars because the Jedi and Sith are close to samurai, primarily because they fight with a katana like sword, and the Star Wars universe, like feudal Japan, is an imperial system.

The second episode brings color and a more anime art style and is just refreshing because if the show continued with the art style of the first episode. The other episodes, like I said before, keep a similar style mostly except in animation style of moving objects. This is seen because different episodes have different ways to show fighting. Also, episodes have different ways of doing lightsabers. For example, one episode features a lightsaber with Japanese script and other are the traditional round and some are just lightsaber versions of katanas.