Happy Star Wars Day to all those who celebrate. It’s May the Fourth (Be With You) and there’s a new batch of Star Wars: Visions episodes hitting Disney+ today. We’re also just two weeks removed from the season 3 finale of The Mandalorian, and we’re coming up on the 40th anniversary of Return of the Jedi this month. All that seemed like a good excuse to dust off my Star Wars in Japan portfolio, especially since one episode of Star Wars: Visions Volume 2 hails from a Tokyo-based animation studio. This is appropriate since a Tokyo art exhibition, also named Star Wars: Visions, actually preceded the animation anthology of that name, which is streaming now.
I haven’t watched all nine episodes of Star Wars: Visions Volume 2; to me, the draw of the first volume was seeing Star Wars done anime style. It was produced exclusively by Japanese animation studios, whereas Volume 2 brings in other countries to offer a more global mix of styles. Only episode 8, “The Pit,” is co-produced by Lucasfilm and D’ART Shtajio, an American-owned 2D anime studio based in Tokyo.
Follow the light out of “The Pit” courtesy of D’ART Shtajio
“The Pit” harkens back a bit to the prison arc in Andor last year. That’s probably my single favorite slice of live-action Star Wars on TV (or Disney+, as the case may be). It restored my faith in the franchise’s possibilities, so it was interesting to see a similar prison-work scenario unfold in animation. It reminded me of the thesis of Ava DuVernay’s 13: namely, that the 13th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution effectively institutionalized slavery by allowing it under the pretense of “punishment for a crime.”
In “The Pit,” we see the Empire exploiting prisoners for labor, only instead of assembling Death Star parts like in Andor, they’re digging for kyber crystals. These are the things that power lightsabers; I wrote an explainer, for instance, on how the lightsaber umbrella in “The Duel” splits one kyber crystal eight ways.
The prisoners in “The Pit” might be digging their own grave. The protagonist of this episode, voiced by Daveed Diggs (Blindspotting), is a climber named Crux who believes all people have an inner light they sometimes forget to follow. In a city lit by the very kyber crystals he and his fellow prisoners excavated, Crux brings news of a pit full of abandoned laborers who are in dire need of help.
Written and directed by Leandre Thomas, “The Pit” functions as a 19-minute short film, and it has the flavor of myth, which feels of a piece with Star Wars. Yet it also wields a broad message that you could apply to any number of things: from inmates making license plates in the prison-industrial complex, to the comparatively privileged yet nonetheless undervalued (and perhaps exploited) writers who are now on strike in Hollywood as of May 2.
They’re dealing with Disney’s “union-busting tactics.” That’s the Empire for you …