Star Wars: Visions season 2 makes the franchise feel like it’s capable of anything

polygon.com:

Brothers and sisters parted by the machinations of mystical warriors and galactic empires. Indigenous populations terrorized by TIE fighters before gloriously striking back. Parent and child on opposite sides of an ideological divide.

The tales of Star Wars: Visions are familiar, recalling the tragedy and pulp fantasies of George Lucas’ long-running franchise. And yet this animated series makes Star Wars feel new, both through the angles its episodes take on these archetypal stories, and perhaps more importantly, through the diversity of its visual palette, from the many animation houses that produced the individual Visions shorts. Season 2 continues to eschew the saga of the Skywalkers and the Palpatines, in favor of smaller episodes reinterpreting the Star Wars universe. But it also has new looks. Visions is no longer just an anime anthology: It’s become so much bigger.

“We always saw Visions as really having the potential to be a broader canvas,” producer James Waugh tells Polygon. The anthology setup, as he sees it, is the perfect “framework that allowed for the best creators in their craft and their mediums to explore and celebrate Star Wars in new ways.” That’s exactly what season 2 commits to, by pulling in a mixture of animation styles and production houses from all over the world.

As with season 1 of Visions, the individual directors and studios naturally superimpose their own histories and house style onStar Wars. A lot of the best moments of Visions’ secondseason draw heavily on those distinctive viewpoints, which connect in a kind of communion, over common themes of lost and rediscovered family, homes colonized or reclaimed, across different cultures, both on-screen and off-.

Each of these new windows on