Today saw the debut of Lucasfilm’s new animated limited series Star Wars: Visions Presents – The Ninth Jedi on Disney+, and Laughing Place was provided with access to early screeners of all eight episodes. Below are my thoughts.
Five years ago, the first volume of the Disney+ animated anthology series Star Wars: Visions was released by Lucasfilm, and after I watched the standout episode “The Ninth Jedi,” I wrote the following in my review: “I can’t tell you how exciting it is to watch ‘The Ninth Jedi’ and imagine it as a pilot for an ongoing animated series about the rebirth of the Jedi, set many hundreds of years after the Original Trilogy. I know that probably won’t happen, but I hope at the very least that other creators will look to Production I.G’s work here and examine just how they arrived at the precise formula for what makes this long-running franchise tick.” And so it seems as though I may have One-Wish-Willowed The Ninth Jedi series into existence, or at the very least I predicted that the higher-ups at Lucasfilm would see fit to invited Japan’s Production I.G to expand the short into not only a sequel in Volume 3, but also its own limited series (not ongoing, which is the part I got wrong) that continues and wraps up the story introduced in that first chapter from 2021.
Star Wars: Visions Presents – The Ninth Jedi picks up where “The Ninth Jedi – Child of Hope” left off (though to be honest that second installment felt more like an inconsequential side quest than anything else)– with young Padawan Lah Kara (voiced in the Japanese audio track by Chinatsu Akasaki and in the English dub by Kimiko Glenn from Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse) on the run with her surrogate master Margrave Juro (Tetsuo Kanao / Andrew Kishino from Star Wars: The Clone Wars), fellow Jedi Ethan (Hiromu Mineta / Masi Oka from Heroes) and Homen (Hinata Tadokoro / Patrick Seitz from Redline), and that indolent pilot droid Gramps (Cho / JP Karliak from X-Men ’97). Meanwhile, a mysterious Sith leader named Nawaam (Nao Omori / Beef‘s Young Mazino) pursues our heroes across the galaxy as he holds Lah Kara’s saber-smith father Lah Zhima (Shin-Ichiro Miki / Simu Liu from Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings) captive, forcing him to craft lightsabers for the followers of the dark side.
What I loved so much about the first “The Ninth Jedi” short was how fresh it felt. Set in a non-canonical time period generations after the fall of the Jedi Order, Production I.G made wonderful use of its freedom from continuity and gave us what felt to me like a lot of stuff we hadn’t seen before. A saber-smith (the aforementioned Lah Zhima) practicing his craft in secret– kind of like a tucked-away samurai swordsmith from feudal Japan– a gathering of surviving would-be Jedi on an inverted asteroid-turned space station, a master concealing himself within the body of a droid like a mech suit, and a handful of Jedi vs. an overwhelming number of Sith. The sequel story “Child of Hope” felt similarly fresh, though not quite as weighty as its predecessor. So I guess after Visions Presents – The Ninth Jedi was announced at Star Wars Celebration 2026 in Japan, I was expecting Production I.G to follow through and wrap up its narrative with an equally innovative experiment in Star Wars storytelling. Instead what we got is a perfectly functional, adequate repurposing of some very familiar tropes and themes from A Galaxy Far, Far Away.
While the animation is nice to look at and the protagonists are charming enough, those attributes are offset by The Ninth Jedi recycling material from previous Star Wars stories, with the most egregious offense being the limited series’ looming threat of a Kyber-powered superweapon, which just so happens to be my least favorite beyond-overused cliche in this franchise. So once I discovered that superweapon in the content of this show, it would have been difficult for it to fully recover, but on top of that there’s also a central villain (Nawaam, referenced above) who is essentially a carbon copy of Kylo Ren, right down to his insistence on not adhering to the teachings of either the Jedi or the Sith. We’ve also got daddy issues, the rescuing of a prisoner from enemy captivity, an army of droids controlled by a central computer system, and more lightsaber battles than I could count– though that last one was admittedly inevitable. On the other hand, there is an added interaction between an individual Jedi’s Force abilities and the Kyber crystals in their lightsabers that does feel unique to me here, but is that enough to bring to the table? I dunno… I just really wanted to love this series as much as I did the short that inspired it, but ultimately it just feels like it’s going through the motions of what a Star Wars story should be or has been for nearly half a century. After I watched “The Ninth Jedi” (2021), my initial reaction (as you can see in that review I linked to earlier) was, “Now we’re talking.” But after watching Star Wars: Visions Presents – The Ninth Jedi, all I can say is, “Okay.”
Star Wars: Visions Presents – The Ninth Jedi is now streaming in its entirety, exclusively
