星战新番《第九个绝地》：日本动画工作室重新演绎星球大战

Eight episodes of animation, a girl, and a sword that glows.

Star Wars has put out something new these past few days, but it is not a film.

It is called The Ninth Jedi, and it went up on Disney's platform on August 5th.

First, what this actually is.

Star Wars has been going since 1977 — almost fifty years.

In those fifty years it has produced films, produced TV series, and in recent years produced an animated line called Visions.

What makes Visions interesting is that it handed Star Wars over to Japanese animation studios to make.

Star Wars drawn by Japanese artists tastes completely different from Star Wars shot by Americans.

More importantly, the studio says the stories in Visions do not count as canon.

What does that mean?

It means these stories do not have to obey the rules laid down over the past few decades. They can rewrite them.

For the people making them, that is a lot of freedom.

This time, The Ninth Jedi is the first Visions story to be pulled out on its own and made into a full series.

It was made by Japan's Production I.G studio, directed by Kenji Kamiyama.

The main character is a girl named Kara.

Her father is a smith who makes lightsabers specifically.

A lightsaber is that glowing weapon from Star Wars.

In the era this story is set in, the Jedi who use lightsabers are almost all gone.

The Jedi are a group of people in Star Wars who can sense an invisible force.

There used to be many Jedi; then they were killed off one by one, and now only a very few are still alive.

Someone wants to gather them back and rebuild the Jedi Order.

He asks Kara's father to make a batch of new lightsabers, and then calls the scattered survivors together.

Because Kara delivers the swords, she gets pulled into all of it.

And she slowly discovers that she too may have some connection to that force.

At this point, you may feel this setup sounds familiar.

Yes — people who have watched it say the same.

The reviews split roughly in half.

The ones praising it say this is the best-looking Star Wars in years: every duel more beautiful than the last, and it dares to blur the line between Jedi and villain.

The ones criticising it say the pacing is too slow and the plot too familiar — a young person who does not know they have power, pulled into a larger war. We have heard that one many times.

Both sides are actually right.

It looks good, but it is not new.

Still, for Star Wars, the fact of it may matter more than the show itself.

A nearly fifty-year-old franchise willing to hand itself to people in another country to redraw, and to let them ignore the source canon — that is not common at a company this size.

Think about it: a very old, very famous story — would you rather it kept being told exactly as it was, or let someone else tell it again?