《第九个绝地》：星战交给日本工作室重新绘制的新番

Eight episodes of animation, a smith's daughter, and a lightsaber not yet delivered to its owner.

On August 5th, Star Wars put something new on Disney — but it is neither a film nor a regular series.

It is called The Ninth Jedi, and it was made by a Japanese animation studio.

To explain why it is worth noticing, you first have to look at what Star Wars has been doing these past years.

The franchise turns nearly fifty this year.

Across those fifty years its problem has stayed the same: it keeps getting bigger, and it keeps getting more afraid to move.

Every new instalment has to line up with decades of established canon, and changing even a little gets you shouted at by longtime fans.

A few years ago Disney tried something different, called Star Wars: Visions.

The method: license the universe out to external animation studios, mainly Japanese ones, and let them tell their own stories.

The key condition is that these stories do not count as canon.

Not counting as canon means the creators do not have to carry decades of baggage. They can change whatever they like.

The result was a batch of shorts in Visions that looked nothing like Star Wars — and the response was unexpectedly good.

The Ninth Jedi grew out of one of those shorts, and is the first to be expanded into a full series.

It was made by Production I.G, directed by Kenji Kamiyama — both first-tier names in Japanese animation.

The protagonist is Kara, whose father is a smith who forges lightsabers.

At this point in the timeline, the Jedi have been almost entirely wiped out.

Someone wants to gather the survivors and rebuild the Order, so he commissions a batch of new lightsabers.

Kara is the one delivering those swords, and that is how she gets pulled in.

You can probably guess what comes next: she discovers she can sense that force too.

Yes — the setup really is old.

And that is exactly where the reviews split.

The side praising it says this is the best-looking Star Wars in years.

The framing of the duels, the texture of the blades, the use of colour — all far above the average for television animation.

More importantly, it dares to blur the line between Jedi and Sith, a line the official canon basically cannot touch.

The side criticising it says the visuals cannot carry the story.

Across eight episodes the pacing drags, and the skeleton is the most standard one there is: a young person unaware of their own gift, pushed forward by a larger event.

Both sides are describing the same thing from two directions: visually it is very free, narratively it is very conservative.

But pull the camera back, and the thing worth recording may be the method itself.

A commercial franchise this size, willing to hand creative control to a team in another country and to state outright "none of this is canon, change what you want" — that is not the Hollywood norm.

The more usual approach is to hold the IP in a death grip, where any deviation needs sign-off.

What the Visions line has now demonstrated is this: take the restrictions off, and creators produce things the main series cannot.

The price is that these things "do not count".

Think about it: if an old story you love were handed to someone else to retell, would you want them faithful to the original, or free to change it?