Star Wars: Visions‘ third “volume” hit Disney+ this week, delivering nine shorts from a bevy of talented Japanese animation studios, each delivering their vision of what Star Wars can be unbeholden to the typical constraints of its contemporary storytelling universe. But only one of those shorts this season took that goal of taking Star Wars somewhere completely and utterly new, and it did so brilliantly.
Although I’ve just slapped a giant “spoiler warning” above, it’s actually very difficult—intentionally so, it could be argued—to “spoil” what exactly David Productions’ “BLACK”, directed by Shinya Ohira. Positioned as the final short of the anthology, it’s 13 minutes long, features no dialogue, English or Japanese, outside of grunts, and is soundtracked exclusively by vibrant, energetically smooth jazz. There is no particularly clear narrative, beyond the fact that “BLACK” is about stormtroopers.
It might be about one stormtrooper in particular; it might be about two. It might be about every stormtrooper to ever be chewed up and spat out by the Imperial engine. It’s perhaps, most definitely above anything else, about stormtroopers dying, at the very least. Almost free-falling, “BLACK” guides us through battle after battle, across space, across planets, and across anywhere the Galactic Empire could fight the Rebel Alliance, blurring these locations between each other as we are guided by the bodies of dying stormtroopers. Their TIE Fighters are exploding and shattering, their battle stations are torn apart by violence, and as each scene blurs from one moment to the next, their bodies are flung, gunned down, cast aside, forgotten. It is both the point and yet not the point.
© Lucasfilm
Amid the chaos and fury, we follow two stormtroopers, their helmets mirrored in the way they have been cracked open to reveal the manic human beneath them, breaking the illusion of this uniform force of oppression, and yet the person beneath them appears to be the same one: masculine, bearded with blond hair, and vividly, starkly beleaguered. Regardless of what is happening around them, these two stormtroopers—one shaded in intensely neon greens, the other in vivid crimsons—are intent on hunting each other down and tearing them apart. They are the only consistent elements throughout “BLACK,” both in terms of focal points in that they come to embody the furor and violence echoed around them.
Are they the mind of a singular trooper? Is one real and the other symbolic? Are they separate men? Is the struggle literal or metaphorical? “BLACK” keeps this question clawing at the minds of its audiences as they race alongside these two figures through the discordant world around them, rendered intentionally loose, all scraggled lines and forms that squish and stretch, in scenes that melt and swirl together, over and over. We see suggestions towards one or the other—the flash of a life and love before the war, the firing neurons of the brain inside a singular body, left to be lost in snow alongside so many others.
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But the aggression of “BLACK” is as much about its attitude towards its audience as it is these two warring figures: it explodes in your face, asking nonstop for you to consider what it means, what to take from it, and even what is actually happening before your very eyes. “BLACK” is not concerned with telling you a story but practically screaming at you to find a sense of meaning in it yourself. It is a piece that is unwilling to hold your hand, and that makes it all the more thrilling than its slick animation or its intense action can ever be.
In doing so, it becomes something pure to what Star Wars: Visions is supposed to represent. This is arguably something that could only be done with Star Wars with the lack of constraints or adherence to canonical events that is unique to Visions, and it’s arguably only the kind of story that could be told in the medium of animation. But above all, “BLACK” relishes in both doing something new and in how it treats its audience with the trust to find connection with it, to vibe with its jams, rather than sit and be told with certainty this is what it’s saying and this is what it all means. It’s not Star Wars made to be written up and stripped for parts by wikis and YouTube explainers; it’s Star Wars that trusts you enough to demand that you find your own way.
© Lucasfilm
That’s when the franchise is at its most exciting: when it not only trusts its audience enough to take them somewhere new and exciting, and especially to challenging places, but also trusts that audience to find a meaning, rather than the meaning. Star Wars is a fantasy, it’s symbolic, it’s mythic, and it is at its very best, as “BLACK” is, when the galaxy far, far away is open to interpretation and suggestion—and when everyone can take something different away from it, from their own certain point of view.
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