How The Anime Community Is Reacting To 'Star Wars' Expanding Into The Medium

Image Source: Youtube

With the release of Star Wars Visions Presents: The Ninth Jedi finally here, it marks the first time that a galaxy far, far away has received a full-fledged anime series, and hopefully not the last. Now seems like a good time to see how well this series, and Star Wars Visions, fares as a whole among anime fans.

To preface, it should be made known that anime has been exploring the concepts behind Star Wars well before the first film graced screens in 1977. The first animated entry into the space opera genre was none other than Space Battleship Yamato, which had a 26-episode run from 1974 to 1975, airing three years before A New Hope. 

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Set in the distant year of 2199, the series centered around the war between the Earth Defense Forces and the alien race Gamilon, who have bombed the Earth to the point of being near uninhabitable. When the Earth Defense Forces receive a message from a distant world who claims to have the key to saving Earth, and leaves them the knowledge to build Wave Motion technology, capable of lightspeed travel, the EDF retrofits the eponymous World War II Battleship with this technology, with Susumu Kodai (Derek Wildstar in the English Dub) and its crew setting out on a perilous journey across space to save the world. Written by Yoshinobu Nishizaki and directed by Leiji Matsumoto, Space Battleship Yamato is regarded as one of the most influential anime of all time, influencing the likes of Evangelion, Macross, and Mobile Suit Gundam, and has received countless iterations over the decades, including sequels, spinoffs, and remakes, with a new anime adaptation in the works from Evangelion creator Hideaki Anno.

It's no surprise that some of the projects influenced by Space Battleship Yamato were also inspired by Star Wars, with the biggest offender being Mobile Suit Gundam, with the Mobile Suits wielding Beam Sabers reminiscent of Lightsabers. Additionally, Newtypes from Mobile Suit Gundam are humans with psychic abilities, not too different from the Jedi and Sith of Star Wars.

In spite of this relationship between Star Wars and anime, Star Wars wouldn’t cross over into the realm of anime until 2021 with Star Wars Visions. Visions was an anthology series wherein Japanese studios, and later, studios worldwide, had the opportunity to tell new stories in the world of Star Wars, experimenting with different styles and themes, creating new and colorful characters, and delivering over-the-top action across three volumes released in 2021, 2023, and 2025. The first volume of Visions was a hit with Star Wars fans, but as previously established, there is a lot of overlap between Star Wars and Anime fans, which can make it difficult to discern if non-Star Wars fans were willing to engage with the series. We can, however, look to the viewer numbers for the trailers for Visions and compare them to other Star Wars projects. 

Image Source: Variety

The trailer for Star Wars Visions Volume 1 garnered over 5 million views, but these numbers would dwindle with subsequent releases, with Volume 2 garnering only 2.7 million views, and Volume 3 garnering only 458 thousand. While The Ninth Jedi only received a trailer about a month ago as of this article, it currently sits around 242 thousand views. For comparison to other Star Wars shows, we can look at the trailers for Ahsoka, The Bad Batch, Andor and Maul: Shadow Lord. The highest-viewed trailer for Ahsoka garnered over 16 million views, while Andor’s highest-viewed trailer sits at 13 million. The highest-viewed trailer for The Bad Batch garnered about 3 million views, while the highest-viewed trailer for Maul: Shadow Lord garnered about 4.5 million views.

For further comparison, we can compare these numbers to the trailers for popular anime like Bleach: Thousand Year Blood War, Chainsaw Man and Mobile Suit Gundam. The most-viewed trailer for Bleach: Thousand Year Blood War - The Calamity currently sits at over 3 million views. The first teaser for the newest Gundam series, Mobile Suit Gundam RG XARX-ZERO, currently has 1.5 million views. Finally, the first teaser for Chainsaw Man Season 2 sits at 7.8 million views after one month.

With these numbers for reference, it paints a picture of how fans as a whole react to Star Wars in the realm of anime, and when looking at how the anime community is reacting to Star Wars expanding into anime, the answer is rather sobering: It isn’t, at least not how one would expect.

There are many Star Wars fans who are also animation and anime fans, myself included, who flocked to the idea of Star Wars Visions. However, the series seems to have little appeal to Star Wars fans who don’t engage with its animated content. Similarly, it seems to have little appeal to Anime fans who have little-to-no prior interest in Star Wars. However, the anime community, like the Star Wars community, is not monolithic. There are many Star Wars projects that Star Wars fans will love, dislike, or have no interest in. Similarly, there are countless anime that anime fans love, dislike, or have no interest in.

Something that cannot be denied, regardless of this reality, is that Star Wars Visions’ latest project, The Ninth Jedi, has proven itself to be a critical success, being well regarded among critics, as well as fans of both Star Wars and anime. The Ninth Jedi, and Visions as a whole, are projects built for the center of a sprawling Venn diagram, and hopefully open the door for more experimental animation from Star Wars, and perhaps for future continuations of Visions stories.

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