Star Wars: Visions Volume 2 is pure signal in a franchise full of intergalactic noise

By being set firmly outside of any established canon, Disney Plus' Star Wars: Visions animated anthology series has been free to tap into the essence of the franchise without being burdened by all the baggage that comes with being part of an interconnected cinematic universe. Star Wars: Visions Volume 1 was such a drastic change of pace visually and narratively that it was a wonder how the series -- what with all of its distinct stories -- could still feel cohesive, experimental, and "true" to the heart of Star Wars.

There are multiple new studios from around the world behind the shorts that make up Star Wars: Visions Volume 2, and the new season is every bit as tremendous as the first was. But what sets Volume 2 apart is how each of its nine episodes feels like the kind of brilliant, beautiful, and culturally specific celebrations of Star Wars mythology fans once could only have dreamt of seeing.

Star Wars: Visions Volume 1 being produced by various Japanese animation houses made many things about the season's remixed takes on classic Star Wars concepts, like siblings strong in the Force and emotional robots, feel unlike anything Lucasfilm would be brave enough to lean into. This is also very true of Volume 2 -- to a certain extent -- because of the way each episode capitalizes on Visions' freedom to play outside of the Star Wars canon. What really seals the deal, however, is the way the Indian (88 Pictures), Irish (Cartoon Saloon), British (Aardman), Spanish (El Guiri), Chilean (PunkRobot), French (Studio La Cachette), South African (Triggerfish), and South Korean (Studio Mir) studios behind Volume 2 weave their own distinctive cultural sensibilities into almost every aspect of their respective tales.

From the very beginning, Star Wars has always drawn inspiration from a variety of real-world cultures from across the globe to give to its fictional alien societies the aesthetic and narrative texture necessary to make them feel like lived-in places steeped in history. That tradition lives on in Visions Volume 2. But what's different here is how each of this season's 12-18-minute-long vignettes is shot through with cultural signifiers that feel essential to the identities of each story, and not like mere pieces of set dressing meant to look cool.

88 Pictures' "The Bandits of Golak" from director Ishan Shukla tells the story of a teen boy trying desperately to keep his Force-sensitive younger sister safe as they journey across the world in search of a safe haven. Everything about "The Bandits of Golak," from its sunbaked bazaars full of different kinds of aliens to its strangely familiar yet still otherworldly foods, looks and feels like the quintessential Star Wars you know. And yet, in the episode's focus on an Indian-coded family risking everything to evade the Empire by catching a train, you can plainly see 88 Pictures working to forge a piece of Star Wars lore that reads as South Asian.

Though it's set on a lonely and far-flung farming planet, Cartoon Saloon's "Screecher's Reach" unfolds like a haunting Irish fairy tale about a young girl whose dreams for a different life bring her face-to-face with a monstrous specter who lives out in the wilderness. Triggerfish's "Aau's Song" and "The Pit" -- a co-production between American-owned Japanese studio D'Art Shtajio and Lucasfilm -- both touch on the catastrophic environmental damage that comes with strip-mining land for its natural resources with no regard for the imbalance it can bring.

But the things those episodes have to say about environmental stewardship and the way they present their ideas couldn't be more different, not just because of their wildly different visual languages but also because of how all of Visions Volume 2's creative teams used their episodes to tell stories that really feel like celebrations of their home countries.

Watching Star Wars: Visions Volume 2 after something like The Mandalorian, it's fascinating to see just how much more can be done with concepts like the Force when it isn't simply being framed as mysterious space magic the Jedi use to move things and people with their minds. In El Guiri's "Sith," the Force is a tool through which visual art can be expressed, and in PunkRobot's "In the Stars," it's the connective thread linking specks of dust and people to the stars burning deep in space. While Star Wars touched on ideas like these before, Visions gives them a prominence and centrality that makes the show's exploration of them unique and makes it feel like there's still so much more to Star Wars that's worth coming back to, overexposed as the IP might be.

It's more than fair to say that, over the past few years in particular, Disney and Lucasfilm have so thoroughly flooded the zone with Star Wars that it has sometimes felt as if the studios were just cranking movies and TV shows out for the sake of it rather than pursuing a particular vision for the franchise's future. While Star Wars: Visions Volume 2 isn't a righting of the Star Wars ship as a whole, it's a reminder of the new, more expansive horizons the ship could and arguably should be journeying toward to keep hardcore fans and newcomers alike engaged.

Star Wars: Visions Volume 2 hits Disney Plus on May (the) 4th.