The first short film in Star Wars: Visions, “The Duel,” sets the anime collection’s unique, creative tone. Its main character, a wandering swordsman named Ronin, also challenges the idea of what it means to be a Sith. But just who is Ronin and what is the significance of his name? Visions sits just to the side of Disney’s Star Wars canon. Given free range to create stories inspired by the beloved saga, the seven studios invited to make the nine anime shorts in the collection were able to reinterpret the story of Star Wars in their own ways. (This is also the case in the upcoming tie-in novel Star Wars: Ronin: A Visions Novel by Emma Mieko Candon, which comes out on Oct. 12.) In “The Duel,” the protagonist simply known as Ronin wields multiple red lightsabers like a Sith. So does his opponent. That’s weird — in canon, morality is usually color-coded with red for evil and other lightsaber colors denoting noble Jedi. But “The Duel” isn’t interested in assigning morality by color. Stream your Star Wars favorites right here! Another major influence on both Star Wars as a whole and “The Duel” in particular is Yojimbo, the classic Akira Kurosawa samurai film. In very early notes for what would become A New Hope, Lucas noted his main character was “Starkiller (Mifune) — a cross between Yojmbo and Seven Samurai,” as quoted in The Making of Star Wars by J.W. Rinzler. Yojimbo also draws on plenty of tropes from Westerns and detective fiction: its nameless hero (or one with a clearly invented name) is often compared to the pulp detective hero from the 1929 novel Red Harvest. It was also directly inspired by the American crime drama The Glass Key, making “The Duel” just the latest in a series of cross-ocean inspirations between American and Japanese genre conventions. But the setting of “The Duel” is pure Japan, with the feudal-era village of a type most notably captured by Kurosawa. While the hero of “The Duel” wields a wicked red lightsaber, he’s also kind, ready to fight on behalf of innocent villagers against the greedy bandits. From the novel, we know he’s a “former Sith,” but the episode leaves open exactly how “former” that might be. More about who Ronin is and how his version of the Star Wars universe works will be revealed in our coverage of the novel next month.
