George Lucas has held no secrets on his many influences over the years, especially regarding the works of Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa. Speaking to The Criterion Collection about Kurosawa’s film The Hidden Fortress in 2001, he explained how Kurosawa helped expose him to a wider field of film than he previously thought possible, well beyond the Blob movies that were available at his local cinema growing up. In particular, Lucas was fascinated with Kurosawa’s detailed visuals and shot composition, which he attributes to the filmmaker’s childhood spent marathoning silent films with his brother, who narrated them for a living.
Many have written about how certain shots in A New Hope mirror The Hidden Fortress, as do story elements such as low-ranking droid characters serving as the audience’s introduction to the universe or the similarities between characters like Star Wars’ Obi-Wan Kenobi and Hidden Fortress’ General Makabe. Even Episode 4’s many transition wipes can be linked to Kurosawa. Similarly, Darth Vader’s costume design recalls classic Japanese samurai armor, with the Jedi themselves being somewhat of a mixture of a samurai, a monk, and a European-style knight. Like it or not, George Lucas might have been, by his own admission, the first American weeb filmmaker.
It should come as no surprise, then, that as the series has aged, its connection to Japanese media, especially Japanese visual design, has only grown more pronounced. Since 2018, Disney has been going full anime with its Star Wars: Galaxy of Adventures shorts, which take inspiration from the shonen genre to introduce Star Wars to a new generation. Marketed under Disney’s Star Wars Kids brand, these shorts seek to give young children with no interest in movies from the ‘70s or ‘80s an alternate entry point into the franchise. By remixing original audio from the movies with exaggerated, big-eyed, angular, anime-style character designs and effects, they aim to hit the same audience as blockbuster anime like My Hero Academia. Galaxy of Adventures’ Luke Skywalker, for instance, is almost the spitting image of My Hero Academia’s soft-hearted anime good boy lead, Izuku Midoriya.
Though initially aimed at kids, these shorts and their widespread use of remix have since inspired a new trend among YouTube’s own remix artists, who grew up influenced by both Star Wars and their own kind of Japanese media: Anime-style intro sequences for the Star Wars movies.
Of particular note is YouTuber ForeverRed3000, who has been making anime-style mash-ups and AMVs since 2011. Over the past 3 months, ForeverRed has released 4 anime style intro sequences for Star Wars, each using footage from Galaxy of Adventures. By cutting together songs for classic and current anime alongside clips from multiple different Galaxy of Adventures shorts and overlaying them with fading Japanese credits (mostly taken from the original anime that features the intro’s song, though with added credit for Star Wars and ForeverRed themself), they nail the feel of Star Wars as an anime series. As a nice touch, each intro is labelled as an “arc” rather than a film, making them feel like parts of a larger serialized television show as opposed to a franchise of films.
Each of the original trilogy gets its own intro, with the prequel trilogy condensed into 1. Meanwhile, The Clone Wars also earns an intro, with footage taken from Genndy Tartakovsky’s 2003 Clone Wars mini-series as opposed to Galaxy of Adventures. Though not quite as anime-inspired as the other intros, Tartakovsky’s unique art style has its own Japanese influences, as seen in his series Samurai Jack.
All 5 of these openings feature the stylistic flourishes fans have come to expect in their anime intros, including dynamic group shots, characters running in profile, determined close-ups, excerpts from climactic moments, and ominous foreshadowing of villainous betrayals. ForeverRed’s intros also tie the different eras of Star Wars together into a cohesive whole, cutting in appropriate scenes from the prequels or previously covered films into every new intro to add emotional context where appropriate. This adds to the “Star Wars as serialized television” feeling, and cements ForeverRed’s clear expertise in both anime and Star Wars.
Though ForeverRed’s work is impressive, they aren’t the only YouTuber in the genre.
な6IXLXRD, for instance, had made their own Galaxy of Adventures anime intro, which takes a different approach than ForeverRed by focusing on the whole of Star Wars instead of making a separate intro for each movie. This allow’s な6IXLXRD’s intro to highlight more elements from the new trilogy of films, with a particularly effective shot around the 40 second mark transitioning from Return of the Jedi Luke to The Last Jedi Luke.
Like ForeverRed, however, な6IXLXRD has their own anime intro made from footage taken from a different source than Galaxy of Adventures. While most of the intros featured so far are made in a modern, shonen anime style, な6IXLXRD’s “Star Wars 80s Anime Opening” instead evokes the feeling of shows like Mobile Suit Gundam and its many sequels and spin-offs. Here, the animation comes from OtaKing77077’s short film about the game Star Wars: Tie Fighter, and focuses mostly on adding weight and heft to the technology Tie Fighter pilots entrust with their lives, as well as showing the stress of battle. For fans of Gundam’s 08th MS Team spin-off, this should hit a similar note.
While reimagining Western media as anime isn’t an entirely new phenomenon on YouTube, Star Wars’ anime style intros take on a more genuine reimagining than, say, SpongeBob’s, which lean more into parody. And armed with both new and old source material like Galaxy of Adventures, Clone Wars, and other fan works like OtaKing’s Tie Fighter short, YouTube’s remix artists like ForeverRed and な6IXLXRD have more room to breathe than ever. ForeverRed’s work even seems to be creating a mini-genre of its own, influencing even more remixes from creators such as Scouty.
Though Kurosawa was not an anime director himself, he is a known inspiration for key figures in anime such as Hayao Miyazaki, who he met in 1993 for a fireside chat. As such, he shares a lineage with Japan’s most popular media export. As Star Wars was one of the first films to bring Kurosawa’s ideas to the West, Western fans…weebs…re-interpreting it using the language of modern Japanese media not only continues, but celebrates Star Wars’ global roots.
ForeverRed is currently making anime style trailers for the new trilogy of films, making up for the lack of new animation for these films with scenes from similar anime. Watch here.
For more on Star Wars, here’s how The Mandalorian is using video game tech to change filmmaking, and here’s what we think might happen after The Rise of Skywalker.
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