Celebrated anime artist and filmmaker Shinya Ohira discussed his new Star Wars short in a pre-recorded Q+A at Anime NYC today.
When Star Wars: Visions Volume 3 arrives on Disney+ on October 29, 2025, the third installment of the anthology series will feature nine brand-new anime shorts all made by Japanese studios. Today, fans at Anime NYC were treated to a special preview of david production’s “BLACK,” with new insights from the writer and director Shinya Ohira. Combining stunning imagery and music, the experimental short presents a psychedelic battle between past and present, light and dark, and life and death in the haunted psyche of an Imperial stormtrooper on the cusp of defeat.
“Something nobody’s ever seen before”
“We wanted to offer a film that was mainly based on Sakura Fujiawara’s singing voice set against these visuals of intense battles. That was our vision as we made the film,” Ohira explained in a pre-recorded video. A veteran artist of everything from Akira (1988) to Spirited Away (2001) to Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003), Ohira-san also served as character designer and key animator for “BLACK.” “As for the interpretation of the story,” he added, “the viewers, the people watching it, we kind of wanted to leave it up to them…so that’s how we made it.”
Ohira-san added that “We really got down into some fine details for this film. There’s the Death Star…. The setting is really super detailed, and the stormtroopers, drawing out the action in the battle scenes, it was really quite an arduous task for the animators. So that was painful, but it was worth it, and the end result really speaks for itself…. It’s really kind of something nobody’s ever seen before.”
Lucasfilm Shares New Key Art
For Lucasfilm’s first ever panel at Anime NYC, senior vice president of franchise content and strategy James Waugh joined voice artist Lexi Nieto onstage to discuss the exciting new stories in Star Wars: Visions Volume 3, including shorts from returning studios from Volume 1 Kamikaze Douga, Kinema citrus Co., Production I.G, and TRIGGER, and new Visions participants ANIMA (in co-production with Kamikaze Douga), david production, Polygon Pictures, Project Studio Q, and WIT Studio.
Newly-unveiled key art showcases the broad range of storytelling and visual design in Volume 3, including the broken armor of the nightmarish troopers seen in “BLACK” and the return of Ronin from “The Duel,” F from “The Village Bride,” and Lah Kara from “The Ninth Jedi,” three shorts available in Volume 1 streaming on Disney+.
Star Wars: Visions Volume 3 arrives October 29, 2025 on Disney+.
