Star Wars is heading into its 50th anniversary next spring in an unusual position. Lucasfilm certainly isn’t short on ways to keep the galaxy-changing franchise alive — there are countless Skywalker-focused books lined up in the next year, Star Wars: Unlimited is expanding deeper into the decade, and even Dungeons & Dragons is getting an official Star Wars crossover. Gaps left by the sequel trilogy are getting filled through books and comics, while Star Wars: Starfighter (starring Ryan Gosling, Mia Goth, Amy Adams and Matt Smith) will bring the franchise back to theaters again next year with a brand new story.
But its most important format — movies — just suffered a serious setback. The Mandalorian and Grogu, the first theatrical Star Wars movie in seven years, received middling reviews and quickly lost its grip on the box office, breaking a decades-long streak of Star Wars movies dominating theaters.
Now, one of Star Wars’ smallest and strangest projects is getting almost the opposite reception. Star Wars: Visions Presents — The Ninth Jedi arrived on Disney Plus on Aug. 5, and in just a few days the anime series has earned rave reviews, including a near-perfect Rotten Tomatoes score. At a moment when Star Wars seems unsure of what its future should look like, The Ninth Jedi may have just offered one possible answer.
What is the The Ninth Jedi about?
The Ninth Jedi is an eight-episode anime from Production I.G. that expands on one of the most acclaimed stories from the original season of Star Wars: Visions. The 2021 short introduced Lah Kara, the daughter of a lightsabersmith living in a distant future where the Jedi have nearly disappeared. A second story, “The Ninth Jedi: Child of Hope,” followed in Visions Volume 3 before Lucasfilm gave the characters an entire series.
The new show follows Kara and Jedi Master Margrave Juro as they attempt to rebuild the Jedi Order while searching for Kara’s missing father, Lah Zhima. Along the way, Kara and her allies travel between worlds recruiting potential Jedi and fighting the forces of General Nawaam, a masked warlord whose growing army threatens the galaxy.
Despite the familiar lightsabers, Jedi, and Sith, none of this is part of the main Star Wars canon. Like the rest of Visions, The Ninth Jedi exists outside the continuity of the movies and live-action Disney Plus shows, which gives its creators considerably more freedom to reinterpret familiar ideas.
And they’ve taken advantage of it. The Ninth Jedi imagines lightsabers that change color based on the person wielding them and questions whether someone needs a powerful connection to the Force to truly be considered a Jedi. Supervising director Kenji Kamiyama told Polygon that he deliberately wanted to move beyond the rigid Light Side-Dark Side divide that has defined much of Star Wars.
“I felt the Jedi Order itself had become restrictive,” Kamiyama said, explaining that Kara was designed to represent what “a new generation of Jedi should be.”
That’s an especially interesting creative choice at a moment when much of Star Wars is looking backward. Lucasfilm’s 50th-anniversary publishing plans include new stories about Luke, Leia, Han, Darth Vader, and Kylo Ren. The Ninth Jedi, meanwhile, is essentially starting over with unfamiliar characters in an unfamiliar era — and using the freedom of being non-canon to rethink some of the franchise’s oldest rules.
The Ninth Jedi is getting some of the best Star Wars reviews in years
So far, critics appear to be embracing that freedom.
The Ninth Jedi debuted with a perfect 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes (although it’s dipped a bit to 95% in the following days), with reviewers repeatedly praising many of the same things: its animation, lightsaber battles, new characters, and willingness to tell a Star Wars story that isn’t dependent on the Skywalker saga.
The response makes for a striking contrast with The Mandalorian and Grogu. That movie currently sits at 60% on Rotten Tomatoes, where even the site’s consensus praises its action while criticizing its thin story and episodic structure.
The response to The Ninth Jedi doesn’t mean Lucasfilm is suddenly going to throw away canon and start retconning 50 years of Star Wars lore. But the show’s success suggests the franchise’s future might get considerably more interesting when creators are allowed to leave some of that history behind.