Star Wars' Place in Anime and Manga

Star Wars: Visions just graced the screens of millions of Disney+ owners everywhere. As anime continues to gain more mainstream momentum, it only makes sense to bring the medium's vast degrees of styles and creativity to that galaxy far, far away. I can't wait to see what all these creative directors and studios can bring to a franchise that has honestly needed some fresh life pumped into it for a while. But this will be far from the first time that Star Wars has had any relationship with Japanese media and much like poetry, you can feel the rhymes of that relationship constantly without even trying to listen to it.

Star Wars creator George Lucas was greatly inspired by the works of Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa. Some of his favorite films include Seven Samurai, Yojimbo and The Hidden Fortress with the Star Wars franchise possessing subtle as well as direct parallels to Kurosawa's films. The Jedi are very comparable to how samurai were portrayed at the time while the suits of the stormtroopers and Darth Vader look like they've been modeled after samurai armor. The Hidden Fortress in particular seemed to have the biggest impact on the look and feel of the original Star Wars trilogy to the point where you could consider the epic space opera as a sci-fi reimagining of that Japanese film. Story beats, cinematography, even scene transitions are lifted straight from Kurosawa's works and it's interesting to look at these films to notice the comparisons. In Japan, the works of Kurosawa were classified as jidai-geki films or Japanese costume dramas that also acted as period pieces and many Star Wars fans speculate that this is actually the origin of the word Jedi. When the films were released, it was Godzilla film illustrator Noriyoshi Ōrai who created the original trilogy's acclaimed movie poster artwork.

It's fair to say that Star Wars would not look or feel the way it does without these Japanese roots, but do those roots extend to anime?

Akira Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress

To the best of my knowledge, George Lucas doesn't state that he was directly inspired by any particular piece of Japanese animation but that doesn't mean that fun comparisons can't be made. Space Battleship Yamato is one of the most influential science fiction anime in Japan while also sharing many plot points and imagery in common with A New Hope. Both feature a ruthless Nazi-inspired empire, a princess risking her life to deliver a message, and even a planet destroying laser. The space combat between the two is also framed almost identically and while Lucas seemed to want to craft something more “realistic” with his ship battles (something akin to World War II dog fighting but in space), the parallels are staggering to say the least when you consider the fact that Yamato predates the first Star Wars film by a few years.

It's very possible that Japanese animation would have followed the same science fiction boom that it did in the 80s even if Star Wars had not come out and a good argument could be made that the medium was always heading in that direction. However, when you consider just how well received Star Wars was in Japan, it would be foolish to deny the hand that the franchise played in the mediums trajectory for the decades to come. I don't think that modern day science fiction would be what it is without Star Wars and I like to think that anime immersed in the genre cannot help but be conscious of this juggernaut of pop culture. Just because there hasn't been a straight anime adaptation of the Star Wars franchise, that doesn't mean that there haven't been Star Wars-esque stories told through the lens of Japanese animation. Major franchises that followed the release of the original trilogy such as Gundam, Macross and Captain Harlock all possess elements that feel whole cloth taken right from Star Wars. These franchises possess epic space battles, psychic abilities very reminiscent of the force and laser beam swords that look like lightsabers. Some laser fights even use similar sound effects!

Nice helmet, Char. Where'd you get it?

All of this and we haven't even gotten into the plethora of anime references to the franchise! Personal favorites include an arc of Gintama that gets fairly emotional despite the fact that one character's backstory acts as a giant reference to Star Wars and a cute Millennium Falcon reference in Hellsing Ultimate. Even the main villain in one of the most popular shōnen anime of this generation, My Hero Academia, has a design and presence that is undeniably reminiscent of Darth Vader. I could honestly write a bible outlining every joke and nods to Star Wars that hundreds of anime have explicitly made. On the flip side, Star Wars cartoons and animation does seem to be taking more influence from it's Japanese roots in terms of style, even if these properties aren't explicitly produced in Japan. One of my favorite pieces of Star Wars media is Genndy Tartakovsky's Clone Wars series which definitely had an approach to its action and direction that felt less western inspired compared to other cartoons at the time. However, if we want to get more into the world of direct Star Wars adaptations, we're going to have to look into the world of manga.

Between the years of 1997 and 1999, the first four Star Wars films were adapted into manga by MediaWorks. Each adaptation was published in English by Dark Horse Comics and they are all extremely close to the original script of the films with very expressive artwork. For some reason the English releases appeared to double the volume length of each series and they were out of print for quite some time but they are all now available for purchase online and honestly worth checking out if you have the time. Other Star Wars manga act as direct adaptations of other pre-existing side material. Star Wars Rebels is a manga adaptation of the hit cartoon series that shares the same name with little dashes of other short stories. Then there are two manga adaptations of novels written by Claudia Grey. There's Lost Stars which is an adaptation of a young adult novel about two teens struggling to find their place in a world run by The Empire and there's Leia, Princess of Alderaan which appears to take place during the same time as the Rebels series except it's from Princess Leia's perspective. There are also manga anthologies such as Star Wars Manga: Silver, Star Wars Manga: Black and The Legends of Luke Skywalker which all seem to be a collection of short stories that just happen to take place in the Star Wars universe at different times while focusing on different characters. But that's not all because even now we're still getting Star Wars manga being released and distributed by Viz Media such as Star Wars: Guardians of the Whills and Star Wars: The High Republic: Edge of Balance. I have not had the opportunity to read through all of these myself quite yet but it's exciting to think that the manga industry has been helping keep the brand going to this very day.

If Japanese media initially inspired Star Wars, the franchise has completed a full rotational orbit. The Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker was interpreted into a traditional kabuki play in 2019 with famed actor Ichikawa Ebizō XI as Kylo Ren. A crowdfunding campaign to create ukiyo-e (woodblock prints) featuring Lucas' characters was met with resounding enthusiasm.

It feels almost impossible to ask the question “where would anime be without Star Wars?” because this isn't a simple franchise that exists in a vacuum. Even if Star Wars wasn't an inherently original idea, George Lucas and his team crafted something that exploded at the right time for a lot of people. It defined generations to come, not just in what it did for people individually, but what it did for media as a whole and yes that includes anime. Honestly, given how full circle this franchise has come, it's a little bit surprising that we haven't tried adapting or telling explicit stories from this universe in the anime medium. I don't know what the future has in store for the Star Wars franchise specifically. But good or bad, this franchise isn't going away anytime soon whether that's in the stories that influence it, the stories that take place in it or the stories that continue to throw back to that galaxy far far away.