The final short film in Lucasfilm’s Disney+ anthology project Star Wars: Visions Vol. 2 is entitled “Aau’s Song,” and was created by the South African animation studio Triggerfish. Much like the opening short “Sith” by El Guiri, “Aau’s Song” has such a distinctive, instantly memorable visual style that I can easily understand why it was chosen to close out this volume.
“Aau’s Song” was lovingly crafted in stop-motion and uses vibrant colors to tell the story of a young girl name Aau (voiced by Mpilo Jantjie of the upcoming TV movie Coco the Money Bunny) who lives on a planet where Sith-corrupted red Kyber crystals are being laboriously mined by people like her hardworking father Abat (Tumisho Masha from Catch a Fire). Abat meets with a Jedi called Kratu (Harriet’s Cynthia Erivo) to give her the Kyber crystals for safekeeping and to eventually be converted back into their natural colors by the benevolent Jedi Order. But it’s clear from the very beginning that Aau has a bigger destiny ahead of her– she demonstrates Force sensitivity when her titular song (performed in singing voice by Dineo Du Toit from Kiya & the Kimoja Heroes) activates something buried deep within the crystals. The next day when Abat goes to work in the mines and Aau attends to her own job of brushing adorable little bugs off of beasts of burden, the latter finds herself called to a larger destiny by the Force.
The climax to this already-beautifully-animated short is just absolutely gorgeous, with Aau’s song cleansing an entire mountain range worth of Kyber crystals, and the miniature landscapes here go a long way in selling the charming atmosphere and reality of the story. The mountainscapes actually remind me a long of the planet Kuboh in the newly released video game Star Wars: Jedi – Survivor in a very positive way, and I found myself wanting to spend more time with Abat and Aau on their home world. The action is fun and well-choreographed and the characters are likable enough to put “Aau’s Song” in the top half of my list for Visions Vol. 2, but the overlap in subject matter with several other shorts from this series is what’s unfortunately keeping it out of the top three. Kyber crystals, Jedi, Force powers, and a young girl going off with a new adult mentor at the end– it all starts to seem very familiar after a while, and reinforces my idea that the individual studios should have been given a prompt or story concept to keep their ideas separated. Again, on its own, this is top-tier, amazing stuff, but taken as part of the Star Wars: Visions whole I want to lean more toward the original concepts as my favorites.
My final Vol. 2 ranking:
1 – “I Am Your Mother”
2 – “Screecher’s Reach”
3 – “The Spy Dancer”
4 – “Aau’s Song”
5 – “In the Stars”
6 – “Sith”
7 – “The Bandits of Golak”
8 – “The Pit”
9 – “Journey to the Dark Head”
Star Wars: Visions Vol. 2 is now streaming in its entirety, exclusively via Disney+.