Written by: Ollie Kaplan
Lucasfilm and Production I.G. unveiled the first trailer and key art for Star Wars: Visions Presents – The Ninth Jedi, an eight-episode limited anime series arriving August 5, 2026, which will air exclusively on Disney+ and Hulu. At Anime Expo 2026, held at the Los Angeles Convention Center in California, supervising director Kenji Kamiyama, director Shunsuke Tada, and producer Hitoshi Ito shared with fans both the English dub and original Japanese trailers for the next phase of the Star Wars: Visions anime series, alongside new key art. The panel also included a full screening of the series’ opening episode.
Anime Expo revealed last month via social media the “First Look: Star Wars: Visions Presents – The Ninth Jedi” panel, which took place on Thursday, July 2nd, in the JW Marriott’s Diamond Ballroom, running from 6:00 to 7:20 pm. Below is the official overview for The Ninth Jedi spotlight panel, which featured a special screening of the series’ opening episode (with English subtitles) alongside a Q&A session with the creative team behind the animated spinoff.
Although Disney and Lucasfilm appear to be scaling back their television slate in the coming years — currently, Ahsoka season 2 is the only confirmed live-action season, set to premiere on Disney+ in 2027 alongside the franchise’s 50th anniversary, the Star Wars’ animated lineup, however, looks like it will have a considerably brighter future. Dave Filoni’s Star Wars: Maul – Shadow Lord is confirmed for a second season, and the international anthology series Star Wars: Visions is set to release its first full-length spinoff later this year. Unlike Filoni’s Star Wars: Tales anthologies, Visions operates outside the bounds of the franchise’s main canon, giving animation studios creative freedom to reinterpret core Star Wars concepts, like the Force, the Jedi, the Sith, the Empire, the Rebellion, and beyond.
The Ninth Jedi series—which occurs in a distant, not necessarily canonical future—marks the launch of the new Star Wars: Visions Presents banner, which Lucasfilm says will be used moving forward to expand select Visions shorts into longer-form stories.
The name traces back to the original 2021 short, picking up the thread from two beloved previous Visions entries, the original The Ninth Jedi from Volume 1 and its follow-up, The Ninth Jedi: Child of Hope, from Volume 3, in which Juro summons a group of eight Jedi survivors to the Hy Izlan Aerial Temple, promising them new lightsabers as the first step toward rebuilding the Order. Lah Kara, the sabersmith’s force-sensitive daughter tasked with delivering the weapons, turns out to be more than a courier: after most of the “Jedi” Juro summoned are unmasked as Sith infiltrators in disguise, Juro reveals that Kara herself has been guided by the Force since birth and invites her to join the survivors as the ninth Jedi in their effort to restore the Order. The Ninth Jedi will follow Kara as she continues her Jedi training under Margrave Juro, joining his small fellowship of Jedi-in-training on a journey of self-discovery and a quest to save her missing father, Lah Zhima, a skilled lightsaber-smith — a mythology Kamiyama has said the new series will dig further into.
The Ninth Jedi is directed by Tada and written by Mitsuyasu Sakai, with Kamiyama serving as supervising director. Executive producers are James Waugh, Jacqui Lopez, Josh Rimes, Justin Leach, and Mitsuhisa Ishikawa; Hitoshi Ito and Kanako Shirasaki produce, with Caroline Keller as co-producer.
The English dub brings back Kimiko Glenn (Lah Kara), Andrew Kishino (Juro), Masi Oka (Ethan), Patrick Seitz (Homen), JP Karliak (Gramps), Simu Liu (Lah Zhima), and Neil Kaplan as The Narrator. New to the English cast are Feodor Chin (Gennoh), Young Mazino (Nawaam), Chase Sui Wonders (Tafflah), and Keone Young (Kwana).
The original Japanese-language cast also returns in full: Chinatsu Akasaki (Lah Kara), Tetsuo Kanao (Juro), Hiromu Mineta (Ethan), Hinata Tadokoro (Homen), Cho (Gramps), Shinichiro Miki (Lah Zhima), and Akio Otsuka as The Narrator.
Star Wars: Visions Presents – The Ninth Jedi premieres August 5 on Disney+ and Hulu.
Source: Lucasfilm
