New Star Wars: Visions—The Ninth Jedi trailer reminds us Star Wars can still look cool as hell

Certainly, that’s the takeaway from the new trailer the streamer rolled out over the holiday weekend for The Ninth Jedi, an eight-episode limited series presented by Visions, and produced by Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex‘s Production I.G. As the name suggests, the series will serve as both a sequel and a fleshing-out to shorts from the first and third seasons of Visions, both centered on Lah Kara, the daughter of a lightsaber blacksmith living in a period way after the events of the films, where the Jedi have (once again!) managed to get themselves almost completely wiped out. (Jedi Colony Collapse Disorder is a serious and persistent problem in this galaxy, as far as we can tell.)

With supervision by well-known animator Kenji Kamiyama, and direction from Shunsuke Tada, the series follows Kara as she continues to search for her kidnapped father, and, hey, if we’re being honest, we’re only half-following the plot as presented in the trailer. (There’s a bad guy who lifted his fashion sense from the “Darth” line of products, and a lot of conversations about kyber crystal colors.) We’re mostly here to see a lot of pretty awesome visuals, including a new take on an old Star Wars favorite, the planet-killing super laser. The package as a whole is undeniably gorgeous, a reminder that, on a fundamental level, this is still a franchise you can go to simply to see things that kick ass. (Whether it’s more than that, we’ll have to wait until the series debuts on August 5 to find out.)