Okazaki won award for juried category “Outstanding Individual Achievement In Animation”

The Television Academy today announced on Wednesday the winners for juried categories in the 78th Annual Emmy Awards. Character designer Takashi Okazaki won an award for “Outstanding Individual Achievement In Animation” for his work on “The Duel: Payback” anime short in the Star Wars: Visions Volume 3 anthology project.

The award will be presented at the Peacock Theater at L.A. LIVE in Los Angeles on September 6. An edited presentation will air on September 12 on FXX. Juried category entrants are screened by a panel of professionals in appropriate peer groups.

Ths year’s Primetime Emmy Awards previously nominated Shinya Ōhira and david production‘s “Black” short from Star Wars: Visions Volume 3 in the Outstanding Animated Program category.

The winners will be announced at the 2026 Emmy Awards on September 14 at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles.

Takanobu Mizuno directed the “The Duel: Payback” short at Kamikaze Douga + ANIMA. The Star Wars franchise describes the story:

With the help of some unexpected allies, Ronin faces off against his greatest foe – a twisted Jedi known as the Grand Master who is bent on revenge.

The short is an sequel to “The Duel” short from the first anthology of Star Wars: Visions. Okazaki was also the character designer for the original short.

Star Wars: Visions Volume 3 debuted on Disney+ in October 2025. The latest anthology continued the storylines of three shorts from the first volume: “The Duel,” “Village Bride,” and “The Ninth Jedi.”

Star Wars: Visions Presents – The Ninth Jedi, the limited anime series spinoff from the Star Wars: Visions project, premiered on August 5 on Disney+ and Hulu.

Source: Press release

The Pokémon Company began streaming a new “POKÉTOON” anime short on Wednesday. The short is titled “Kameil to Natsu no Tsuzuku” (Wartortle and the Ongoing Summer).

The short follows a boy named Rikuto who visits his grandmother on an island at the end of summer. There, he meets a Wartortle.

Shingo Yamashita (Cosmic Princess Kaguya!) directed the short at Studio Chromato and Studio Colorido. Aya Satsuki (Solo Camping for Two) wrote the script. Riiki Miura designed the characters and served as chief animation director. Kyosuke Kagawa composed the music.

The short stars Sayaka Senbongi as Rikuto, Tasuku Hatanaka as Gaku, Akiko Hiramatsu as Shuri, Kana Hanazawa as Wartortle (Kameil), Natsumi Haruse as Leafeon, and Michiyo Murase as Bellsprout (Madatsubomi).

Sources: Official Pokémon YouTube channel, Comic Natalie

By this point in pop culture, we’ve all read about or watched time loops. The usual method for handling them (with, of course, some exceptions) is that the looping party eventually uses their knowledge to break the cycle or just becomes inured to their situation and makes the best of it. Not so Dinah, heroine of Hwang Bino’s adaptation of Songiba’s The Archduke’s Adopted Saint. Dinah has spent lifetimes being tormented by the church that took her off the streets, reviled for being an orphan and abused by fellow saint candidate Lavienne, and none of this is relegated to “oh, well, that’s just my life.” Dinah is genuinely traumatized, and that’s what drives her story.

It’s a good thing that the book opens with a “chapter 0” that shows readers that things will, in fact, get better, because Dinah’s life is pretty bleak. Just before she successfully commits suicide to end the loop before the main story starts, we see her kept chained in a dank basement and treated like a criminal. Every day, Lavienne comes to the cellar to drain some of Dinah’s blood, which she consumes to create the fiction that she, the daughter of a duke, is the true saint. If this seems a bit over the top for a villain, it’s worth mentioning that Lavienne has perfect parent manners – she’s an expert at convincing adults and later higher-ups in the church that butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth and she’d never do something as horrible as lock a rival up and bleed her dry. She’s blonde and pretty and perfect, after all.

Lavienne is, of course, just part of a systemic problem within the church, an organization that took Dinah in and then left her to be abused (while doling out some of the abuse themselves). Dinah doesn’t fully understand that until she meets the kingdom’s only archduke, Dewin Tersia. She believes that if she, a scrawny pre-teen who has clearly been neglected, charges him with a knife, he’ll just kill her without a second thought. After all, that’s both what the rumors about him and what her own life have prepared her to believe. But instead of murdering a child, Dewin offers to adopt Dinah – and after only a cursory glance at her sorry state, he quickly pays the church handsomely to relinquish any claim on her.

Dewin is an excellent hero (not romantic, don’t worry!). Mostly this comes down to the fact that he’s that rare creature in media, a fantastic parent. He’s been raising his twin sons Jude and Dennis, and he recognizes that Dinah needs a loving family and a fresh start. Renaming her Esther, Dewin begins his campaign of treating the poor girl gently and with love. One of the most heartwarming scenes in the volume is when she has a nightmare during a storm and he and Jude both sleep in the bed with her all night so that she feels safe. It’s top-notch familial love, and even the more standoffish Dennis is devoted to making sure that Esther feels like she belongs. These are the people she always needed in her corner. When Dewin renames her, he’s trying to send the message that she’s no longer being judged (the meaning of the name “Dinah”), but is instead a shining star, which is what “Esther” means, as Hwang mentions. (It may also come from the goddess Ishtar, which has its own implications.)

Most of this volume is about Esther making the transition from reviled and tormented orphan to beloved daughter. It’s smoothly presented but not smooth for her, and I appreciate that the story is acknowledging her trauma. Her situation can’t be fixed with one hug and a couple of cookies; she needs steady care over a long period to believe it’s true, and even then, she may have flashbacks. Her history has taught her not to trust, and we can see that in her words and actions over the course of this volume. Her new brothers take the brunt of this simply because they don’t really understand what she’s been through, but by the end of the book, even less emotionally literate Dennis is clearly making an effort. It’s lovely to see.

The art is lovely, too, and Hwang has a good touch with colors and facial expressions. All outfits are done in the same basic style so that they look less “unspecified fantasy time period” and more “basically mid-Victorian” without obvious deviations. Esther’s hair color is my one major complaint, as it seems to go between light brown and dark brown with no rhyme or reason.

Crossed Hearts has released two editions of this: regular and limited. I have the limited edition, which comes with an obi around the book, a bookmark of Esther, character sheets, and a couple of bonus short-short stories. Both editions are beautiful, though, with French flaps and foil touches on the cover, albeit in a smaller trim size than most English manhwa books. (Think mass market paperback versus trade paperback.) Crossed Hearts also includes “Observational Log” pages after some chapters – these are basically reading journal pages with questions to promote active reading. My teacher/librarian self loves this idea, and anything that gets more graphic novels into schools is a win for reading comprehension and modalities. But I could see how these pages might feel juvenile for some readers, and the questions are a bit all over the place – from “If you entered this chapter, what would you do?” to “Do you have any phobias or lingering trauma?”

Whichever edition you pick up, The Archduke’s Adopted Saint is off to a good start. Emotionally honest and a good take on the time loop story, it’s a story I’m looking forward to reading more of.