Lucasfilm Entrusted the "Sound of the Force" to a Japanese Scoring Duo

Say "Star Wars score" and most people picture John Williams and those iconic brass fanfares. Yet in August 2026, one corner of that mythic sound world was handed squarely to two Japanese composers. The original soundtrack for the Disney+ anime series Star Wars: Visions Presents: The Ninth Jedi was released digitally by Walt Disney Records on August 7 — 27 tracks, roughly 70 minutes. Composed and produced by Nobuko Toda and Kazuma Jinnouchi. For anyone who follows film and TV scoring, the fact that Lucasfilm and Disney entrusted the sound of an entire galactic chapter to a Japanese duo is thrilling in itself.

This is an eight-part limited series that picks up after the shorts The Ninth Jedi and The Ninth Jedi: Child of Hope, following Lah Kara and a small fellowship of Jedi-in-training on a quest to save her father. In other words, it is not a one-off showcase but a continuing story that must grow its characters and themes over eight episodes — a job that a simple pastiche cannot carry. You have to build themes for each character and design a musical arc that holds the whole series together.

Halo, Metal Gear, Ghost in the Shell — Two Border-Crossing Careers

So why these two? Toda and Jinnouchi formed a composer-producer unit in 2013 and founded a company dedicated to scoring for the screen. Lay their credits side by side and the choice looks anything but accidental.

  • Kazuma Jinnouchi — Hiroshima-born, a Berklee graduate. After Konami he joined 343 Industries and scored Halo 4 and Halo 5: Guardians, earning a BAFTA Games nomination for the latter. He also worked on Metal Gear Solid 4, and in 2022 won the Japan Academy Prize for Best Music for Makoto Shinkai's Suzume (with RADWIMPS).
  • Nobuko Toda — With Jinnouchi she has scored globally distributed anime such as Netflix's Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045 and ULTRAMAN.

Games, Hollywood-scale franchises, worldwide-streaming anime: everything the pair has done involves music built to travel across language and culture. That the ultimate border-crossing property — Star Wars — chose them feels like a natural conclusion. It marks a symbolic turn, with Japanese screen scoring moving from the side that imports to the side that gets entrusted.

27 Tracks: Reading "the Galaxy's Breathing" From the Track List

Even the track list reveals the score's blueprint. It opens with "The Ninth Jedi Main Theme" (2:42), followed by driving cues like "The Rise of Nawaam" and "Droid Army." The middle sets out clear character themes — "Tafflah's Theme," "Zhima's Theme," and the album's longest piece, "Nawaam's Theme" (5:56). As you'd expect from a serialized story, the whole thing is organized around per-character motifs.

The back half lines up "Dark Side," "The Duel," "The Jedi Path" and "New Dawn" — the classic Star Wars drama of light and shadow — before closing with "The Ninth Jedi End Credits" (0:57). Following a royal-road narrative while weaving 27 cues organically around a central theme is exactly the long-form control the two have honed in games and series work. Rather than confronting the Williams legacy head-on, they let the galaxy breathe through an accumulation of character themes. In that approach lies a genuine footprint left by Japanese screen music on a top-tier global franchise. Start with the main theme and hear it for yourself.