Cannon Busters, created by Satelight and Yumeta Company, is an anime adaptation of LeSean Thomas’ fantasy-action-comedy comic book series (originally published in 2005 by Devil’s Due and later reprinted). Thomas and Takahiro Natori, making his directorial debut with the project, co-directed the twelve-episode season. The project originated on Kickstarter for crowdfunding, and its creators eventually produced a short pilot in 2016, before Netflix picked the idea up and produced it as an original series in 2019.
The series wastes little time throwing the audience into its fictional world, presenting a collage of Western and Eastern influences, including the Wild West, sorcery and knights à la RPG (role-playing game) roles, science fiction and anime tropes. With this eclectic mixture of concepts, settings tend toward barren wastelands (icy tundra, forest and desert), small Western towns and sprawling megacities.