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.
MAPPA with character designs by
Takeshi Koike. The show takes place in an alternate version of 16th century Japan where magic and robots exist. While scores of people have eagerly awaited the day when the story of Yasuke would become an anime, the end result is a disappointment.
Yasuke is a middling anime that squanders its extremely rich historical source material.
The series takes place 20 years after the last known historical records for the real-life Yasuke. The story of the real-life Yasuke as we know it is reduced to backstory told through flashbacks. Of course with any historical fiction, a certain level of fabrication and creative liberty is to be expected. Especially in a case like Yasuke s where much of the available information is in the realm of speculation and debate. But the extent to which
In 1579, Alessandro Valignano, an Italian Jesuit who was instrumental in introducing Catholicism to many parts of Asia, arrived in Kyoto, his visit prompting riots in what was then Japan s capital city. The residents were not literally climbing over one another so that they could learn the story and teachings of Christ, but rather they were all desperate to catch a glimpse of the mysterious figure who served at Valignano s side. Standing at an imposing 6 2 with dark skin, Yasuke, as he would be known, was unlike anyone the people of Kyoto had ever seen before.
Scholars differ on his place of birth and how he came to be Valignaro s bodyguard, what is agreed upon is that shortly after his arrival, Yasuke would gain an audience with Nobunaga Oda, one of Japan s most powerful feudal lords, one of three men who unified Japan during the Sengoku period. The two quickly bonded, the daimyo having Yasuke first join him as a bodyguard, later promoting him to the rank of samurai, making him th
Netflix s big bet on anime is changing the Japanese animation industry, says expert
Yasuke, a new Netflix original animated series, is drawing attention for the way it both subverts the traditional Japanese anime genre, while also remixing classic tropes in a way that appeals to North American and other global audiences.
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Posted: Apr 30, 2021 6:32 PM ET | Last Updated: April 30
Netflix s latest anime original, Yasuke, tells the story of Japan s first-recorded Black samurai. The anime series was created by LeSean Thomas, and features the voice of Academy Award-nominee Lakeith Stanfield as the eponymous main character. And while the show s creative team are largely American, Yasuke was produced by Japanese anime behemoth Studio Mappa.(Netflix)
The historical Yasuke was a warrior who served the 16th-century Japanese feudal lord Oda Nobunaga.
At first, it s not clear who s fighting whom. All you know is that it s Kyoto, 1582 and dudes are getting absolutely sliced up. Then come in the big mechas, and they have huge guns and swords for arms that contribute to the bloodshed. And then there are the sorcerers summoning beams of arrows that would cut their opponents down if not for those other sorcerers conjuring protective shields.
This is the world of
Yasuke, the new anime series on Netflix about the real-life Black warrior who served under Oda Nobunaga, one of the great unifiers of feudal Japan. The show s creator, LeSean Thomas, first read about Yasuke in 1960s children s book