Yasuke
“Great Visuals, Disappointing Plot”
Every few years, anime hands you a show that’s far easier to love in stills than in motion. Yasuke is one of those. It dropped on Netflix in the spring of 2021 as a six-episode original net animation—a samurai-fantasy series built around the one piece of 16th-century Japanese history that should have sold itself without any help. We’re talking about the real Yasuke, the African retainer who stood alongside Oda Nobunaga, carried his sword, and earned samurai status in a country that had no prior social category for him. The one that would have Assassin’s Creed fans furious four years later.
For those of us who came of age during the wild west of the 1980s and ’90s, gritty, heavy-duty titles like Wicked City, MD Geist, and the legendary Fist of the North Star felt like a seismic shift. We spent decades dreaming of a major production that would take this legendary figure and give him the heavy-metal, auteur-driven treatment he deserved. The stakes were enormous. This wasn't just another seasonal drop; it was a rare opportunity to fuse authentic Black cultural identity with the uncompromising craft of Japanese animation.
We walked into this expecting a grounded, blood-soaked historical epic in the vein of Studio Bones' Sword of the Stranger or Yoshiaki Kawajiri’s Ninja Scroll or maybe Blade of the Immortal. Instead, we got a kitchen-sink science-fantasy experiment that swaps narrative focus for superficial flash, leaving us with a beautiful but hollow shell of what could have been a masterpiece. The question this review keeps circling is why a show with that foundation, this studio, and that score still feels like it's wrestling with itself the whole way through.
To understand how Yasuke got to this strange territory, you have to look at the production committee and the bridge built between Western and Japanese creators. The miniseries is an animated series by Studio MAPPA, the high-profile powerhouse founded in 2011 by Madhouse co-founder Masao Maruyama that has dominated the modern landscape with heavy-hitter titles like Vinland Saga (Season 2), Dororo, and my recent favorite, Hell’s Paradise. MAPPA built its reputation on heavy, kinetic action animation, and you can see exactly what they were hired to deliver here.
The series was created, directed, and executive-produced by LeSean Thomas, an American creator whose credits include serving as lead character designer on the first two seasons of The Boondocks and directing Cannon Busters. The writing team was based in the U.S. and included Canadian screenwriter Alex Larsen—who penned three of the six episodes—while the art and animation were handled entirely in Japan. To realize the visual identity, the production turned to renowned animator and director Takeshi Koike for character designs. Koike’s touch is unmistakable; his signature thick, high-contrast ink lines, heavy shadows, and expressive faces create the gritty, hand-drawn aesthetic of vintage 1990s OVAs. Behind the scenes, co-director and chief episode director Takeru Satō managed the technical pipeline, while Satoshi Iwataki took on the role of chief animation director.
To handle the extensive 3D requirements, MAPPA collaborated with Moe Co., Ltd. (株式会社萌), a Tokyo-based Japanese CG animation studio known for its specialized cel-shaded 3D modeling on projects like Magilumiere Co., Ltd. and Lupin III vs. Cat's Eye (see Moe Co., Ltd. Profile on Note.com). Rounding out the creative dream team, Oscar-nominated actor LaKeith Stanfield voiced the lead and served as an executive producer, while Grammy-nominated artist Flying Lotus (Steven Ellison) composed the synth-heavy score and co-produced the series. The entire six-episode season premiered worldwide on Netflix on April 29, 2021.
The set-up is forceful on paper, kicking off with a terrific, kinetic sequence of the fiery fall of Kyoto’s Honnō-ji Temple in 1582. This is the night when Akechi Mitsuhide betrayed his senior lord, Oda Nobunaga, in history. But in the anime’s alternate reality of Sengoku Jidai, the betrayal is amplified with dark sorcery. Nobunaga's forces are overwhelmed by the Dark Army, and he is forced to commit seppuku to avoid capture. Yasuke is to be his kaishakunin. Twenty years later, we find a broken, traumatized Yasuke living incognito under the name "Yasan." He spends his days as a reclusive, alcohol-soaked boatman ferrying travelers across a remote river. A singer named Ichika shatters his peaceful isolation when she hires him to ferry her sickly daughter, Saki, upriver to a specialist, Dr. Morisuke. Saki, of course, is no ordinary child—she’s a powerful mystic whose latent psychic energy threatens the demonic warlord Yami no Daimyō, who now controls the land.
This setup outlines a classic Lone Wolf and Cub skeleton: a haunted, weary ronin, a mysterious child he didn't ask to protect, and a road crawling with bloodthirsty mercenaries and monsters. Thomas has cited Samurai 7 and the Rambo films as major touchstones, and you can feel those influences in the show's bones. The trouble, however, lies in the narrative execution. The promotional trailers practically marketed a grounded biographical history lesson (see Smithsonian Magazine — Who Was Yasuke?). Instead, the show abruptly pivots into high fantasy by the second episode and never looks back.
We are assaulted with giant weaponized robots, Russian shapeshifters who turn into grizzly bears, a rogue Catholic priest named Father Abraham who wields dark magic, and a demonic Japanese sorceress ruling from Azuchi Castle. Individually, some of these swings work. But crammed into a tight six-episode runtime alongside Yasuke's actual history, his trauma, his bond with Nobunaga, and a present-day chase plot, none of these elements have enough space to develop. This is the core failure of the show, and it's a failure of narrative math, not imagination. By trying to cram an entire multimedia franchise's worth of mechs, magic, and mutant mercenaries into a three-hour window, the series never allows its central historical hook to breathe. Every time the story settles into a genuinely moving, quiet exploration of a man with no homeland finding a reason to pick the sword back up, the show interrupts itself to introduce a new toy.
Despite the script's pacing issues, the characters themselves show brief flashes of brilliant writing. Yasuke himself works as a compelling protagonist, and LaKeith Stanfield’s vocal performance is a major reason why. He plays the strong, silent type with a quiet, weary stoicism that lands hardest during the flashbacks, where the weight of what Yasuke survived does more emotional work than the dialogue ever could. The problem is that the script frequently leaves Yasuke in a passive, reactive register rather than driving the plot forward, occasionally causing his own series to forget he’s the lead.
Saki (voiced by Maya Tanida) serves as the emotional anchor of the present-day timeline. Her scenes with Yasuke represent the most honest, resonant material in the show—two outsiders who don't fully belong anywhere, looking out for each other.
In the flashback timeline, the standout figure is Natsumaru (voiced by Ming-Na Wen), an onna-bugeisha (female warrior) fighting for status within Nobunaga's ranks. Natsumaru and Yasuke bond deeply over their shared identity as samurai, treating them as "others." However, she secretly serves as a shinobi spy for Hattori Hanzō. When her betrayal is exposed, her arc ends in a tragic, beautifully animated duel in which she begs Yasuke to execute her to preserve her honor as a warrior. It's a classic Sengoku tragedy of Giri (duty) versus Ninjo (personal feeling) that serves as the narrative's high-water mark. Unfortunately, the villains suffer most from the tight runtime. Father Abraham’s mercenary squad—Haruto the self-aware, wisecracking battle robot (Darren Criss); Nikita the Russian werebear; Ishikawa the chain-scythe assassin; and Achoja, an African shaman—are visually spectacular but thinly written. Achoja is a fascinating exception; as a fellow African warrior, he develops a mutual respect for Yasuke and refuses to participate in Abraham's cold-blooded torture of him.
The primary antagonist, the Yami no Daimyō, remains a generic dark-overlord menace. The most compelling adversarial presence is actually the Dark General, who pursues Yasuke throughout the series. In Episode 5: "Pain & Blood," the general removes his red-horned mask and reveals himself to be Mitsuhide Akechi, Yasuke's former comrade who betrayed Nobunaga and was transformed into a demonic warlord. This reveal carries immense emotional weight, but like much of the show’s lore, it is introduced and resolved too quickly to have a lasting effect.
Visually, Yasuke is frustrating for its inconsistency, which reflects both the talent of its staff and the brutal realities of TV anime budgets. On one hand, Takeshi Koike's touch is unmistakable. The hand-drawn 2D character designs are gorgeous. The premiere episode's opening sequence—the fiery, chaotic fall of Honnō-ji Temple—is a stunning display of kinetic 2D action. However, the visual quality degrades rapidly after this high-water mark. As the series progresses into the middle episodes, the traditional 2D animation becomes noticeably stiffer, relying on static pans and repetitive combat loops. The integration of 3D CGI models looks flat and jarringly out of place against the beautiful, hand-painted rural backgrounds.
The absolute saving grace of Yasuke is its exceptional, genre-defying soundtrack, composed and produced by Flying Lotus and released under the prestigious Warp Records label. The music completely rejects the predictable, sweeping orchestral melodies typical of historical fantasy, opting instead for an organic, synth-heavy atmosphere that Flying Lotus built in chronological order to reflect the protagonist's progression. The opening theme, "Black Gold," featuring the soulful, falsetto vocals of Thundercat, is a slow, smoky masterpiece of modern electronic soul that perfectly captures Yasuke's melancholy and nobility. The track earned a well-deserved nomination at the 12th Hollywood Music in Media Awards in 2021. The ending theme, "Between Memories," featuring Niki Randa, provides a haunting, serene wind-down to each episode.
Ultimately, Yasuke is a high-spec, visually appealing miss that struggles to reconcile its historical ambitions with its fantasy excesses. The animation has moments of top-tier brilliance, the Takeshi Koike designs are unmistakable, and the Warp Records soundtrack is one of the best things attached to any anime recently. But you can't grade a samurai series solely on its album. The plot takes the single richest premise in feudal-era history and buries it under more fantasy, mechs, and magic than six episodes can possibly carry. This leaves the protagonist underserved in his own show and reduces compelling historical figures to fantasy tropes.
A Black samurai at the center of a major anime is still a historic milestone, and Yasuke treats him as a complex man first, not a mascot, which is more than most "representation" projects manage. For a VHS-era fan, this is a rental, not a buy: watch it for the look and the sound, the way you'd put on Redline with the lights off. Come for tight, character-first storytelling, and you'll spend six episodes mourning the show this could have been.
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