Yasuke is the kind of project that feels obvious in conception, but bleakly novel in reality. If someone had told me five years ago that a big-budget anime based on the real-life black samurai of 16th century Japan was going to be made by a lead on The Boondocks & star the stoner guy from Atlanta I’d have thought, that sounds about right. Do it.
Well, here we are, drowning in all...six episodes of LeSean Thomas’s anime mini-series, and yet when you google “black anime characters” you still find mostly supporting roles and just a few leads. So, Yasuke presents us with something of a look at the world that could have been. It’s a completely functional tale of a man finding his second act after living through enough pain for several lifetimes. Backed by high production values, magical embellishments, and nary a sex scene or curse, its (cartoonish gore aside) remarkably accessible for the non-weeb public. As I write this the show sits in Netflix’s top ten.
Our title character is a stranger in a strange land, but not a blank slate; he brings his own values and we see how he internalizes those of others. He becomes a samurai and respected warrior, but his position as a servant shadows his career. He will always be the one black friend (or rival) to every soul in the country. Yasuke gives you a tortured protagonist to invest in while never devolving into misery porn and keeps from becoming a history lesson by filling in the edges with sci-fi pulp.
Yasuke’s (the character) journey mirrors that of black creatives in entertainment. This U.S.-Japan co-production feels like it escaped through a wormhole from a world once promised to black film directors and audiences in the 1990s. Thirty years ago was an exciting time for black voices in cinema with the Boyz N the Hood, Jungle Fever, and New Jack City all releasing the same year. After the 1970s, black-led films stalled for a decade (with a couple of exceptions such as Eddie Murphy playing a cop) before a relaunch with the clout of Sundance awards.
As the decade closed, however, each of those new talents had their careers axed as they pursued more ambitious films outside urban drama or were squeezed into ill-fitting blockbuster projects doomed to underperform commercially or critically. They were often afforded just one chance in the spotlight and then quickly dropped. Only in the last decade have black project leads peppered box office reports and slipped in the margins of awards season. This time they are unignorable by white audiences and financers, but there’s still a catch: they’re treated as a trend.
To be part of a trend, Yasuke must be deliberate in some conniving way. This is laughable because every show and movie is planned. The obvious example here is the mechs and magic that fill in the series’s historical setting in a bid to appeal to a larger audience outside the current Isekai trend. LeSean Thomas set out to make a show that could appeal to a wider demo than Re:Zero; after all, the market for shows like Demon Slayer or Attack on Titan practically dwarfs the competition.
Yasuke delivers the goods in six episodes split into two arcs. The first three detail his purchase by warlord Nobunaga and fighting alongside ally Natsumaru juxtaposed with a time skip decades later. In the present he is a classic broken man, eking out a living as a ferryman until a local woman asks him to secret away her daughter. The girl, Saki, is another trope: a golden child, blessed with psychic powers that make her a target for multiple factions.
What doesn’t come packaged with this road trip are the kinds of detours into racism that litter American TV & film. There’s the odd comment on his darkness needing cleaning or that being a servant one can not make his own destiny despite his novelty. Notably, almost all the villains regard Yasuke with some degree of respect, if merely for his swordsmanship. This is to say, we’re not treated to gratuitous abuse of black bodies. Thomas respects his audience to get that Yasuke is obviously not of this land without all that and aside from the loaded image of Yasuke in captivity, we see our hero instead battle naysayers & tyrants, not samurai lynch mobs.
This arc is also the introduction of four mercenaries that seem to throw viewers more than anything else. It’s not that a robot and a shapeshifter are anachronistic in the show’s historical setting (and they are, the year is regularly dropped in on-screen text), but it’s that they barely have time to grow on viewers in the short running time. They, like Yasuke and Saki, do have a small collective character arc, they just don’t get to inhabit the world and step outside of their two-dimensionality of “I enjoy killing people with you.” They are there for flavor, not allegory, and to tease the complexity and size of the world should a second season come.
The mercs are such a sure-fire collection of anime indulgences I’m confident that with more time they would have overtaken the hero’s popularity. They’re both a missed opportunity and not a real problem. Let me throw a Blake Snyder term at you: “Double Mumbo Jumbo”. This is the screenwriting rule that an audience can only accept one fantastical element in a story. You can have vampires or aliens, but you can’t have both. I believe there is some validity to this. Audiences expecting a historical drama are already doing some readjusting in the show’s opening minutes as Nobunaga’s forces battle mechs with blue lightning magic. So it’s to the writers’ credit that “Yasuke” knows sincerity wins hearts and minds.
Take Gintama, a sci-fi action comedy about samurai and aliens and a big dog, and it’s two hundred episodes long with three movies and I do not like it. Although Gintama does have a heart, its minute-to-minute speed is zany. It’s kind of a goofball, anything-goes approach something like Adventure Time revels in and it just puts me off. Why should I care? Yasuke wants you to have fun, crack a beer, maybe even recommend the show to your dad, and instead of smothering you in twee anime shenanigans, it chooses love. Love for mechas, animal people, psychic battles, and villainizing Catholic missionaries.
There is no law that requires a historically based story to be as dry as a textbook nor is the answer in pandering to the kids with chibi fluff. Yasuke’s solution is fantasy chanbara with all the trimmings, but played straight. There’s a baddie out there and rather than with a smirk or a groan, the black samurai speaks honestly with others, asking for bygones to be bygones when addressing an old foe or makes it snappy with allies as he battles intrusive memories. He’s a deeply human character in a very human tale. That also has big monster fights.
The second set of episodes, however, are mixed as the show keeps up the same speed and energy admirably, but towards a climax that would feel extravagant in a twelve-episode series. Yasuke is made to make peace with his past in a hoary magic fight while Saki takes center stage in a show no one hit play for. The mercs also suffer here: friendships are declared before abrupt endings and bittersweet farewells, again, they just don’t have the history needed to bring tears. That the show still looks incredible in these final episodes as the story peters out is a save I think only an anime could pull.
Seeing Yasuke don his armor again and lead an army is pure hype. The interpersonal asides during the final fights trace the characters’ journeys to this moment far better than the clip shows we see in battle Shonen. The show’s heart is so big, the expected triumphant declarations of the blinding finale put you at ease that it may have been bumpy, but a ride worth taking.
The only things I can’t abide by include the disposability of the women for one. Both Yasuke and Saki have found family ripped from them so that they may meet each other with emotional holes to fill in the other. It works, but it’s not fun watching these capable women warriors die well before the meat of the story. The other issue is Lakieth Stanfield and look, I’m sure the show likely wouldn’t have come together the way it did without his involvement (he has a nebulous producer credit). His casting alone is just a drop in the bucket among the many screen actors in roles better suited to voice actors. That performance though? Stanfield speaks, appropriately, as if his chin rests on his chest, in short, honest bursts. I think he and Thomas were going for a gentle giant and instead landed on a groggy teen.
Yasuke is hardly perfect, but the fact that it’s so confident in its non-weebness (no destinies, no ubermensch, no fanservice, no harem!) makes me love its eccentricities all the more. All this and saying nothing of Flying Lotus should be enough for any adventure fan, but that soundtrack....that’s gonna be on the old Spotify for a bit. Flylo’s music arguably promises a more epic experience than we get yet never feels bombastic. “Between Memories” closes episodes like a long stretch after waking from a pleasant dream; the screen is often alight with carnage, but warmth is what I hear and feel from this American anime/cartoon/Japanimation/who gives a fuck. And like the sound, the last images we get of Yasuke in a Ghibli-esque forest promise a bright future, once robbed, on the horizon.
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