LeSean Thomas, the Bass X Machina creator who moved to Tokyo to make anime his way

LeSean Thomas

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	1975 South Bronx, New York City, United States
Occupation	Animation director and producer

The most useful move LeSean Thomas ever made looked, from the outside, like a demotion. With a co-directing credit on The Boondocks already behind him, he left Los Angeles for an in-house job at a Korean animation studio, earning less and working longer hours, because that was where American cartoons were actually being drawn. Tokyo came next, and he stayed. With Bass X Machina now on Netflix, he is one of the few Black Americans making anime from inside the Japanese industry, and the one most willing to tell fans that the show they are asking for is not the show he intends to make.

He grew up in the John Adams Houses in the South Bronx, the second-oldest of eight children raised mostly by their mother. He started drawing because his older brother Kelby drew; Kelby moved on to other hobbies, and LeSean never stopped. School went badly, and his mother steered him into the arts program at Julia Richman High School. The education that mattered happened elsewhere, in Chinatown, where he found anime on VHS that no shop in his neighborhood carried. “They didn’t sell animation in the bodegas in the ‘hood,” he told Andscape. He devoured films like Akira on those tapes, a taste that set him apart from most of his comic-drawing friends.

Thomas, born in 1975, spent the years after high school drawing for whoever paid. Designing backpacks around SpongeBob and Disney characters forced his realistic, Marvel-and-DC line into a simpler cartoon shape. For the web start-up Urban Box Office he wrote, produced and directed BattleSeed, an eight-episode online cartoon about a Black teenage girl in a future city, built as a homage to Octavia Butler. His mother died in 2000; a year later came September 11. In 2002 he left New York for Greensboro, North Carolina and met the illustrator Carl Jones.

Jones introduced him to Aaron McGruder, who hired Thomas to supervise the character designs on the first season of The Boondocks, the Adult Swim series that won a Peabody Award; he also co-directed episodes across its first two seasons. McGruder, Thomas has said, was the first Black man he had seen command a room that way. Storyboard jobs at Cartoon Network and Warner Bros. followed, and a realization: the bulk of the actual drawing had been outsourced to South Korea and Japan. In 2009 he moved to Seoul and joined JM Animation. “My thinking was that if I went to work in South Korea, that would put me above my animation production peers in the United States,” he explained. At Studio Mir he worked on the first season of The Legend of Korra, and he documented those years in a web series, Seoul Sessions.

Los Angeles pulled him back in 2012 for Black Dynamite, Carl Jones’s animated riff on blaxploitation for Adult Swim, where Thomas was supervising director. In parallel he was building something he would own. Cannon Busters, a sci-fi Wild West adventure adapted from his own comic book, began as a Kickstarter-funded pilot made with the Japanese studio Satelight. Netflix picked it up in 2017, Thomas moved to Tokyo that autumn, and the twelve-episode series arrived in August 2019. In between came Children of Ether, a short film co-produced with Crunchyroll; he later said Netflix passed on financing it because he refused to give up the rights.

Yasuke was the bet that carried his name beyond animation circles. Animated by MAPPA and released in April 2021, the six-episode series took the African man who served the warlord Oda Nobunaga in the sixteenth century and set him loose in a Japan of sorcerers and giant mechs, with LaKeith Stanfield voicing the lead and Flying Lotus writing the score. He had first met the story in a children’s book by Yoshio Kurusu. “More than anything, the story of Yasuke is Japanese history,” he said before the premiere.

That is exactly where the case against him starts. When the trailer showed a samurai beside a ten-foot mech, part of the audience revolted, and the complaint that stuck came from Black anime fans who felt a rare chance to put a real African samurai on screen had been spent on spectacle. Reviews split: the fights and the music won praise, while Den of Geek wrote that the show had a lot of trouble fleshing out its main subject. Thomas said the series was built for several seasons; Netflix never announced a second. He has not retreated an inch. “Nobody’s seen anything like this before, and they’re already telling me how to make it,” he told a Japan Society audience in 2024, adding that “everyone has their own ideas of what the first Black anime should look like.” As a principle, the defense holds: anime has always bent history to its own ends. As an answer to the narrower charge, that Yasuke himself got lost under the machinery, it is thinner.

Since then Thomas has become a go-between for two industries. At Japan Society in New York he hosts Foreign Exchange, long-form conversations with Japanese creators; Shinichiro Watanabe sat with him there in November 2025. And he has gone back to the studio that once employed him as a storyboard hand. Bass X Machina, which he created and executive produces, is animated by Studio Mir and premiered on Netflix on November 3, 2026, a month later than first planned. Drawing on the frontier lawman Bass Reeves, it follows a father in a steampunk West overrun by outlaws, machines and supernatural terrors who is forced to become judge, jury and executioner. Brian Tyree Henry voices the lead and executive produces, with Janelle Monáe and Tati Gabrielle in the cast. It is his third animated series for Netflix, and the first whose title announces the mix of history and invention before anyone can complain about it.

Thomas lives in Tokyo and has published two books of his drawings, Nervous Breakdowns and Midnight Marauder, alongside the Cannon Busters comic.

His next credit is a supporting one, and it says a lot. In October 2026 The Hollywood Reporter revealed that he wrote the pilot of Sentinel 6, an Afro-futurist anime created by Pat Stout and the late Asa Palmer, now in development with the Japanese studio Creative Freaks and backed as executive producers by the former NBA player Michael Carter-Williams and the NFL running back Jamaal Williams. Thomas is consulting producer, not the man in charge. For someone who crossed the Pacific to learn the trade from the bottom of the pipeline, handing that knowledge to a first-time team is the logical next stop.

Tags: anime, Brian Tyree Henry, Bass X Machina, Lakeith Stanfield, LeSean Thomas, Cannon Busters