The interesting Black anime story is no longer about representation on screen. It is about production credits — who is directing, who is financing, who owns the property, and who is physically in Tokyo making the thing. Over the last decade a small group of Black American creators stopped negotiating for a character and started building the shows, and the results are uneven in a way that is far more useful than another round of applause.
LeSean Thomas went and did the work
LeSean Thomas came up as the character designer and later co-director on The Boondocks, worked on Black Dynamite and The Legend of Korra, then moved to Asia and started producing inside the industry rather than adjacent to it.
Cannon Busters — his own comic, animated at Satelight and picked up by Netflix in 2019 — was the proof of concept: a Black American creator's original property, animated in Japan, distributed globally. It began as an independent project he had to fund and fight for, which is the part of the story most profiles skip.
Yasuke was the swing
Then came *Yasuke*, released on Netflix on April 29, 2021: six episodes, animated by MAPPA, created and directed by Thomas, with LaKeith Stanfield voicing the African retainer who served Oda Nobunaga in the sixteenth century, and Flying Lotus composing the score and serving as executive producer.
Look at that stack. A Black American showrunner, a Black American lead, a Black American producer on the music, a top-tier Japanese studio, a global platform, and a historical Black figure in Japan as the subject. Collider and ComicBook.com both covered the run-up, and ComicBook.com ran the trailer and poster ahead of release.
Yasuke did not get a second season. Six episodes is a short window to land a historical drama that also has mechs in it, and the show's tonal swings were a real critical problem. But the production itself answered a question that had been open since Afro Samurai: can a Black American creator run a Japanese anime production end to end? Yes. It is a normal, doable thing. The only reason it looked impossible was that nobody had been given the budget.
The Michael B. Jordan model
*gen:LOCK* came at it from the capital side. Michael B. Jordan starred in and executive produced the Rooster Teeth mecha series through his company Outlier Society, premiering in January 2019. Deadline reported the move of the second season to HBO Max, and Variety covered the commitment to staff that season's writers room through an inclusion initiative rather than the usual referral pipeline.
That last detail is the one with structural consequences. Casting a Black lead changes one credit. Changing who gets into the writers room changes the next ten years of credits. Rooster Teeth was later shut down by Warner Bros. Discovery, which is its own lesson about building on someone else's platform, and Jordan has since said he has anime projects in development.
What the pattern shows
Three projects, three different financing structures, one shared finding: the bottleneck was never talent or audience. It was access to production budget and to Japanese studio relationships, both of which are gatekept by people with no incentive to widen the gate.
Thomas solved it by relocating and building the relationships himself over years. Jordan solved it by arriving with a movie star's leverage and his own production company. Flying Lotus solved it by already being a composer with a catalog and a label relationship. None of those are repeatable paths for a 22-year-old animator in Atlanta, which is the actual problem the industry still has not addressed.
The take
Fandom was never the ceiling. Black audiences have been anime's most reliable Western demand base since the Toonami years, and the industry has been happy to sell to them and slow to hire them. What Thomas built is the answer that matters: not a Black character in someone else's show, but a property, a director's chair, and a production credit in Tokyo. The measure of progress from here is not how many Black leads get voiced. It is how many Black creators get a second season — and Yasuke didn't.
## Sources - LeSean Thomas — Wikipedia, accessed 2026 - Yasuke (TV series) — Wikipedia, accessed 2026 - LaKeith Stanfield Stars as African Samurai in Netflix Anime Series 'Yasuke' — blackfilm.com - Michael B. Jordan Animated Series 'gen:LOCK' Moves To HBO Max — Deadline, October 2019 - Michael B. Jordan's 'gen:LOCK' Announces Season 2 Writers — Variety, September 2020