LeSean Thomas’ Cannon Busters was a fantasy-action romp through a sci-fi Wild West featuring multiple Black characters.
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“They didn’t sell animation in the bodegas in the ’hood.” But Thomas found VHS copies of anime series for sale in Chinatown, and he devoured movies such as Akira and Ghost in the Shell. “More people were into comics because of accessibility,” Thomas said. In his spare time, Thomas was absorbing and emulating Japanese animation, which set him apart from most of his comic-drawing friends. “But when I got the job designing backpacks featuring SpongeBob and Disney characters, I had to simplify my drawing to match the Disney cartoon style.” In high school, “my drawing was super-realistic, in the style of DC and Marvel comics,” he said. Meanwhile, Thomas’ drawing style was changing. That led to an assistant gig at a New York animation studio that produced comedy shorts for Saturday Night Live and the animated bits on the television show Lizzie McGuire. He took a series of drawing jobs, including designing kid-themed backpacks and making a cartoon for a web startup called Urban Box Office. “Everyone has to hustle, and I learned other skills.” “You’re not special in New York,” he said. He wanted to be a comic book artist, but the competition in New York for jobs at Marvel and DC was stiff. When he graduated, “I knew I wanted to be an artist, it was just trying to figure out how I was going to get there,” Thomas said. Rather than fight her son’s artistic inclinations, Thomas’ mother enrolled him in the arts program at Julia Richman High School, the site of early reform efforts in the city’s public schools. There was the birth of hip-hop culture and Basquiat – all these great movements when New York was broke.”
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“You had Reaganomics, the crack epidemic, the war on drugs. “When I was 8 or 9, it was 19 in New York City,” he said. Looking back, he realized that much of his learning was occurring outside the school’s walls. LeSean Thomas said he’s interested in how Yasuke will be received internationally, but particularly in Japan, where he plans to remain for the foreseeable future. They stood there and all they were interested in was if you knew Columbus discovered America. “I couldn’t relate to my teachers,” he said. But at school, his penchant for drawing during class got him into trouble. With so many siblings competing for attention, Thomas said, he was content to spend long hours by himself. “I wish we still had some of the comic books he made when he was in elementary school.” Kelby moved on to other hobbies, but “Sean never stopped,” he said. “He started drawing because I was drawing,” said Thomas’ older brother, Kelby, who lives in Florida. He’s the second-oldest of eight children who were raised primarily by their mother. Thomas grew up in the John Adams Houses projects in the South Bronx. “He said, ‘Yo, man, you want to work on an anime series for Netflix about a Black samurai?’ I was like, ‘Are you … kidding me?!’ ” Lotus, otherwise known as Steven Ellison, recalls being approached by a producer to join the project. But Yasuke, which debuts in the spring, is his highest-profile venture yet, with LaKeith Stanfield ( Atlanta, Get Out, Sorry to Bother You) voicing the character of Yasuke and Flying Lotus composing the musical score. “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,” Thomas said during a recent Skype conversation.Ī decade later, after Thomas moved to Tokyo, Netflix aired Cannon Busters, which he adapted from his own comic book series. So he moved to South Korea in 2009 to immerse himself in the grunt work of the industry. His busy early career culminated in 2005-06 with codirecting several episodes in the first two seasons of The Boondocks, an animated television series based on Aaron McGruder’s groundbreaking comic strip.īy that time, Thomas, who was living in Los Angeles, recognized that the bulk of animation production was outsourced to South Korea and Japan. Yasuke’s creator, producer and director, LeSean Thomas, a native of South Bronx, New York, also made an improbable move to the Far East. Legend has it that when they first met, the warlord, Oda Nobunaga, ordered Yasuke ( pronounced YAS-kay) to strip and scrub his body, assuming that the foreigner had painted himself with black ink. The protagonist of Netflix’s new anime series, Yasuke, is a true historical oddity: an African who entered 16th-century Japan with a Jesuit missionary and then became a samurai under Japan’s most powerful warlord.
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