‘It was a lot of fun to be a samurai for six months.’

Before he started working on Yasuke, an upcoming anime series on Netflix, but I didn’t know much, because there wasn’t really much out there for so long,

which gave the team lots of room to be creative. The anime follows the samurai’s life, but it also mixes in elements of fantasy and sci-fi: there are mechs and robots UFABET.

For Lotus, it was the fact that the show would be an anime that inspired many of these far-out ideas. “It was rich enough on its own,” he says of the Yasuke legend, “but for anime it just needed that extra thing to take it over the edge.”

Lotus is just one part of an impressive creative team behind the show. Meanwhile, revered animation studio Mappa is helming the production. Lotus is no stranger to these kinds of collaborations.

most notably, he’s worked with Cowboy Bebop creator Shinichirō Watanabe on a number of projects — and he says part of what made Yasuke so interesting was that he was involved beyond just the soundtrack, which included helping shape the story early on.

The trick, he says, was balancing history and fantasy. “I think there’s enough of the historical document in the show that serves Yasuke’s story, and honors his story,” he explains. “When we tell our version, no one really knows what happened to him after a certain point.

I thought it was fun to speculate as to what that could be. It’s such an important time for this story to come out.”