In a sea of shows where many anime-influenced Black animated projects feel cloyingly recycled, Netflix’s new sci-fi animated series Bass X Machina stands out as genuinely stunning. Instead of arriving as a derivative mimicry of Toonami-era pastiche, the biggest compliment is that it’s hard to compare directly to anything else.
Bass X Machina feels wholly its own, effortlessly cool and unapologetically Black. But more than anything, Bass X Machina feels like the long-awaited example of original Black genre animation that isn’t merely riffing on existing anime aesthetics but is building its own enveloping mythos, remixing fantastical steampunk westerns with real-life history.
Animated by Studio Mir (Devil May Cry/Legend of Korra) and Studio IAM(The Witcher: Sirens of the Deep) and created by LeSean Thomas (Cannon Busters/Yasuke), Bass X Machina follows Bass Reeves (Brian Tyree Henry), a Black bounty hunter roving about a post-Civil War steampunk America. When he’s offered the chance to become a U.S. Marshal, Bass leaves his pregnant wife, Glory (Janelle Monáe), and children behind to go on one last job in search of a missing inventor.
In tow is his Lone Wolf and Cub-esque sidekick, Dana Starr (Tati Gabrielle), an aspiring inventor herself who’s also the niece of the MIA inventor. Along the way, Bass’ shoot-first pragmatism and Dana’s technological ingenuity and pacifism give the unlikely duo the spark they need to turn shootouts with outlaws and hulking automatons into a surprisingly fantastic adventure.
Admittedly, I walked into Bass X Machina with tempered expectations. The moment I learned it wasn’t wholly original but a fantastical reinterpretation of a real-life historical figure, I got Yasukeflashbacks. I didn’t much like Thomas’ last go around on this front, bringing real-life Black samurai to life. I thought it missed the mark, namely because it prioritized the fantastical spectacle of mechs and werebears, overshadowing a prime opportunity to bring a real-life Black figure into the mainstream years beforeAssassin’s Creed would try its hand at it for gamers. Mostly, I worried history would repeat itself, with Bass X Machina‘s historical precedents on the back foot of the show’s fantastical original ideas.
Unlike its spiritual predecessor, Bass X Machina benefits from the rule of cool in its steampunk ideas. Like a second draft, Bass X Machina feels like a refinement of the ideas Yasuke posited as a historical remix, with a more confident balance as a character drama, action spectacle, and timeless social commentary.
Here, the steampunk elements of post-Civil War America give Bass X Machina thematic grounding, where historical constraints enhance the supernatural elements of its world-building rather than distract from them. Namely, steampunk, like its cousin cyberpunk, isn’t treated like an aspiration. It’s treated like opening Pandora’s box. Cool weaponry like Bass’ cybernetic arm’s literal finger gun and double-barreled cannon launcher attachment is as cool as it sounds as a bounty hunter’s weapon of choice, but it’s not a weapon he fashioned for himself by choice.
In a similar phenomenon to the Tuskegee experiments, Bass was one of many Black men experimented upon with technology and managed to escape. His conflicting ideals with Dana get even more interesting when he has to contend with his place in the world as a Black man, ostensibly acting as a dog to a white contractor who goads him on a fool’s errand with the promise to be legitimized, which gets him clowned on by fellow Black bounty hunters. He also meets a troupe of Native American elemental benders hunting for the same AWOL inventor. Thankfully, Studio Mir makes Bass and all involved look fucking cool every step of the way.
It comes as no surprise that the visuals deliver when Studio Mir, the animation production house largely responsible for the look and feel of modern Western animation, is attached to a project. Bass X Machina is no exception, with Studio Mir delivering another triumph where every frame of action and compositing feels provocative and oh-so alive. Every action sequence carries momentum thanks to the dynamic camera work and strong sense of weight, impact, and vibrant colors.
The scale of Studio Mir’s bombast never dips into excess, upstaging the narrative it’s meant to serve. In tandem with its animation, the world of Bass X Machina feels massive, with new corners of its setting continually unfolding with each passing episode, beckoning viewers’ curiosity beyond the story’s confines.
What’s more, the series avoids the common streaming-era trap of throwing every idea onto the screen at once. It neatly restrains its idea of a Black steampunk cowboy roving the Wild West with a gun arm against elemental benders and automatons, and rightly trusts that this cool backdrop serves the human drama at play as Bass wrestles with the humbled man he becomes on his journey.
Another not-insignificant hallmark that left me positively giddy while binge-watching Bass X Machina is how unapologetically Black the production feels. Unlike shows that seem overly concerned with proving their Blackness, Bass X Machina moves with quiet confidence in every facet of its production. Black culture isn’t treated as a fugazi spectacle. It’s culture as texture.That’s evident in Thomas and Henry serving as executive producers for the show, with stalwart Black voice actors like Cree Summer among its cast. All that to say, Bass X Machina feels remarkably FUBU: for us, by us.
Nowhere is that confidence more evident than in the show’s soundtrack. Janelle Monáe’s bopping opening theme is an instant statement of purpose, pairing their infectious energy with lyrics that refuse to water down the show’s voice, with “I’m not my brother’s keeper/I’m not your nigga either” uncensored in its stylish opening sequence. Whereas any other show not tapped into the culture would’ve glanced at a Billboard Top 100 rap song and slapped it into an action sequence, Bass X Machina wastes no time proving it knows its shit thematically and socially, with an apt early needle drop of Kendrick Lamar’s “The Blacker the Berry.”
It also didn’t hurt that I got to hear hip-hop duo Paris, Texas get some play as an insert song in one of Bass X Machina‘s action sequences. Even the score from its original soundtrack carries that same sensibility, blending hip-hop with a Western twang that feels familiar rather than forced. One recurring leitmotif in its OST was so evocative that I had to do a double take because I could have sworn I heard a ye-olde version of the synthesizer 50 Cent used in “Candy Shop.”
That authentic musical identity ofBass X Machina doesn’t just add swag. It gives the animated series a sense of place and perspective that even few Black animated productions achieve. Taken together, Bass X Machina feels like the clearest evolution of The Boondocks, which Thomas also worked on, as a production unafraid to wear its influences proudly while transforming them into something fresh. The result is one of the most authentically Black animated productions in years, a show whose cultural specificity only makes it feel more universal.
What makes Bass X Machina particularly impressive is that it lets racial commentary serve as the bedrock of its world-building. The series uses post-Civil War America’s racial tensions as a foundation rather than an after-school special-feeling endpoint, allowing its world to expand outward instead of remaining confined to overly familiar conversations. As Bass’ journey unfolds, the show’s scope broadens to include Indigenous communities through characters like Bass’ ally Lighthorse (Chaske Spencer) and his fire-wielding foe, Anhi (Summer), exploring how different marginalized groups navigate the same hostile system while forging alliances of necessity and survival. In doing so, Bass X Machina sidesteps the trap of reducing history into a neat, binary morality conversation and instead presents a richer portrait of a fractured America struggling to define itself.
That widening perspective also gives the show’s supernatural and sci-fi elements room to breathe. What begins as a relatively straightforward tale about a bounty hunter with a mechanical arm gradually unfolds into something far stranger and more ambitious, introducing characters with extraordinary abilities, government conspiracies, and echoes of real-world atrocities woven into its fiction.
The show’s escalation across its six-episode run never feels arbitrary. LikeCastlevania: Nocturne before it, Bass X Machina broadens the horizon as a multi-pronged character drama with race serving as its centerpiece. Even with world-building mythology as elaborate as what Bass X Machina is cooking with, the historical anxieties underpinning its world-building keep it grounded.
On paper, Bass X Machina sounds like a series assembled from a dozen competing pitches. It’s a western, a steampunk adventure, a supernatural thriller, an alternate-history drama, and an anime-inspired action series all at once. Yet what should feel unwieldy instead becomes one of the show’s greatest strengths. LeSean Thomas and Studio Mir understand that genre is only valuable when it serves character and theme, so every stylistic ingredient feels deliberately chosen rather than thrown into a blender. The gunslinger iconography, mechanical augmentations, supernatural powers, and historical backdrop all reinforce one another, creating a world that feels cohesive despite its apparent contradictions.
More impressively, the series never feels as though it’s borrowing aesthetics simply because they’re cool. The western influences evoke America’s mythologized frontier. The steampunk technology becomes an extension of industrial progress and bodily otherness. The supernatural elements externalize generational trauma and buried histories. Together, they form a genre chimera that feels startlingly original, not because its parts are unprecedented, but because it combines them with such confidence. By the end of its six episodes,Bass X Machina feels less like a collection of influences and more like a fully realized identity, one capable of standing shoulder to shoulder with the very works that may have inspired it.
Bass X Machina arrives like a landmark moment for Black stories in animation. One where rare anime-inspired productions can stand entirely on their own merits. Even among the bona fides of Studio Mir’s past work, Bass X Machina feels like some of the crew’s strongest. Likewise, as an occasional detractor to Thomas’ past attempts at remixing Black history with fantastical fiction, Bass X Machina feels like that relationship operating at the height of their powers, both as a wildly interesting show with depthful world-building and one that extends curiosity beyond its frame to the real-life, mustachioed historical figure at the center of its tale.
Whether Bass X Machina endures as a breakout hit like Kpop Demon Hunters was for the streamer (as it deserves) or becomes a cult favorite, it feels destined to leave a lasting mark on the culture. More than anything, Bass X Machina feels like proof that Black storytelling and animation have never needed to imitate anime to belong in the conversation. The series succeeds because it embraces the long-standing relationship between Black culture and animation, forging something that feels wholly original, deeply personal, and excitingly new. The world would be all the better for spending more time in it with a second season, should that ever happen.
Bass X Machina is streaming on Netflix.
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