‘Lazarus’ Creator Shinichiro Watanabe Discusses the Daredevil Action of His New Adult Swim Anime

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Lazarus, which debuts April 5th on Adult Swim, is director Shinichiro Watanabe’s first TV series since Carole & Tuesday (2019). It’s good to have him back. Lazarus is an original adventure, but fans will detect echoes of Cowboy Bebop (1998), Samurai Champloo (2004) and Terror In Resonance (2014). Animators and fans should plan on watching it more than once: Lazarus is an intriguing, complicated series that requires more than one viewing to catch all the details.

Set in 2052, Lazarus centers on a cocky anti-hero: Axel, whose favorite activity is breaking out of jail. Although his initial crime was apparently minor, his sentence was doubled every time he escaped. He’s now serving more than 800 years. Axel shares some traits with Spike Spiegel and Mugen, but he’s a unique, charismatic individual.

He’s freed from prison to join a mysterious squad of five agents known as “Lazarus.” Three years earlier, the brilliant neurologist Dr. Skinner released Hapna, a fantastic pain-killer that began as a miracle cure but quickly became a worldwide addiction. The drug had a built-in half-life: In 30 days everyone who’s taken it — which includes most of world’s population — will die. Lazarus represents a last, desperate attempt to find Dr. Skinner and a cure. In just 30 days.

Watanabe talked about his most recent work in a Zoom interview in late March. The series began when he imagined a character with a distinctive style of movement. “I’ve been in the business for a long time, and I think one of the key aspects of animation is movement —interesting movement,” he said. “After seeing some people do parkour, I thought, ‘That looks very appealing. I would like to incorporate that into one of my works,’ which led to the idea for Axel.”

“Parkour is very dangerous: If people slip, they can fall to their deaths,” he continued. “Working from that line of thought, I wanted a character who put himself into dangerous situations and became more of a daredevil. I’d also heard that Tom Cruise loves doing dangerous stunts: I wanted to make Axel look like a very young version of Tom Cruise.”

The fight choreography in Lazarus looks different from Watanabe’s previous action series because Chad Stahleski, the director of John Wick and its sequels provided input. “I watched John Wick, and it was fantastic,” Watanabe said. “It looked very new compared to all the old action movies. It also reminded me of my own work. I wanted to find out why, so I reached out to to Chad — and Chad said he was a big fan of Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo. No wonder I felt some similarities!”

Stahleski offered to help stage the action sequences in Lazarus. Watanabe didn’t think he could afford to accept, but Stahleski told him not to worry about the cost. Watanabe’s work had inspired him: He was happy to do something in return. He and his crew would choreograph fight scenes; Watanabe and his artists would study the videos and chose elements they could heighten and stylize. Some changes were required to fit a different medium and a different character.

Axel doesn’t dispatch enemies with a bullet to the head the way Keanu Reeves’ John Wick does. Agile and wiry, Axel has a unique style of movement that reflects his parkour talents. When he comes into conflict with prison guards or thugs, he doesn’t repeat Spike’s staccato martial arts moves or Mugen’s breakdance spins and kicks. Axel has a gymnast’s flexibility and sense of balance, which enable him to to out-maneuver his enemies with menacing grace.

In the fifth episode, Axel fights four murderous security guards in a moving elevator. The sequence is tour de force of understated violence, animated with exceptional panache. “For that sequence, we had one animator who spent half a year working on it, “ Watanabe said. “She was very careful about the movement and tempo and speed of the entire sequence. As a director, I don’t really like to get into the nitty gritty of individual actions. I like to showcase the individual animator who worked on a sequence and let their style shine through. Of course, if it feels too fast or there’s no reality to the action, I’ll step in and make changes.”

Axel and his fellow Lazarus agents’ search for the elusive Dr. Skinner takes them down mean streets that may remind viewers of the two-bit towns on Mars and Ganymede in Cowboy Bebop. In a previous interview, Watanabe said, “I wanted to create a futuristic world, but a world that people actually live in. Only movie characters could live in the worlds they depict in Star Wars and other science-fiction films. I wanted to make a world where people live and breathe. Even if it’s just a shot of an empty sidewalk, there should be cigarette butts or some other visible traces that people actually walk through that setting.”

In Lazarus, he adds a strong social commentary on the growing inequality of wealth: “This time, I made the areas that are rich very clean, especially for the tower in the middle of Babylonia City. It’s very rich, so it’s very, very clean. The areas that are poor are very, very dirty, like slums.”

Lazarus is rooted in Watanabe’s response to the opioid crisis and to the deaths of favorite musicians from prescription painkillers. It also includes a recurring theme in Japanese cinema, animated and live action: The threat of a rogue technology that the government seems powerless to control. “For me, it’s less about science being out of control and more about things in general being out of control,” Watanabe concluded. “What I believe is most dangerous right now is AI, and it’s not being controlled. That problem figures into Episode #6…”

At the end of the interview, Watanabe reiterated his statement that all his films take place in the same universe — so Axel just might be a descendent of Mugen’s and/or an ancestor of Spike’s.

 

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Lazarus premiered on Adult Swim’s Toonami on April 5. It is produced by MAPPA and Sola Entertainment and airs in Japan on TV Tokyo.

The series airs on Adult Swim in English, with new episodes available the next day on Max. English-language encore airings will debut every Thursday at midnight beginning April 10. Episodes in Japanese with English subtitles will debut in the U.S. on Adult Swim and Max 30 days after their English-language premiere.