Shinichirō Watanabe is ready to tell humanity something about itself with Lazarus

After some time away, Shinichirō Watanabe is jumping back into science fiction. Though each of the director’s original projects has spoken to his artistic sensibilities, Cowboy Bebop solidified him as a sci-fi visionary whose style and eclectic taste in music set him apart. Almost 30 years later, Cowboy Bebop is still regarded as one of the most iconic and influential anime series of the 20th century. But Watanabe’s desire to grow by trying new things led him away from telling stories about far-flung futures and toward projects like the historical action series Samurai Champloo and Kids on the Slope.

That same feeling is what brought him back to his roots and inspired him to dream up Lazarus — a new series premiering on Adult Swim in 2025 that enlists John Wick director Chad Stahelski for its action sequences.

Set in a future where most of the world’s population has begun using a new wonder drug called Hapna, Lazarus tells the story of what happens when the painkiller is revealed to be a time-delayed toxin that is guaranteed to kill. The revelation sets off a race to track down Hapna’s creator in hopes of stopping his plan to punish humanity for its self-destructive sins against the planet. But the situation also sets off a wave of panic and confusion as people come to grips with the idea of being killed by the very same thing that once seemed to be the key to their salvation.

When I recently sat down with Watanabe to talk about Lazarus, he told me that, as excited as he was to return to hard sci-fi, he wanted the series to feel like a heightened rumination on our own present-day reality. Lazarus, he explained, is a kind of fantasy — one that’s trying to make you think about how the present shapes the future.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How did the concept for Lazarus first come to you initially? What was on your mind as this story began coming into focus?

The image of Axel, our main protagonist, was actually what came first to me, and I had an impression about his physicality — how I wanted him to move through the world. I also knew that I wanted to do a story about humanity facing the end of the world. In the very first episode, our character Dough delivers a monologue that’s set to a montage of images, and a lot of what he’s saying is actually very close to what I’ve imagined at being how our world could fall apart.

What aspects of our own present-day society did you want to explore or unpack through this specific vision of the future you’ve created for the show?

When people think about the end of the world in fiction, usually the cause is some kind of war or maybe an alien invasion. But with this story, the collapse of everything begins with the creation of this new painkiller, Hapna. The general real-world opioid crisis was one of my bigger inspirations for this series, but also the fact that many of the musicians I love listening to ultimately died from drug overdoses. 

In the old days, you would hear about musicians overdosing on illegal street drugs, but over the years, you’ve seen more and more cases like Prince, for instance, who wind up dying while taking prescribed painkillers. Prince’s death still shocks me. I love hip-hop culture and rap as well, and unfortunately you’re seeing more of this kind of overdosing with younger artists.

What made you want to come back to sci-fi after being away from the genre for so long?

After Cowboy Bebop, I wanted to try something different genre-wise, which was how I ended up making Kids on the Slope and Carole & Tuesday. When I wound up working on Blade Runner Black Out 2022, it felt so good to come back to sci-fi, but because that was just a short, I still felt like I needed to find an opportunity to stretch those specific creative muscles.

I didn’t just want to repeat or rehash what I’d done with Cowboy Bebop, though, and that’s part of why I initially reached out to Chad Stahelski, who worked on the John Wick films. I thought that he was able to really update action sequences in a new way, and I wanted to bring that kind of energy to my next project.

Talk to me about collaborating with Chad.

When I first mentioned Chad’s name, a lot of people were skeptical about whether we would be able to find the time to collaborate because of how busy he is and how many people want to work with him. But I felt such a strong affinity for Chad’s approach to building action scenes, and so I still reached out. It turned out that he had seen and was a big fan of Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo, and he immediately said yes to coming onto Lazarus.

Chad’s team would do their own interpretation of fight scene choreography and send videos to us, and then we would study that footage to find different elements of the action that we wanted to incorporate into Lazarus. Obviously, live-action and animation are different mediums, so our process involved a lot of figuring out which aspects of the footage felt like things we could heighten and stylize. 

What was that process like?

Different episodes have different ways of incorporating Chad’s choreography. For the premiere, we were actually still in the early stages and we weren’t able to benefit from Chad’s input as much. And for episodes two and three, we created very short action sequences specifically to incorporate things we saw in the videos from Chad’s team. But for the fourth episode, we went with a much bigger set piece because at that point, we had really found our rhythm.

For some episodes, we gave them information about what kind of scene we wanted, and they would just go brainstorming. But in a lot of cases, before getting detailed instructions from us, Chad’s team would offer up their ideas, and we used quite a bit of those as well. It was a constant ongoing discussion between our teams, and that open communication was key to striking the right tone for Lazarus’ action. For instance, the John Wick movies’ fight scenes involve a lot of headshot kills, but that was a little too much for us because Axel isn’t really a killer the way John Wick himself is.

You mentioned earlier that Axel was the first piece of this story that came into focus for you. How did you envision him?

I don’t want you to get the wrong idea when I say this, but Axel was somewhat inspired by Tom Cruise. Axel thrives on danger and at times, it seems like he’s almost addicted to it. Lazarus features a lot of parkour because we wanted the action built around Axel to always feel as if one wrong move could lead to him falling. He’s risking his life, but that danger is something he gets off on — it makes him feel alive.

You’ve always been known for populating your worlds with diverse arrays of people, but there’s a pronounced multiculturalism to Babylonia City [one of the show’s important locations] that feels really distinct in the larger anime landscape. What was your thinking behind building a story around such a culturally diverse group of characters?

Whenever I’m thinking of the specific environments my characters will exist in, the most important thing is that the space feels real and like a place where people can actually move around in a realistic way. What I’ve always felt looking at other sci-fi depictions of the future is that often, they don’t have a sense of being truly lived-in, and that’s what I want to avoid. So for Babylonia City, my thinking was that a big, busy cityscape would lend itself to characters’ expressions of their personalities.

I always try to incorporate multicultural elements into my stories, I think, because they were such an important part of Blade Runner, which really stuck with me after I first saw it when I was young. Blade Runner’s multiculturalism — the cultural blending — was part of how the movie illustrated how society had changed in the future. I half expected the future to be more like that, which is funny to say today because the original film is set in 2019.

People will be able to hear Lazarus’ soundtrack for themselves, but what did the series sound like in your mind as you were thinking about the musical palettes you wanted to build for it?

With Cowboy Bebop, we used somewhat older jazz music to create a contrast with the story’s futuristic feel. But for Lazarus, I wanted to find a different kind of sound and feature more of the relatively recent music I’ve been listening to. 

Was there a specific song or songs that really crystallized the show for you?

This hasn’t been made public yet, but the end credits sequence features The Boo Radleys’ song “Lazarus,” which was really a huge inspiration for this series as a whole. I’m very interested to hear what they think of the show.

You talked about your process for collaborating on visuals, but what about for the music?

There was a lot of back and forth with that process as well. Typically for animation, you try to have all the music cues created and ready while the production is going on. We had a lot of discussions with our musical collaborators about the show and the specific kind of feeling we wanted to evoke from scene-to-scene, and the challenging thing about that process is always that the visuals we’re creating music for just aren’t entirely finished. They’re part way there, but the musician has to imagine something more complete to compose to. But then, when the visuals are finished, there might be requests for retakes or small adjustments that make the musical piece fit more cohesively.

There has been an increase in focus on the working conditions that make it harder and harder for illustrators and animators to thrive and cultivate sustainable careers. What’s your read on the current state of the industry? 

In a nutshell, the problem is that there are too many shows being made and there aren’t enough experienced animators to go around. Even for Lazarus, we weren’t able to get all of the experienced animators we needed domestically, so we had to bring in quite a few from overseas. With the first episode, there are many non-Japanese animators, especially for the action scenes.

Big picture, what do you think needs to really change in order for animators to get that kind of experience?

In order for an animator to really develop their skills, I think they need to be working on a project, and being able to focus solely on it. But more often than not, because of the sheer number of shows and films, many animators have to jump from one project to another, and really scramble to finish their work, and it’s not an environment that’s conducive to genuine artistic growth.

Going back to that first episode, the action scenes in the first half were drawn by a single animator, and another animator handled all of the action in the second half. They each had 50 shots to work on. That, to me, is the ideal way — to have someone who’s already good at action animation be able to focus on a substantial chunk of scenes. That’s how you grow. But so often in other animated projects, you see experienced animators limited to working on maybe two or three shots max, and the end product just isn’t as good.