Shinichiro Watanabe’s New Anime Isn’t Groundbreaking, But It’s Still Cool As Hell
Cue jazz saxophones.
The problem with making something as impossibly cool and undeniably revolutionary as Cowboy Bebop is that, well, it’s borderline impossible to top it. And that’s what anime legend Shinichirō Watanabe has been trying to do in the quarter decade since Cowboy Bebop has been off the air. His succeeding productions have been remixes of varying degrees of the iconic 1998 anime series — some more successful than others. But they’ve been remixes nonetheless, and Lazarus, his new anime in collaboration with John Wick’s Chad Stahelski, is no different. But damn it, if it isn’t cool as hell.
Set in the near-future of 2052, Lazarus centers around a miracle painkiller called Hapna, created by the reclusive Dr. Skinner. Hapna is not your ordinary painkiller, it’s believed to be able to even heal emotional and mental pain. It instantly becomes the most popular pharmaceutical on the market and starts to supersede the use of alcohol and other party narcotics. But soon after introducing Hapna, Dr. Skinner mysteriously vanishes, only to resurface three years later with a chilling announcement: everyone who has ever taken Hapna has only one month left to live. But he leaves one nugget of hope for humanity: if anyone finds him before those 30 days are up, they can get the vaccine.
Lazarus speeds through this plot set-up and exposition very quickly, in an opening voice-over and montage that plays at the beginning of each episode. And before you can get your bearings, it drops you in the middle of this near-future utopian world, which has already started to descend into chaos. It’s a little baffling that a show will start off with this kind of narrative whiplash, but it sort of embodies exactly Watanabe and his team’s whole approach: who cares about the story? Let’s get to the cool stuff.
The gang’s all here.
And get to it Lazarus does. Skinner’s announcement is relayed to maximum security prisoner Axel Gilberto by Hersch, a high-powered woman who is assembling a team of fellow outlaws to track down Dr. Skinner and his supposed vaccine. But Axel is a maverick and parkour enthusiast (and our obvious Spike Spiegel equivalent in this show), and immediately breaks out of prison — only to be captured by his future teammates. There’s Christine, the requisite femme fatale; Leland, a teen pickpocket; Eleina, a cute young hacker; and Doug, a stoic former investigator who takes an immediate dislike to Axel’s reckless ways.
But like every bushy-haired hero of his show, Axel gets the full glamor treatment from Watanabe. The show’s opening action sequence — in which Axel smoothly breaks out of prison and parkours his way across the city — is breathtaking, lent a crisp fluidity by animation house Mappa. But as Axel soars through the air and effortlessly fights legions of prison guards, you do start to wonder where Chad Stahelski’s input comes in. Stahelski supposedly directs the action sequences, and while they’ve got a terrifically balletic wuxia-like quality to them, they still feel weightless — which somewhat goes hand-in-hand with the anime style, especially that of Watanabe’s. Still, if you’ve got the director of John Wick coming in to lend a hand, you’d hope there would be a little more crunch to those bones.
[Hacker voice] I’m in.
But regardless, Lazarus looks great and sounds great (thanks to a jazzy electronic soundrack by Kamasi Washington, Floating Points and Bonobo), even if it doesn’t all hold together narratively. But sometimes you just want to see a wild-haired hero parkour across rooftops, accompanied by a colorful gang of misfits. And in its later episodes (critics received five of the season’s 13 episodes), a more coherent plot does start to come together, as a twisty conspiracy begins to emerge around Dr. Skinner.
Lazarus is no Cowboy Bebop, and that’s fine. But it’s proving to be an intriguing, if imperfect, new riff on the formula that Watanabe perfected with his first space-set noir. And hopefully it’ll only grow more promising from here.
