LAZARUS

DESCRIPTION

CAST

REVIEWS

• 

  jahver

  20/100
  Shinichiro Watanabe's 3.0+1.0 Moment

  Shinichiro Watanabe was one of those guys who was impossible to criticize for years. When you’re the name people most commonly associate with a show as lauded as Cowboy Bebop fans are gonna be ride-or-die for you regardless of the quality of your successive projects. You can argue that Bebop isn’t perfect, and I’d agree with you, but it outshines practically anything coming out these days thanks to Watanabe’s direction and writers like Keiko Nobumoto at the helm. Bebop’s understanding of homage, Champloo’s anachronisms, and Space Dandy’s reverence towards of the previous 40-something years of anime all go to show that Watanabe’s reverence towards whatever he was paying tribute to was enough to help a show stand on its own despite the peaks and valleys that may be there. Carole and Tuesday was Watanabe’s 3.0 moment and people still overlook its obnoxiously glaring flaws on the grounds that the non-humorous musical performances are great. Lazarus on the other hand is his Thrice Upon a Time, and you honestly couldn't get something this bad if you force-fed a script writing algorithm the last decade's worth of capeshit and MSNBC broadcasts.

  The way Lazarus presents itself is as bleak, sterile and spiritually vacant as the setting. If Bebop was style before substance (not indication a lack of the latter or surplus of the former) then Lazarus is no style and no substance. It’s an unwelcoming range of greys, blues and dull browns compared to Cowboy Bebop’s prismatic spectrum. There’s no warmth to the color palette, which while mostly being an unfortunate side effect of the transition to digital animation, doesn’t excuse how muted and lifeless everything seems. This is supposed to be an episodic ensemble storyline but it feels like you’re watching a Marvel movie. The main cast even goes as far as to compare themselves to The Avengers once or twice, which makes all too much sense watching something that presents itself like a Joss Whedon flick instead of anything serious or intellectually present. The direction and animation are no better, in fact the only time Lazarus channels Watanabe’s old energy is the fourth episode with enough competent direction to emphasize Chad Stahelski’s technically impressive fight choreography (https://www.sakugabooru.com/post/show/281409, https://www.sakugabooru.com/post/show/281412, https://www.sakugabooru.com/post/show/281410, all look good if you ignore the jarring shifts in fluidity, detrimental camerawork and garish digital backgrounds). Episode 11 has a decently put together fight scene that also suffers from the inconsistent production. The audio mixing, voice acting and OST are fine, though, and I really like the instrumental opening. It surprisingly manages to emulate the style of Tank! without being a total rehash, which is sadly not the case for every other aspect of Lazarus.

  Cowboy Bebop’s most glowing accomplishment was the writing teams’ ability to draft the foundations of credible characters with credible conflicts and then build upon them over the course of 26 episodes and a movie. Every ally, antagonist, or passerby Spike encounters is iconic in a nostalgic sort of way. The chatbots tasked with writing Lazarus might’ve been too comfortable in conformity, however, and opted to ride the coattails of Bebop and hope people like watching the same thing again, but shallower and with less feeling. I had to look up the names of the Lazarus crew just to try and remember their role in the show. Axel is just Spike without the regrets, the drive or the connections. Doug is just Jet if he wasn’t a philosophical asskicker. Christine is just Faye if she was a completely unlikeable bitch all the time without any of Faye’s charm, wit or sympathetic tenets. Leland is Canadian or something. Eleina is…fuc, I don’t even have anything to say on her, she’s just there. Ed’s equivalent would probably be Popcorn Wizard, a hacker who exclusively speaks in Katy teh penguin of d00m-tier dialogue. You’ll want to put your head through a wall every time she’s onscreen. There’s even a Vicious knockoff who shows up in the last third to try and form an emotional bridge between Lazarus and Bebop, which doesn’t work because he has about as much of a scarce connection to Axel as anyone else in his crew. If this show had another ten to twelve episodes maybe he'd be a compelling antagonist but that’d mean sitting through more of Lazarus.

  The MyAnimeList page doesn’t even have a complete character list so the front page where you’d usually find the main cast has bit parts like “Police Officer” or “Loan Shark” which is both hilarious and a tragic indictment of how much of a non-factor the characters are in this show. 13 episodes go by and you barely learn anything about Team Lazarus or feel anything about them which is astounding because Bebop managed to get me to in less than half that time. These guys are trying to save the world together and by episode twelve they still feel like colleagues whose relationships begin and end at the water cooler.

  Lazarus also has a plot, surprisingly, which I think the writers forgot because absolutely nothing happens for 90% of the show’s runtime. Nearly every single episode ends with the team back at square one with maybe a shred of evidence towards the location of the guy who wants to give everyone on earth the vaxx. Because that’s the running storyline, even though most of the show is pointless sidequests building up to character moments that never happen. Dr. Skinner made a miracle drug that cures all pain and disease, got every single person on the planet to take it, announced it’s gonna kill them all in two more weeks like a /pol/ schizoposter and then dipped. The problem is that there’s no urgency. Even after Skinner’s announcement we don’t see any social unrest, no riots, no television debates, no internet shitposting, nothing. We’re just told the whole world is kinda on edge and that's really it. It takes THIRTEEN EPISODES for the team to go “Hey, isn’t Skinner a bigger deal than whatever we’re doing right now?” There’s no before or after, the whole world seems to be living in some kind of equilibrium of apathy but if that’s intentional it’s never actually demonstrated in ways becoming of an intelligent writer.

  And if you thought the show would spend any time telling the pretentious mass murderer off, you’d be wrong, because apparently this show was written by fucking Dan Harmon or something. I swear there’s a corny speech every episode about how humans are le bad because of war or racism or climate change. Episode 7 had the most eye-rolling instance of this where one of the characters states that “the last beautiful place on earth is only like that because there’s no humans” because there’s water and trees and stuff despite the fact that they were literally a minute away from occupied civilization. The ending of the show even goes as far as to completely vindicate Skinner and his ideology. I know Watanabe’s always been a bit of a progressive type but this hysterical neolib fatalism isn’t his style. Carole & Tuesday’s obnoxious showboating and political caricatures look tasteful compared to these WEF-sponsored diatribes. Lazarus’ moral barometer is on the same level as those childfree millennial couples to brag about how they “hate those breeders, man” because having kids destroys the environment or causes racism, or whatever insane notions of moral grandstanding you can think of. If you wanna own the chuds you made up in your head write something that doesn’t make you look like a shallow, immature misanthrope. I don’t watch anime to listen to reddit-tier haranguing and neither does any self-respecting human being.

  The narrative’s self-righteous moralizing crumbles when you consider how it fails to reasonably convey any sort of justification for it, or any meaningful solution for that matter. Episode 1 begins with Skinner’s plan being put into action. There’s no glimpses of the world before his announcement, everyone who took his miracle drug reveling away in their newfound carelessness, no sign of the underlying problems with the world, we’re just thrown right into it. Where’s the conflict, where’s the prejudice, where’s the indifference? How would there even be any in such a racially harmonious world? It’s practically utopia compared to Bebop’s setting. The worst you get is the occasional government hitman or a couple one-off villains being sex pests being menacing towards the female cast, but they’re more like ideological punching bags than real antagonists. (Side note, making the rapey cretin of the week a Wall Street jerkoff or an AI-touting Silicon Valley techbro doesn’t make your hackish social commentary any more insightful.) And when characters start spouting monologues about racism or the struggles of being transgender it feels like lipservice more than anything else. Am I even supposed to care when the entire world is at stake? It doesn’t feel like it. Every single character in this show would rather be off doing something else of talking about whatever social cause the script guys were incensed about that week.

  Did I mention this show is predictable? Because it is to an insulting degree. Lazrus doesn't know when to show and when to tell, and it does both in the most infuriating ways imaginable. You’ll figure out every turn of events an episode before Team Lazarus manages to combine their 5 brain cells and get anything accomplished. It takes them a month to find Skinner when the audience already knows he’s off larping as a hobo. The final plot twist regarding Skinner’s drug is staggeringly obvious to anyone with the most surface-level knowledge of The Bible. The final episode convolutes what little we’ve already learned to try and turn it into some big “Gotcha!” moment and make Skinner look smarter than he really is but it falls flat.

  I can’t make heads of tails of Lazarus. This show is a piece of trash and I feel sorry for everyone who wasted time making it and writing it. What was anyone involved in its creation expecting us to see in it? A pretentious, half-assed spiritual sequel to Cowboy Bebop without any of the soul and none of the passion where everything is explained through flashbacks and infodumps and none of the characters seem to care about anyone or anything going on around them until the last few minutes of the show? At least two-thirds of the show can be described as “nothing happens”. You could watch only the first and last episode and you’d have the same exact experience as watching the entire thing. The characters are lame, unlikeable retreads of better ones from a better show, the message is so far removed from reality it sends me into a schizophrenic episode trying to figure out what any of this was trying to say and the production isn’t enough to justify watching outside of AMVs. Maybe Watanabe's at fault or maybe he's innocent in this whole affair. For all I know the Toonami execs could've pigeonholed him into making something more generic. I can tell there were promising paths he wanted to explore, that the writers took as an opportunity to build around their pseudointellectual rambling. Everything that happens in Lazarus is in service of faux-socially conscious moralizing that’s naïve at best and outright ignorant at worst, timewasting garbage plots that go nowhere, idiotic navelgazing hackish bullshit. This isn’t anime, it’s cynical westernized slop pretending to be something it hasn’t earned the right to be. This isn't anime, it's more cultural detritus courtesy of Hollywood.

  Continue on AniList
• 

  melamuna

  40/100
  A Pretentious, Passion-Less Corporate Imitation of Watanabe’s Previous Works

  ---

  Shinichirō Watanabe is deemed one of the most respected anime directors currently. Once he’s on the director’s chair—or in other projects that he’s attached to—it automatically becomes one of the most pristine, unique anime, due to his unique direction that went against the waves of norms. He creates a world that blends the familiarity from other genres, while injecting his personal flair—particularly how he structures characters and his prowess in music production. We’ve seen this through his other famous works such as Cowboy Bebop, Terror in Resonance, and Samurai Champloo (My personal favorite). It is due to these qualities that audiences love Watanabe’s work, and a certain quality that has stood against time.

  Hence, when Adult Swim and MAPPA declared that they’ll release a brand new anime with Watanabe on the seat—along with various western talents such as Chad Stahelski (Director of the John Wick Franchise)—it has become one of the most anticipated anime of the year. Unfortunately, it had fumbled. ***

  Lazarus is an anime that follows various mercenaries looking for Dr. Skinner—a renowned scientist that went missing. In a world building sense, it is absolutely intriguing. The bleak display of the world (especially in the context of the certain “substance” in which the series revolves its lore into) is displayed in an interesting manner, creating an interesting critique and philosophy of a modern dystopian world, in addition to its mystery goose chase. Another highlight—and the show’s main attraction—is its unique action sequences in the anime field, with fluid, dynamic hand-to-hand combat, along with parkour sequences giving it one of the most adrenaline-filled, well-choreographed action sequences in anime in recent times. But alas, that's the extent of praise I can give to this anime. ***

  To put things more bluntly, this anime felt passion-less, and there are many reasons for it. For instance, it does not have that distinctly captivating world building Watanabe is known for. Everything felt familiar with moments inspired from other Watanabe’s works, and famous films in recent history, but in these sequences, nothing new was added that made it distinct from the rest. Even the world that it tries to build and its message it preaches to us felt disingenuous, and the urgency the series presents does not show on screen, but rather was only brought in monotonous exposition dialogues. Not only that, it provides a lazy direction with how it reveals its revelations, either through cheap expositions, or viewing the events from afar, or a mix of both. As if the characters didn't really need to be there since the events can progress point-on-point without them anyways like they're just filler nuisance.

  And speaking of characters in the series, they are barely interesting to follow. They have their own quirks that can give a bit of personality with them, but they felt like they’re written just to fulfill a stereotypical role in ensemble cast type of action series like these. We barely get to interact at an interpersonal level, or a proper heart-to-heart motivation between these characters in doing their cause, but instead, they're having their own solo realizations and dramatic moments, whist the rest are just bystanders,—barely any memorable cohesion with these characters (other than the ones that were delivered in an uninspiring dialogue), and if the series does attempt to be, it gets overshadowed by another sequence that's happening simultaneously, or the delivery is half-baked.

  There are moments in Lazarus, but the journey to get those moments is a tedious slow-burn with a reward that doesn't fully satisfy the viewer, as if it feels like the series was supposed to be a 24 episode series that had to be condensed down in order to fit the needs of a corporate entity. For such talent behind this anime, and the huge potential this series proposes, watching it feels like the names behind this project is just a facade of a marketing ploy. Lazarus feels like it's directed by a committee, asking to copy the best elements of previous Watanabe works, create an interesting idea, and mish-mash them all together without wovening the threads—creating a jumbled mess of an anime. ***

  __Conclusion__

  For all the divisive opinions this anime got, it is safe to say that the anime does have an captivating plot that tingles the thoughts of viewers, but you are only left with your imagination to expand the world and deepen its lore. Lazarus only gave you the framework of a potentially amazing series that’s crushed by a premise and philosophy that I wished was given more time to explore. ***

  Continue on AniList
• 

  0215MADman

  68/100
  Lazarus is painfully okay. Good action, great music, but with writing this uninteresting, what are we even doing here?

  I've been defending Adult Swim for a long time. And contrary to whatever your first reaction to that sentence or this entire review is, I'm still going to. But I am not the same Adult Swim fan that I was in 2018. Simply because, well, Adult Swim isn't the same as it was in 2018. Toonami certainly isn't. Even with cable ratings declining by truckloads, Adult Swim remained the only cable network that still gave a damn. That ended up becoming a double edged sword, evidenced in 2023 when it overtook Cartoon Network for number of hours on the air. Cartoon Network is in an even worse shape but I'm getting off-topic. My point is that I'm not watching Adult Swim like I used to. I didn't watch Lazarus on Adult Swim, I watched it on HBO Max. My interest in watching anime on Toonami is fading. Toonami is a gateway drug but I took that drug a decade ago. Honestly, the only reason I even watched Lazarus was because my friend really wanted to. If I was on my own, I probably wouldn't have gotten around to it.

  I've seen every Adult Swim original anime except for Blade Runner: Black Lotus (or the Rick and Morty one if that counts). Lazarus isn't the best of these shows, nor is it the worst. If I were to rank them, Lazarus would be in the middle. But I'm not going to rank them because I don't think that's the problem. When I finished Lazarus, I wasn't thinking "Wow this was easily one of the weaker Shinichiro Watanabe shows", I'm thinking "I am sick of these Adult Swim original anime all feeling like the same damn show". I can't explain it but a Shinichiro Watanabe series should not have the same art direction as Ninja Kamui and Shenmue. Is it a Sola Entertainment thing? I hope not but I'm inclined to believe so.

  Let's actually talk about Lazarus on the off chance anyone reading this doesn't know or care about Adult Swim. The plot of Lazarus is simple: in the near future, a Turkish scientist named Dr. Skinner releases a painkiller called "Hapna" which I think is how you spell it. Hapna is a perfect pain reliever so everyone takes it and everyone is happy and free and clubbing and shit. Three years later, Dr. Skinner comes out of hiding and reveals that Hapna is poisonous and everyone who took it will die 3 years afterwards. Enter Lazarus: a team of five secret agents who have one month to find the elusive Dr. Skinner and beg him to make a cure before the first people who took Hapna will start dying.

  The series does not do any dive into how Hapna worked and why everyone took it. That I'll let slide because let's face it all that matters is that "everyone starts dying in 30 days unless we find this guy", Hapna only exists to answer why or how everyone dies. Here's my problem: very early on I became convinced that the plot twist was going to be that Dr. Skinner was lying about Hapna being a ticking time bomb. I'm not spoiling whether or not that's true because by the end I didn't know which would be better. Either it's real and he makes the cure and everything goes back to normal, or it's not real and it was a giant waste of the planet's time.

  Alright so the premise is flawed, so what? The show is actually a globe-trotting adventure of five secret agents, who cares why they're on their adventure? Okay then let's look at our five main characters. There's Axel, the cocky and brash lead who always gets in trouble but he's smooth and likable and that's all I got. No really that's all I got on all five. Without looking them up I don't even remember the names of the other four. I remember that Eleina is a hacker even if I had to copy/paste her name from Wikipedia. I do not remember what the other three did that made them unique. I can't tell you anything that you couldn't figure out by clicking on the characters and reading their descriptions. I don't care for Samurai Champloo, on a level similar to Lazarus actually, but Mugen was the arrogant loud mouth that acted before he thought. Jin was the calm and collected type that handled situations in a more stoic manner. And Fuu was the cute girl in search of the fabled Sunflower Samurai. I might be a little off on some of these, and they probably deserve better descriptions, but these are iconic characters because they're fun. You can put them in any situation and they would be fun. The characters in Lazarus at best have been done before. Axel is just Spike and Mugen again.

  With boring characters and an uninteresting premise (along with a plot that believe me goes nowhere), you can't blame anything else but the writing, something that admittedly we all probably should've seen coming from a hundred miles away. Cowboy Bebop by all accounts has strong writing but it's also got arguably the greatest main cast of characters in an original anime so comparing anything except I dunno Evangelion to it is a fool's errand. Samurai Champloo's writing is fine but that show is all about the mood. The direction and music are Samurai Champloo. Space Dandy doesn't give a shit about its story and it's all the better for it. At the time of this writing I haven't seen Kids on the Slope (but that's a manga adaptation) or Carole & Tuesday yet, and hey maybe Carole & Tuesday is awful but I'm not judging until I see it for myself. So the show that I think makes for the best comparison to Lazarus is Terror in Resonance, a flawed series that I love (that hey is also animated by MAPPA). That show is about two teenagers committing terrorist attacks while the police scramble to uncover both why and how to stop them. Its premise has similar problems to Lazarus, its writing is also all over the place, but it grabs your attention. When action is happening, you're watching. And that's because of a difference in genre. Terror in Resonance is a psychological thriller focused on its mystery. That's what it wants you to care about. Lazarus wants you to care about its action.

  Terror in Resonance is also a good comparison because I'm already seeing people say that Lazarus's problem is being 13 episodes. "If it was longer then the characters could get fleshed out more." I don't buy it. Because Lazarus does try to make you care for its characters. But it's all done to service the plot and nothing more. Lazarus doesn't need 26 episodes, it needs 13 episodes that are focused on getting us to care about its characters. Leland is the only character that I recognize this almost working in, but it's a wasted effort considering I didn't even remember his name before looking it up.

  It's sad because once you look past the fatal flaw of Lazarus's writing, the rest of the show is good. The direction is solid, the action choreography was worth getting Chad Stahelski. The episodes written by Dai Sato were fun. And of course, as a Watanabe show, the music is great. But it's hard to appreciate the direction when the writing is this much of a snoozefest. The best analogy I can make towards Lazarus is its opening, Vortex. The song is great, I have no complaints there, it's arguably the best damn thing about the show. But the visuals boil down to "birds flying, all five characters are falling like they're in the Mad Men intro making the same expression, they do some kicks, and then the opening ends". It's the shortest 90 seconds of my life. It's an opening that insists so much personality while exuding none.

  I'm not gonna lie, writing this review soured my feelings on Lazarus. I originally had like two paragraphs but that was it. The more I forced myself to write about Lazarus, the more I came to terms with how little I was taking away from the experience. Do I recommend Lazarus? Probably not. If you're a seasoned anime veteran, you know what yeah go ahead, it's not every day you get a new Watanabe anime. But remember at the beginning of this way too long review when I said that Toonami was my gateway drug? With Toonami's relevance as curators gone, there's no good resource for people that are interested in anime to find "what's good and worth checking out". It's either too simple or too elitist. I look at this medium and how I don't think the English-speaking world is doing a great job at making sure the classics remain classics for the next generation of English-speaking anime fans, and I can't bring myself to say "Yeah Lazarus was painfully okay but it's worth checking out". Dawg if you're still reading this wondering "Hmm is this for me?" then what are either of us doing? Why talk about Lazarus, a show that went in one ear and out the other, when we can be preserving the truly great shows both old and new? Okay I need to wrap this up, Lazarus is not worth an existential crisis.

  Look I have no ill will towards Jason DeMarco. The fact that we're getting original anime at all should be commended. Neither he nor Adult Swim are killing anime just because they're pumping out mediocrity. But either he needs to produce an original anime that doesn't feel like literally every single Toonami original anime we've seen so far or he needs to stop making anime for Toonami.

  Continue on AniList

SIMILAR ANIMES YOU MAY LIKE

• ANIME

  ActionCowboy Bebop
• ANIME

  ActionPSYCHO-PASS
• ANIME

  DramaZankyou no Terror
• ANIME

  ActionVivy: Fluorite Eye’s Song
• ANIME

  DramaID: INVADED
• ANIME

  ActionBaccano!
• ONA

  ActionCyberpunk: Edgerunners
• ONA

  ActionGREAT PRETENDER
• ANIME

  ActionAkudama Drive
• MOVIE

  ActionAKIRA
• ANIME

  ActionBANANA FISH
• ONA

  ActionSuper Crooks