Anime legend Shinichirō Watanabe is back with Lazarus, and haunted by Cowboy Bebop

Everyone has had the same question for Shinichirō Watanabe since the late 1990s: When can we get more Cowboy Bebop? Or at least more sci-fi action anime resembling his work on Cowboy Bebop, a show that helped the entire anime industry cross over as a global industry? But after meeting up with the anime titan in the lead-up to the 2024 New York Comic Con, it seems there’s no quicker way to drive Watanabe away from a project than to tell him it’s what he should do. Which may be why it took over 25 years for him to return to the genre in earnest, with next year’s Lazarus. 

The 13-episode series, which premieres on Adult Swim in 2025, is Watanabe’s grimmest look at the future. In Lazarus, it’s the year 2052, and the world is in an unfathomable era of peace thanks in major part to Hapna, a popular painkiller created by neuroscientist Dr. Skinner. When Skinner goes missing, no one really bats an eye — that’s the beauty of Hapna! — but three years into the drug’s rise, the scientist returns with an announcement: Hapna’s hidden side effect is that, three years after consumption, it’s fatal. The only cure is with Skinner at his unknown location. If humanity is truly worth saving, the maniacal scientist says, then someone will have to find him in the 30 days until Hapna’s lethal component takes effect. 

Watanabe bristles anytime Cowboy Bebop comes up — at the end of the day, he “doesn’t appreciate” the comparisons he anticipates hearing — but the show’s DNA is all over Lazarus. At the center of the drama is Axel, an acrobatic master criminal recruited by a shadow organization to hunt down Skinner. In the premiere, Axel spends most of his time outrunning (and out-parkouring) his eventual employers, all to a jazzy soundtrack courtesy of Kamasi Washington, Bonobo, and Floating Points. But Watanabe says reviving what many might see as the Cowboy Bebop spirit had little to do with his impulse to return to sci-fi action. Instead, his work on Blade Runner: Black Out 2022 in 2017 compelled him to find an idea that will keep him in the grounded-but-futuristic territory — where he could also have some fun.

“I would’ve done [more Bebop] if it felt right,” Watanabe told Polygon via an interpreter. “But I didn’t feel that way. It’s my belief that having someone tell you to do sci-fi action or something else is not the way to make it great. I have to feel like I want to do it. There are no shows in my filmography that I didn’t want to do.”

Watanabe attributes some of the Cowboy Bebop-ness of Lazarus to Keiko Nobumoto, the late writer of Bebop who worked with the director to develop the story and scripts for his new series. But when Nobumoto died in 2021, Watanabe was left to finish the work himself — and work out his anxieties in the process. The director says the idea of lethal Hapna drug was directly inspired by the opioid crisis, while the existential threat of climate change plays a major role in where the story goes (but he wasn’t about to spoil anything). 

While the director is no stranger to sci-fi, his vision for Lazarus is focused on reality. When he marks the series as a return to sci-fi action, even in the wake of Space Dandy and Carole & Tuesday, Watanabe stresses over and over his need for this story to reflect real life as it would be in 2052. To ensure the action had gravity, the director hired John Wick mastermind Chad Stahelski to consult on the fight-heavy sequences. Watanabe was exacting when it came to Axel’s parkour, swearing that even when the rapscallion is hopping off walls or scaling skyscraper-sized cranes, that would all be doable for an extremely nimble person. The production also turned to Formosa Group, the sound effects company behind Dune, Top Gun: Maverick, and Game of Thrones, for a Hollywood-level design that would bring a bit of grit to the soundscape. Watanabe’s whole goal was to go just a little bit further into the “real” than most action anime.

“If a character is injured in a scene in animation, sometimes they would get better very quickly, things like that — they don’t stay unwell,” Watanabe said. “So [in Lazarus] when a character is injured in one episode, in the next episode, he or she will be in bed the whole time.”

Lazarus gets its name from the English Britpop band The Boo Radleys’ 1992 single of the same name, which plays as the show’s credits theme. It’s a trippy distorted classic of the “shoegaze” genre, with lyrics that glide through the experience of expanding consciousness. It was a song Watanabe had in his head long before hiring his trio of musicians, though he still relied heavily on Floating Points’ ultra-kinetic beats in order to choreograph Axel’s daring escapes. The free-flowing mixture of tone and ideas is actually what makes Lazarus feel like pure Watanabe. If you think of that as Cowboy Bebop-ish, fine.

“I wouldn’t mind people getting into the show because of my work, as someone who did Cowboy Bebop,” he says, “but I believe after seeing Lazarus, people will end the feeling that it’s totally its own thing.”

Lazarus does not have an official release date, but Watanabe confirms all 13 episodes are complete and set to premiere sometime in 2025.