Shinichiro Watanabe on the star-studded collaborations of ‘Lazarus’

The list goes on, and far back in Watanabe’s career. His debut as a director was on the mega-franchise Macross, on the OVA Macross Plus (written by the late, great screenwriter Keiko Nobumoto, who would work across many of Watanabe’s projects)—known for its particular combination of big robots and pop stars. So it feels appropriate that Lazarus—which features names like jazz saxophonist Kamasi Washington and electronic artists Bonobo and Floating Points—is borne from Watanabe’s love of music and the people who make it. It also feels right that as I speak to him on a video call, he sits, sunglasses on, in front of a wall covered, from floor to ceiling, in records.

Beyond the incredible, diverse soundtrack, music influenced Lazarus in deeper ways too, going back to the show’s very conception. “The biggest inspiration [on Lazarus] was the opioid crisis that's currently going on,” Watanabe tells me. “And a lot of my favorite musicians have passed away because of it—I was shocked when Prince passed away due to opioids as well.”

Lazarus reflects the crisis through its fictional drug Hapna, created by an enigmatic scientist named Dr Skinner. It seems to be a cure for everything, from disease to mental health issues, and as one character says, even comes with a bit of a high. Three years after the drug’s introduction to the public, Skinner makes an announcement: Everyone who has taken the drug will die in 30 days. And that’s a majority of the Earth’s population. Effectively, the end is nigh.

The legality of Hapna is the important part—how in the eyes of the government, the misuse of such substances is perfectly fine as long as it does them good business. “What’s even crazier is that he passed away due to prescription medicine that he received from his doctor,” Watanabe points out about Prince’s death. “So that's kind of the final straw, where I started thinking, ‘This is a big problem,’ and that I need to start talking about it.”

This is just the setup, as the rest of the show concerns the chase for Skinner in order to find a cure for Hapna, and prevent the end of humanity. Enter the show’s eponymous Lazarus team: a group of charismatic social outcasts with the skills to find and catch Skinner, hastily assembled out of desperation. Each episode has the team—Axel, Doug, Leland, Chris, Elena—follow Skinner’s trail, stumbling into various international misadventures along the way.

The narration, which opens each episode, picks through the personal reasons as to how the use of a market drug might balloon into an epidemic. Under atmospheric music from Bonobo, each member of the main cast talks through their first encounter with the drug, and why they either needed to take it or why they simply tried it. The common thread is how the miracle painkiller became used for other things. Leland talks about it plainly as a recreational drug, while Chris mentions the temptation of using it to avoid grief and heartbreak. The quiet hacker, Elena, speaks about her depression and how it led her to Hapna and she ended up buying it at an artificially inflated price. All of this misappropriation, it seems, is costing people their humanity.

While jazz is still important to the sound of Lazarus, with Washington composing some exciting, catchy numbers for both the opening credits and some action sequences, Watanabe wanted to create something that felt more “futuristic and electronic.” The director says that he had recently become a fan of Floating Points and Bonobo, and reached out to them. Their versatility as producers is what drew them to him, as “they’re not producers or musicians that can only make dance music, they have a much wider range.” Watanabe clarifies: “for Bonobo, he has this melancholic atmosphere to all his tracks, which was a big plus,” as evidenced by the use of the artist’s music at the top of every episode. “And Floating Points, he has these more like modern instrumentalizations in his tracks, which fits the series very well,” he adds.

Of course, Lazarus needed other, different sounds. And for that, Watanabe reached out to Washington. “He's known for his sax and it's very emotional and has a lot of soul to it,” Watanabe explains. This manifests in the way Lazarus explores a world where people seem to have given up on feeling, and Washington’s work feels like a soul breaking free—especially when tied into action sequences featuring Axel, who feels most alive when he’s on the run.

Speaking of action, the international collaborations don’t end with the music. Another high-profile name involved with Lazarus is Chad Stahelski, the director of the John Wick series and a former stuntman. He and his studio 87eleven contributed to the show’s action design, exchanging ideas for sequences and creating live-action references for the animators to play off of.

Watanabe, with some amusement, tells me how when he first encountered John Wick, it was through word of mouth from staff members at conventions in the United Kingdom and Belgium—all asking if he’d seen it, though it wasn’t out in Japan at the time. “And then I went to a convention in America, and the staff there are like, ‘Oh, I have a movie recommendation for you!’ And I go, ‘Okay I know, it's John Wick,’” he says with a laugh. Watanabe fondly notes that it reminded him of his own work, and says that “Chad was a big fan of Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo, and he got very inspired by watching those, so my hunch that they were similar to my previous works was actually spot on.” Even with those similarities, the director highlights how having a team who “basically think about action sequences like day in, day out, 24/7,” was invaluable. “He added action sequences that we couldn't have come up with by ourselves. There’s no one better than them,” says Watanabe. With a laugh, he adds that when talking to the team, “sitting across the table from them, they could come up with 20 different ways to kill a person with a pencil. We could only think of two or three.”

The influence of Stahelski’s action style, as seen in John Wick, is immediately apparent, but also right at home with Watanabe’s usual style. While Watanabe’s series embrace the expressive freedom of animation, these works have also been very conscientious about creating a sense of weight in their action choreography. Stahelski and 87eleven’s work, particularly on John Wick, is often about leveraging such weight and momentum.

All of these different personalities contributing to the making of Lazarus—highlighting the importance of idiosyncratic artists and their specific contributions in the making of animation and giving it a “soul”—also come into play in the show’s themes. One particularly striking way is in how it addresses AI, the antithesis to such collaboration in how it seeks to eliminate participation, removing the creators from creation (if that sounds contradictory, that’s because the very concept of “AI art” is). Watanabe has long been skeptical of the idea of AI acting as a replacement for people as far back as in Macross Plus (in which a computer writes pop songs, and then tries to destroy the world), and again in his previous show Carole & Tuesday, in which a pair of singer-songwriters try to make real music again in a setting where algorithms do the work for everyone.

In the fourth episode of Lazarus, he tackles this again, through a misogynist, lecherous DJ and a businessman who both use AI to make their money—a dependency which eventually backfires on them. “So of course, there's a reason we had the DJ play not a very positive role,” Watanabe laughs. Thinking back to how his previous show considered AI, he adds, “The answer that Carole & Tuesday came to was that it's more fun not using AI to come up with music. That basically summed up my opinion: if we leave it all to AI, what fun is left for us to be having?” It all comes back to the feeling of life on autopilot, which the fictional Hapna creates for the characters, taking shortcuts past any difficulties, at the cost of feeling something real.

Even with all these heady topics, Watanabe stresses that, “in no means is this a social commentary anime—some parts of it speak on the topic, but it is all entertainment.” Each episode of Lazarus has a sequence which emphatically underlines that entertainment value through relentlessly paced action and a playful sense of humor. You can feel that in the soundtrack too—starting from a place of mourning, before expanding that grief to the numerous ways in which humanity is destroying itself, inaction on climate change being near the top of that long list. But Watanabe also tackles it with a playful, if still morbid, sense of humour, wondering if pop artists might do album release cycles at the end of the world. Even in the face of the end, he’s thinking about how the music will sound.