Lazarus

In the year 2048, Dr. Deniz Skinner, a scientific genius dubbed second only to Einstein, developed the revolutionary painkiller Hapna. Being cheap with no reported side effects, the drug gained widespread acceptance, even though Skinner himself silently vanished one year after launching the drug. Everyone revelled in the heaven of relief and ecstasy provided by Hapna, but they would suddenly come crashing down to Earth. It is now 2052, and Skinner reappears, giving the shocking announcement that Hapna was designed to mutate into a lethal toxin, killing anyone who had consumed it. While he claims to have a cure, he will only hand it over if he is physically found within 30 days.

Axel Gilberto, a maverick youngster serving a sentence of 888 years in a high-security prison, is unwillingly recruited by a group calling themselves Lazarus. Composed of eccentric misfits, the group has only one task—to find Skinner. With no means to escape and their lives on the line, Lazarus begins the hunt to find Skinner before the countdown to the end of humanity ends.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Gilberto, Axel Main

Miyano, Mamoru Japanese

Christine Main

Uchida, Maaya Japanese

Eleina Main

Iwami, Manaka Japanese

Hadine, Douglas Main

Furukawa, Makoto Japanese

Leland Main

Uchida, Yuuma Japanese

Skinner, Deniz Supporting

Yamadera, Kouichi Japanese

Lindemann, Hersch Supporting

Hayashibara, Megumi Japanese

Police Officer Supporting

Volcano Ota Japanese

Inga Supporting

Uesaka, Sumire Japanese

Jill Supporting

Nakamura, Yuuichi Japanese

Chou, Joseph Producer

Matsunaga, Masato Producer

Watanabe, Shinichirou Director, Episode Director, Script, Storyboard, Original Creator

Yamashita, Shingo Episode Director, Storyboard, Animation Director

Reviews

Jun 29, 2025

Marinate1016

Recommended

Unpopular opinion, I like Lazarus. A lot. That’s not to say this show is perfect or even a masterpiece, but it was a very enjoyable watch for me and a lot of the criticism levied against this show tends to fundamentally misunderstand what it’s trying to accomplish. Yes, there’s flashy fights done by the legendary Chad Stahelski, but that’s not the main point of this show. It’s supposed to be a slower introspective piece on the sins of humanity, how we(generally) prioritise profit over the greater good and whether or not humanity is truly worth saving. Now, If you actually go into this series expecting ... that sort of philosophical questioning, you’ll enjoy it. If you go in expecting cowboy bebop, space dandy or any of Watanabe’s other legendary series, you’ll be disappointed. This falls short of those, but then again most shows do. That’s why they’re considered masterpieces. Lazarus sets out to answer a singular question “is humanity worth saving” and by the end, we reach a conclusion. Again, that’s not to say this show is perfect. There’s some very valid critiques of it, especially surrounding the episode count, a few holes in the logic, the dub voice acting, etc., but people acting like this show killed their mother or something or like it’s the next Ex-Arm are ridiculous.

Lazarus was awesome to me because I’m a huge fan of that early 2000s late night toonami style of anime. Your Bebops, The Big O, etc. Those sort of subdued, mature and thought provoking series that let you know you were up way too late if you were awake when they came on. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Lazarus has that sort of energy since it’s literally produced by Adult Swim and comes from Watanabe. The aesthetic really just does something for me here to pull me in, but the cast, music and story are what hooked me. I absolutely loved the entire Lazarus team. Even though I would’ve really loved to have seen every single character get their own little 1-2 episode development arc(most do) the little time we got with them and their backstories was enough to make me care about them. There’s this nice found family dynamic going on and I’m a sucker for social rejects coming together to form a team and do something greater than themselves, thanks Jamss Gunn. They all have their own strengths and compliment each other’s weaknesses very well. It’s nowhere near Bebop levels of character writing, but it’s solid for a one cour show. Every scene with the full team on screen together was awesome too. The banter and way they tease each other as the season goes on and they get more comfortable.. awesome. I really fell in love with this group.

The story is the other big draw for me here. You need to set your expectations going into it though so as to not disappointed. Again, this isn’t a straightforward story. Yes, the goal initially is to find skinner and get a cure for the HAPNA situation, but it’s quickly made apparent that there’s much more to skinner’s actions than previously thought and that everything he’s done is with the intention of making the characters retrace the steps he took, seeing all the bad stuff humanity has done, ignoring climate change advice, putting profits over people, caring more about covering up illegal experiments than saving lives, etc., and have them meet him knowing everything he knows before they ask for a cure. That’s why the story doesn’t go from point A to B and often sidetracks, it’s supposed to. This is show is about people at its core. The good, the bad and the ugly. That requires.. spending episodes with people, getting characters’ backstories, going into homeless camps, slums, visiting islands affected by climate change, etc. You can’t make a judgement on humanity or the world if you haven’t seen all it has to offer. To me, this was obvious after like 3 episodes so I really don’t understand how people misunderstood the show, but a lot of criticism about it would instantly be eliminated if people realized what the show’s narratively and philosophically trying to do. It does it consistently and well in my opinion. That doesn’t mean you need to like it, you can absolutely just not like skinner as a villain and find his actions reprehensible or maybe you just don’t care for the cast, couldn’t connect with any of them and didn’t find them compelling. That’s totally fine and I’m not here to force an opinion on you, I just want people to understand where this show’s coming from. There’s plenty of objectively well written shows that I don’t like as well. It happens.

The third most important thing for me here are the production values. This show looks amazing. I love the subdued colors, the realistic character designs, the incredible soundtrack, which shouldn’t come as a surprise because Watanabe’s works always have great ones, the choreography from Stahelski and the voice acting(JP). I’m a huge fan of the more natural sounding dialogue style they went for in this. From what I’ve heard, the dub sounds very awkward so I would definitely recommend sticking with the Japanese here if possible. MAPPA brought their A-game to all the big fight scenes as well. Phantom Killer’s introduction is going to live so rent free in my head for a while.

This was just such a fun series to watch. It just had a way of really gripping me every week in an almost mesmerising fashion. Christine and the rest of the cast stole my heart, the story was solid and really the only thing I’d change is making it 16 episodes or so just to get more of the team hanging out. Happy with what I got, though.

Lazarus gets 8 out of 10.

Reviewer’s Rating: 8

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Jul 5, 2025

KaminL

Mixed Feelings

complete and utter wash. no clue what even happened here. wait. yes i do.

shinichiro watanabe is mainly known as the cool badass genius that made classics like cowboy bebop and samurai champloo, as well as underrated gem space dandy and forgotten nightmare terror in resonance. considering everybody forgot said forgotten nightmare, surely his newest production, from the same team that worked on attack on titan and the same guy that is basically about 50% of the reason why john wick is such a huge hit, will be just as legendary as his original iconic works. surely! except, this is what happens when you try to ... physically manufacture a classic. it comes off as inauthentic -- strictly artificial.

watanabe has gone on record stating that, when adult swim initially contacted him to work on a new anime, his first desire was to make something more akin to space dandy: something light, and fun, and maybe a bit horny. but the big wigs over at willaims street said "eeehhh listen ichi. can we call you ichi? space dandy kinda came and went like a pleasant smelling fart. we want something thatll put adult swim back on the map. we want something thatll withstand the test of time. we want something LEGENDARY." to which watanabe said, "you want cowboy bebop?" and to which the execs nodded back, "yes." thus, watanabe was given a task, a team, and a seemingly endless well of money to do what he does best. but, much like AS similar attempt to exhume a historic gravesite with their many, many failed attempts to make flcl happen again, lazarus simply...does not work very well.

like i said, it reads as total plastic. axel is as bland of a "cool guy" mc that one can imagine. the rest of the lazarus team is...fine, i guess, by virtue of them being well designed and given just enough depth to balance out axels lack of any original qualities. of course the artwork and animation by studio mappa is quite heavenly as well, with the choreography by chad stahelski going quite well with the fast paced and flowy style theyre inconsistently known for. the best aspect of lazarus, however, has got to by the plot: the doomsday countdown. the mystery. where is dr. skinner? will the team find him in time, or are we doomed for another absolutely diabolical "platinum ending"? thank whatever gods you believe in that its nowhere near as catastrophic as that insult of an unflushed toilet was, but the monkey paw that manifested this anime curled with a sickening crunch, and instead of a show by an immensely talented and hugely successful anime director that follows a team racing against the clock to find one man before the end of the world, we get a show by an immensely talented and hugely successful anime director that follows a team...lazily completing repetitive fetch quests, as the doomsday clock continues ticking by uninterrupted, and seemingly unnoticed.

its like a video game with optional side quests which your friend is obsessively completing before proceeding with the main storyline. its infuriating. what are we doing. why are we leisurely taking little breaks when the literal fate of the world is at stake? what is the point of any of what is happening? and why is popcorn wizard so annoying? blessedly about half of these questions get answered about halfway through when the show itself questions the lazarus team by having an inquisition upon their actions like "um, are yall still looking for skinner? yes? then what was all of this other bullshit yall have been up to for the past 6 episodes? was this trip to vivis bubble tea a part of the plan?" which was fun, and actually captured my attention again briefly. but then immediately after that we fall back into more pointless b-plots that amount to nothing, lead nowhere, and end unceremoniously as we get another onscreen reminder that there are only so many days remaining until basically the entire planet gets genocided. like i hope the boba was worth it because now theres a week left and we still dont know if bro is even still alive at this point

without spoilers there is a finale, and the mystery does get solved one way or the other, but, much like everything else in lazarus, its underwhelming as hell and feels entirely half baked. the mystery and countdown is what kept me coming back for more, and watanabes style is what got me here in the first place. but if it wasnt for the team behind it, and the fact that it was inoffensive, AND the fact that i already dropped mha vigilantes prior and i had nothing else to do, im not sure idve made it to the very end of this one, yall. not bad really, just uninteresting, uninspired, and painfully forced. would never part my lips to suggest watanabe lost his touch, but i will say that that space dandy style anime that he wanted to make prior to getting basically forced to make this...probably wouldve been substantially better. ik the dandy nonbelievers hate to hear it, but that show ruled, and this one kinda drooled, so live in denial all yall want. all i know is that gachiakuta, dress up darling, panty and stocking, call of the night, dr. stone AND dandadan are all dropping in the coming weeks so i have literally zero time to waste trying to catch up on mediocre bullcrap right now so if yall aint got no sauce then im leaving the drive thru expeditiously. @ adult swim, next time, let my man cook!!!!!!

Reviewer’s Rating: 6

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Jun 29, 2025

jahver

Not Recommended

Well-written

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.

Reviewer’s Rating: 2

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	Poll: Lazarus Episode 11 Discussion ( 1 2 ) godzilla9637 - Jun 14, 2025	94 replies	by Zish_jaya »» Mar 17, 11:29 AM
	Poll: Lazarus Episode 1 Discussion ( 1 2 3 4 5 ... Last Page ) IzanaSolos - Apr 5, 2025	294 replies	by oozePOP »» Mar 16, 2:40 PM
	Poll: Lazarus Episode 13 Discussion ( 1 2 3 4 5 ) IzanaSolos - Jun 28, 2025	231 replies	by Sharpedon »» Feb 24, 12:09 PM
	Poll: Lazarus Episode 12 Discussion ( 1 2 3 ) godzilla9637 - Jun 21, 2025	123 replies	by Sharpedon »» Feb 24, 11:24 AM
	Poll: Lazarus Episode 10 Discussion ( 1 2 ) godzilla9637 - Jun 7, 2025	88 replies	by Sharpedon »» Feb 24, 10:08 AM