In Adult Swim‘s Lazarus, the latest anime action series from Cowboy Bebopcreator Shinichirō Watanabe, one man aims to free the world of pain at a catastrophic price.
The year is 2052 when an era of peace and unbridled indulgence reigns supreme. The reason for this? Humankind has been freed from sickness and pain after a Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist, Dr. Skinner, invented a miracle cure-all drug with no apparent side effects called Hapuna.
However, after society grows an unhealthy dependence on the pills, Dr. Skinner vanishes. Three years later, Dr. Skinner returns only to bring a message of doom. He announces that Hapuna, while vital to those hooked on it, has a short half-life, and everyone who has taken it will die in approximately thirty days since its release. A group of ragtag individuals forms a task force to locate Dr. Skinner and persuade him to develop a vaccine at the risk of humanity’s impending global extinction.
Here, Watanabe speaks to Deadline about the creation of the series.
DEADLINE: What was the inspiration for the series?
SHINICHIRŌ WATANABE: I always wanted to make an anime like 007 or Mission: Impossible.
The reason our project kicked off was because I got an offer from Cartoon Network. The inspiration for Lazarus specifically came from watching foreign news, where the topic often revolved around the opioid crisis. I thought that this isn’t something that’s really covered or touched upon in action movies.
So, I thought it would be a great topic. Opioids are not illegal; you can get a legal prescription for some of them, but people will still get addicted to them, and people do die from them. I thought that maybe you could make a drug that would be similar in the way that it would be like an opioid but also designed to kill people in a certain amount of years.
Whenever I talk about this, people ask if this is a metaphor for the opioid crisis, but it is not really like that. This is just media and entertainment, and it’s set in the future, so it’s nothing like that.
DEADLINE: I read that you teamed up with the director of John Wick, Chad Stahelski, to help create the series’ stylized fighting. Talk more about that.
WATANABE: It’s been a while since I’ve made an action anime—about roughly 20 years, to be exact. So, I can’t just make the same type of action anime I made before. I needed to modernize. So, the best person to reach was Chad.
DEADLINE: What has changed in the 20-year gap within the animation industry?
WATANABE: In the past, anime production budgets were very low, so there wasn’t much wiggle room for what we could actually make. There was no way we would have been able to call on Chad’s team in the past due to budget constraints. Now, while the budgets are bigger, there’s a lot more we can do, and there’s a lot of work that needs to be done, but there aren’t enough people in the industry to get the work done. We can’t just add more people willy-nilly; the animators are artisans and craftspeople, so they take a long time to train. That’s the reason we have a shortage now. This goes to directors, too. They take a lot of time to train and a lot of skills and experience to have a good director direct a series.
DEADLINE: What were some themes that you wanted to get through on Lazarus?
WATANABE: There are a lot of themes. But the biggest one is pain. Dr. Skinner does say in the beginning that not feeling pain is the same as dying, and for him, it’s a question of whether pain should be moved completely, both physically and mentally.
DEADLINE: What media have you been consuming lately that inspires you?
WATANABE: I’d like to make a series based on a ghost story in the future. I’ve been consuming a lot of ghost-related media lately—specifically, movies where evil ghosts make an appearance.
Oh, and I recently watched The Exorcist.
This interview was conducted through an interpreter add has been edited for length and clarity.
From Deadline.com