How John Wick‘s Fighting Maestro Helped Bring New Anime Lazarus to Life

A SHINICHIRŌ WATANABE anime series is a rare occurrence. A new project from the creative mastermind behind Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo is a veritable Haley’s Comet; It appears only so often that once it does emerge, it’s worth spotlighting accordingly.

Such is the case with Lazarus, Watanabe’s newest show, which debuted April 5 on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim programming block. The hook is simple, yet hauntingly resonant: In 2052, a miracle painkiller named Hapna is introduced, and immediately revolutionizes the world. But there’s a catch: Three years later, its creator, Dr. Skinner, appears after falling off the grid to reveal that everyone who took it will die in 30 days—unless, that is, someone can find him in time. A team of five heroes is assembled to find Skinner and secure a possible vaccine before the clock runs out.

Lazarus’s decidedly topical and killer hook is undoubtedly enough to bait anime acolytes into hysteria even before the creator’s penchant for character, stylish animation, and kinetic musical choices enter the fray. Watanabe’s work is well-known for its action, too. Ask any Bebop fan, and they’ll rave about standout episodes like “Ballad of Fallen Angels” or “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door.” How does a legend, then, push the envelope on what’s possible? He turns to another; Watanabe made the decision to tap John Wick director and stalwart action choreographer Chad Stahelski to develop the action choreography for the show.

Speaking to Men’s Health over Zoom, Watanabe says he went to Stahelski to ensure they weren’t behind the times. “We didn’t want to redo what we’ve done in the past,” he says. “We wanted to do a new type of action anime this time. The first thing that came to mind was John Wick.”

For Stahelski, there was a built-in level of mutual respect and admiration. “People ask, ‘Where do you get the ideas? Where do you get your influences?’” he says. “One of them was always Shinichirō Watanabe-san, with Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo.” He goes on to mention that during his days as a stunt coordinator for The Matrix movies, The Wachowskis had “talked a lot about” Watanabe and his work—“It was so influential to them”—before ultimately tapping the creator to work on the franchise’s 2003 anime anthology film, The Animatrix.

Stahelski had already been engaged in conversations with Lazarus producer Joseph Cho about how to translate John Wick into the anime medium. “We had bumped into Joseph, and he said, ‘Hey, by the way, Watanabe-san is doing another anime.’ We were like, ‘Oh my god. Wow. It’s been a while since the last one,’” Stahelski eagerly says. “Through mutual acquaintances… they went, ‘Oh, you guys should talk.’”

There was a level of mutual admiration. “We talked and riffed and pontificated about how much we love each other’s stuff,” Stahelski says with a huge smile. “That was a very big surprise,” Watanabe confirms. From there, an ask was made for a member of Stahelski’s stunt team to jump in and help with the action design for the show. The Wick director volunteered himself.

“I was like, I’ll do it,” he says with a laugh. “I’m not giving that one up.” The only condition he had was that he didn’t want to be a hired gun, but rather, a true collaborator in the process, citing a desire to learn and get a further education about the medium from one of its great masters.

This isn’t a passive relationship, but a full-on commitment, with Stahelski confirming he and Watanabe chatted “at least twice a week” about the project through the production of its 13-episode first season. As things progressed, the eventual flow involved Stahelski, Wick choreographer Jeremy Marinas, and a handful of other stuntmen from Stahelski’s 87eleven Entertainment stunt team working to put together sequences out of their Manhattan Beach office. The crew would get story beats from Watanabe, experiment, plan the movements, and then send them over in the form of pre-visualizations to the Lazarus animators. From there, the artists distill everything into animation, drawing each beat. “We didn’t just rely on rotoscoping or motion capture,” Wanatabe says. “… if we had done that, we didn’t think we would be able to beat live-action. The animation [would] become more secondary.”

The results are electric. Each episode builds to or features a sequence that’s instantly memorable. Series lead Axel certainly mirrors the same acrobatic style of a typical Watanabe protagonist, dashing and darting around. While Spike Spiegel often moved his torso and arms first, Axel’s lower body drives Lazarus’s action, swinging his legs around with a spinning fluidity. That’s to say nothing of his parkour abilities, bounding from building to building with reckless abandon. Axel believes himself to be blessed by a guardian angel of sorts, and thus finds himself getting as much of a high off the action as he would if he were to take some Hapna. “A big reason why we have him do that is that we wanted to show that he was someone who could challenge something very dangerous and want to succeed,” Wanatabe says. “It’s why his personality is the way it is.”

The creative process wasn’t always as linear as mapping out one sequence and moving on to another. There had to be room for a back-and-forth about how sequences were coming together. Wanatabe mentions a scene in the fourth episode, “Don’t Stop the Dance,” where Axel, ever the acrobat, jumps onto the back of a helicopter in pursuit of a foe. As he reminds us, diagraming that sequence isn’t really possible in the middle of a Manhattan Beach gym. “Chad’s team sent us, basically, a CG movie version of it,” Watanabe explains. “But animating something based off of CG and animating something off of live action is very different. They had to adjust to make the transition between the live-action parts and the CG parts flow better.”

Stahelski preferred this kind of collaboration. “We call it the ever-decreasing circle of perfection,” he remarks between laughs. “It’s very much a spiral inward. Meaning, yeah, we have a lot of ideas. You start with a bunch of smart people—usually the director’s idea. ‘I want a club scene. I want these events to happen.’ We’re like, ‘Okay, cool.’ We’ll go to the gym, we’ll block out those scenes that we’ll choreograph, and we’ll try to give you the shoe leather in between points A, B, and C. But in the middle, we try to give some other ideas. We show the director, and he goes, ‘Okay, that one’s really cool, but this one wasn’t as cool as we thought it would be…’ You just go back and forth.”

He mentions, in particular, that sometimes Watanabe would draw something that would cause logistics to change, whether it was the music flowing in the moment or even individual moves. But for Stahelski, the exploration of what to do in those unsure moments was invigorating. “Most of the people I like working for—the directors, producers, writers—are constantly trying to explore,” he adds. “They know they have the starting point idea, and they’re locked in pretty good to the idea, or the path of that idea. But then it’s the exploration if you’re truly trying to do new stuff, especially in anime.That’s how we like to work, because anime is literally an empty page. You should try things.”

Watching Lazarus come to life out of that blank page is effortlessly thrilling. It’s not enough to iterate on the past or rest upon one’s laurels. As such, Lazarus feels like Bebop or Champloo— but is every bit its own beast. Despite its futuristic setting, it all feels rooted in today. Axel name-drops The Avengers. Wikipedia is a common resource. Guns look and sound like the ones you’d see in an episode of Law & Order instead of sci-fi-esque laser pistols or plasma rifles. The Hapna crisis is drawn from, in part, the fact that Watanabe watched musicians he loved die from overdoses, alongside the calamity of the opioid crisis. These are all effective set dressing for Watanabe to explore how the world grinds up and spits out the less fortunate. Even in the end of times, the richer get richer and companies continue to exploit in the service of profits.

Those themes of lost souls looking for their place in the cosmic tragedy of it all are a throughline in Watanabe’s work from Bebop to Lazarus. But it takes a special alchemy to return to the spirit of something you’ve done well before and find new textures and hues to it, while finding ways to make it memorable for years to come.

That’s something Stahelski is keenly aware of. “There’s always a way to choreograph around a piece,” Stahelski says. “The hardest thing is to nail it in such an algorithm of story, character, exciting, cool things, cool moves, and moments. You can’t tell me five moves out of the original Matrix, but you can tell me Bullet Time, and you can tell me [Carrie-Anne Moss] doing the thing, right? [imitates the move and laughs]. Those are fucking moments. Can you get a moment out of it? Can you make it something people refer to? 26 years later, you and I are sitting here talking about The Matrix. 30 years later, we’re sitting here talking about Cowboy Bebop. So something clicked … you just don’t know until it all comes out and you see what clicks with people. So for me, it’s the whole vibe. Did we add anything to what this genius is doing? Have we made the little bit of difference where you go, ‘I don’t know why, but I really love that show.’”

With any luck, Lazarus is a show that we all talk about thirty years from now, due in part to the collaboration between these two giants of the entertainment world. Collaborations happen all the time in the industry. But true partnerships like this, forged out of a mutual desire to push the limits of what’s possible, are as rare as a Watanabe project itself.

Stream Lazarus Here