Lazarus (Japanese TV series)

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Lazarus is an anime series that begins with a video posted online in October 2052 by a man the world believed it had lost. He is Dr. Skinner, a celebrated neuroscientist who vanished three years earlier. His message is short and chilling. The painkiller he gave humanity, called Hapna, carries a three-year half-life, and soon everyone who took it will die.

  A countdown starts at once. A task force of five agents, code-named Lazarus, is assembled with 30 days to find Skinner and make him hand over a vaccine before the first wave of victims dies. Why would a man build a cure for pain and then announce its poison? Who are the five people trusted with the hunt, and who is working to stop them? And how did a series with this premise come to be made, and how did audiences respond?

  212131

• 2. The Miracle Drug

  ›

  Three Nobel Prizes stand behind Dr. Skinner's name, and he comes from Turkey. His grandmother lives in Istanbul and is known for her baklava. She raised him after he lost his parents. When the story opens, the world of 2049 is called a utopia, and Skinner has given it a drug that lets users feel no pain at all. To the public, Hapna looks like a cure for everything, which is why his later reveal lands so hard.

  The drug did not reach the public without a trail behind it. Delta Medicinal, led by a CEO who now suffers from sleep deprivation, ran clinical trials of Hapna on monkeys and on humans. Since Skinner's announcement, that executive has barely slept. Others read the crisis differently. A private investor sold off his Delta Medicinal stock before it crashed in the scandal and made a huge profit. He enjoys the nightclubs he owns and the women he meets there. His edge came from a popular DJ who performs as Visionary and is secretly a big-time hacker. That hacker leaked insider information from the company, and the two men split the gains.

  Skinner's past also holds a bitter figure. A college mentor of a character named Doug once collaborated with Skinner, grew jealous of his talent, and fabricated research results. The mentor lost his professorship and later became homeless. Back at Delta Medicinal, its CEO agrees to cooperate with Lazarus on a plan to lure Skinner into the open. The plan is a fake Hapna vaccine launch, staged at an emergency conference.

  212131

• 3. The Five Agents

  ›

  A sentence of 888 years hangs over the youngest-looking prisoner on the team, a 23-year-old Brazilian man. He first went to jail for three years on a minor charge. Then he kept breaking out of every prison he was sent to, and the life sentences piled up. Parkour skills and a fearless streak let him escape almost any situation. He is friendly and straightforward, yet he gives off a solitary air.

  The team's coordinator is a 23-year-old Nigerian man who is intellectual, calm under pressure, and physically gifted. He studied physics in college and once looked up to Skinner as a role model. He is delicate about small details and proud of himself. He builds a playful friendship with Axel, and in one dialogue he jokingly turns Axel down.

  Chris, a young Russian woman, is the team's gun specialist and is skilled with many kinds of firearms. She drinks heavily and stays optimistic. She talks to anyone in a friendly way, and her rough big-sister manner flatters neither men nor women.

  A 16-year-old Canadian boy pilots the team's drones. He reads a room and answers accordingly, but he never says what he really thinks. He avoids talking about his family because of its complicated background, and one of his hobbies is egosurfing. He is the sole surviving male heir to the prominent Astor family estate. Within that family, an older sister has mixed feelings about Leland, an illegitimate heir who left the household. She could not inherit the estate because she is a woman.

  The youngest member is a 15-year-old girl from Hong Kong who struggles to join other people's conversations. She is also one of three world-famous covert hackers. As the story goes on she grows more open and bold, and she develops a friendly rivalry with a Maldivian hacker called Popcorn Wizard.

  212131

• 4. Government And Shadows

  ›

  Rumors circulate among colleagues that the director of the National Security Agency is secretly a human AI. The reason is his overly rational thinking and his calm, which nothing seems to disturb. He founded Lazarus. Liz, the deputy director, assists him with its operations. The team answers day to day to an older woman who commands it and serves as its link to the U.S. government. She has many connections in large corporations and national organizations. She works efficiently and is never swayed by emotion, and she can be frightening when angry.

  A lieutenant named Schneider, from the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command, works against them. He is deeply involved in developing Hapna as a bioweapon. He plans quietly to disrupt Lazarus and to eliminate Axel, a key figure in the project. Axel is the lone survivor of the command's confidential Hapna clinical trial on inmates at an Arizona prison. To do the killing, Schneider hires a ghost assassin known as Soryu.

  The man behind that name is stranger than a typical hired killer. Soryu works through an agent called HQ, who negotiates with clients. In truth the two are the same person, who suffers from dissociative identity disorder because of the Hundun Program carried out on him in China. Schneider's offer is US$30 million to kill Axel, and the assassin accepts. His tools include string, throwing knives, grenades and rocket launchers.

  When Soryu fails, the fallout spreads inside the army. A captain who helped Schneider conceal the bioweapon, and who was a fellow Green Beret of the NSA director, was about to snitch to the colonel. Schneider kills him first. Later the hacking DJ makes a plea deal with the NSA and helps uncover who Soryu really is.

  212131

• 5. Cults, Hackers, Old Loves

  ›

  Kobayashi Shelter Sales owes a great deal of money, and its owner sells survival bunkers in the U.S. state of Arizona. His business is one of the few that profits from fear of the end. Another community answers that fear with worship. The Tower of Truth is a new age religion led by a former associate professor at MIT. He was so fascinated with an artificial intelligence called Naga that he stole it from the lab. He then founded a commune around it. Naga is described as an intelligence beyond the singularity. It was developed at MIT, is based on Skinner's neural network, and is programmed with a desire for dominance and recognition. A childhood friend of Eleina was raised inside that commune and secretly envied Eleina for venturing out alone as a young girl.

  The Maldives, now submerged by rising sea levels from global warming, shaped another hacker. Lynn comes from there and suffers from analgesia, like some other former residents. She feels she owes Skinner, who bought all the islands so that the residents could afford to relocate. She breaks into Delta Medicinal's internal network and fights a hacking battle with Eleina. By the end of the series the two become friends.

  In prison, Axel knew a transgender woman who, after her release, took on a female appearance and now runs a homeless village.

  For Chris, the past arrives with a Russian special forces unit. She once faked her own death to escape the unit and to shield her former lover Inga from possible execution for betraying their homeland. Inga now leads that unit, and she recognizes Chris in Fiji. She kidnaps her and holds her on a Russian oil rig in the Arctic Ocean. There a subordinate of Inga's beats Chris in anger over her abandonment of the motherland. Later, when she and the others nearly give in to the death of the world, Chris kisses Axel as a final wish, after he protected and saved her.

  212131

• 6. Making Of Lazarus

  ›

  Shinichirō Watanabe began planning this series in 2018, after finishing his work on Carole & Tuesday. Actual production started in 2021. He created and directed it, and he is best known for directing the Cowboy Bebop anime series. MAPPA handled the animation, and Sola Entertainment handled general production. Adult Swim announced the project in July 2023.

  The film director Chad Stahelski, known for the John Wick franchise, designed the action sequences. Watanabe told interviewers in November 2024 that he held the John Wick films in high regard for how their fights were choreographed. The production team worked closely with Stahelski to receive choreography for its fight scenes. Japan lacked enough experienced animators for such sequences, so the team recruited animators from outside the country. During most remote meetings, the staff showed Watanabe action footage shot with stuntmen for scenes he wanted to animate. Where that footage was not used, hand-drawn animation and CGI served as alternatives.

  In an October 2024 interview, Watanabe said the opioid crisis was one inspiration. The effects of climate change also played a major role in the story.

  Sadness came early. Keiko Nobumoto, who was originally set to be a co-creator and writer, died of esophageal cancer on the 1st of December 2021. Watanabe said her spirit lived on during production. The series was ultimately made as a tribute to her.

  131214203

• 7. Music And Episode Titles

  ›

  Jazz saxophonist Kamasi Washington wrote the score together with Bonobo and Floating Points, who are producers, DJs and musicians. A December 2024 announcement revealed that Washington also performed the opening theme, "Vortex". The band the Boo Radleys performed the ending theme, which shares the series' name, "Lazarus".

  Two insert songs mark key moments. "Dark Will Fall" is by Bonobo featuring Jacob Lusk, and it plays at the beginning of the first episode. "Beyond the Sky" is by Bonobo featuring Nicole Miglis, and it plays at the start of the ninth episode.

  The same love of music reaches the episode titles. Each is directly named after an album, single or extended play from around the second half of the 20th century. One song comes back at the very end. "Dark Will Fall" returns as the ending theme for the final episode.

  15562223

• 8. Broadcast And Reception

  ›

  On the 22nd of July, a teaser trailer played at Adult Swim's "Toonami on the Green" panel at San Diego Comic-Con. A year later, in July 2024, it was announced that the series would air in 2025. In January 2025 came news of a Japanese broadcast on TV Tokyo and its affiliates, with a new visual. Adult Swim then confirmed on Instagram that it would also air the same month. In February 2025 the date was set. On the 6th of April 2025, near-simultaneous broadcasts began in Japan and the United States. The United States run was on Adult Swim's Toonami block, with an Adult Swim Canada simulcast, and the series ran until June 2025.

  Reviews were mostly positive. Rotten Tomatoes lists a 92% approval rating from 24 reviews. Its critics called the series "a kinetic anime with no shortage of provocative ideas", though they felt it did not quite match the originality of Watanabe's earlier work. Streaming figures were strong. The series reached the top 10 worldwide, peaking at sixth on Netflix Japan, and appeared in top 10 lists on Amazon Prime Video Japan, HBO Max in several countries, and Vidio in Indonesia.

  Not everyone agreed. Ryan Gaur of IGN gave the first five episodes 5/10 and called it a disappointing return to directing for Watanabe. He missed the energy and joy of his earlier work and found the leads too unbothered and invulnerable. Still, he found the apocalyptic stakes intriguing and saw some creative action. He left room for a revised opinion once all the episodes were out.

  Awards followed. On the 16th of July 2025, the series was nominated at the 77th Primetime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Original Main Title Theme Music. In 2026 it won Best Original Anime at the 10th Crunchyroll Anime Awards.

  Adult Swim promoted the last episode as a series finale. In July 2025, though, Watanabe raised the possibility of a sequel. He said: "Since there are still many problems left in the world, the team will continue to be active. Their story is far from over."

  161762426