Call me stubborn, but I still want to believe that Adult Swim can produce a decent anime someday. And Lazarus, shown off for the first time today at an NYCC panel, shows more promise than anything before, due to the pedigree of those involved.
It’s Shinichiro Watanabe’s next anime. You know, the dude responsible for Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo, as well as Space Dandy, which was sort of a half-Adult Swim original ten years ago. They didn’t produce it, but they had first dibs. Watanabe has yet to truly let us down. This could be the one!
In a cityscape of the future, brilliant scientist Dr. Skinner has formulated a revolutionary painkiller called “Hapna” that changes the face of medicine. It isn’t long before Hapna is prescribed for everybody, and becomes as common as asprin. That’s when the other shoe drops: apparently it wasn’t discovered until now that Hapna kills you three years after you first take it. Oops!
This essentially means humanity is about to go extinct UNLESS somebody can come up with a cure in time. Skinner developed a cure, but no one knows where he slipped off to. A special task force is given the name of the show and given one mission: find him and save the world.
As for what all that has to do with Axel Gilberto, the escaped fugitive the teaser footage focuses entirely on…no one knows yet. What we do know is that he’s really good at parkour. Have a look:
The English voice cast for Lazarus has yet to be announced, but the Japanese cast contains some veterans from the Cowboy Bebop days:
- Koichi Yamadera (Spike Spiegel from Cowboy Bebop) as Dr. Skinner
- Megumi Hayashibara (Faye Valentine from Cowboy Bebop) as Hersch
- Mamoru Miyano (Chrollo Lucilfer from Hunter x Hunter) as Axel
- Maaya Uchida (Alluka Zoldyck from Hunter x Hunter) as Chris
- Yuma Uchida (Megumi Fushiguro from Jujutsu Kaisen) as Leland
- Makoto Furukawa (Saitama from One Punch Man) as Doug
- Manaka Iwami (Akane Kurokawa from Oshi no Ko) as Eleina
- Akio Otsuka (Yujiro Hanma from Baki Hanma) as Abel
Lazarus is in production now and will debut on Adult Swim sometime in 2025.
