Shinichiro Watanabe was one of those guys who was impossible to criticize for years. When youre the name people most commonly associate with a show as lauded as Cowboy Bebop fans are gonna be rideordie for you regardless of the quality of your successive projects. You can argue that Bebop isnt perfect and Id agree with you but it outshines practically anything coming out these days thanks to Watanabes direction and writers like Keiko Nobumoto at the helm. Bebops understanding of homage Champloos anachronisms and Space Dandys reverence towards of the previous 40something years of anime all go to show that Watanabes 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 Watanabes 3.0 moment and people still overlook its obnoxiously glaring flaws on the grounds that the nonhumorous musical performances are great. Lazarus on the other hand is his Thrice Upon a Time and you honestly couldnt get something this bad if you forcefed a script writing algorithm the last decades 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. Its an unwelcoming range of greys blues and dull browns compared to Cowboy Bebops prismatic spectrum. Theres no warmth to the color palette which while mostly being an unfortunate side effect of the transition to digital animation doesnt excuse how muted and lifeless everything seems. This is supposed to be an episodic ensemble storyline but it feels like youre 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 Watanabes old energy is the fourth episode with enough competent direction to emphasize Chad Stahelskis 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 Bebops 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 mightve 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 wasnt a philosophical asskicker. Christine is just Faye if she was a completely unlikeable bitch all the time without any of Fayes charm wit or sympathetic tenets. Leland is Canadian or something. Eleina isfuc I dont even have anything to say on her shes just there. Eds equivalent would probably be Popcorn Wizard a hacker who exclusively speaks in Katy teh penguin of d00mtier dialogue. Youll want to put your head through a wall every time shes onscreen. Theres even a Vicious knockoff who shows up in the last third to try and form an emotional bridge between Lazarus and Bebop which doesnt 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 hed be a compelling antagonist but thatd mean sitting through more of Lazarus. The MyAnimeList page doesnt even have a complete character list so the front page where youd 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 nonfactor 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 shows 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 thats 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 its gonna kill them all in two more weeks like a /pol/ schizoposter and then dipped. The problem is that theres no urgency. Even after Skinners announcement we dont see any social unrest no riots no television debates no internet shitposting nothing. Were just told the whole world is kinda on edge and thats really it. It takes THIRTEEN EPISODES for the team to go Hey isnt Skinner a bigger deal than whatever were doing right now? Theres no before or after the whole world seems to be living in some kind of equilibrium of apathy but if thats intentional its 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 youd be wrong because apparently this show was written by fucking Dan Harmon or something. I swear theres a corny speech every episode about how humans are le bad because of war or racism or climate change. Episode 7 had the most eyerolling instance of this where one of the characters states that the last beautiful place on earth is only like that because theres no humans because theres 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 Watanabes always been a bit of a progressive type but this hysterical neolib fatalism isnt his style. Carole Tuesdays obnoxious showboating and political caricatures look tasteful compared to these WEFsponsored 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 doesnt make you look like a shallow immature misanthrope. I dont watch anime to listen to reddittier haranguing and neither does any selfrespecting human being. The narratives selfrighteous 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 Skinners plan being put into action. Theres 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 were just thrown right into it. Wheres the conflict wheres the prejudice wheres the indifference? How would there even be any in such a racially harmonious world? Its practically utopia compared to Bebops setting. The worst you get is the occasional government hitman or a couple oneoff villains being sex pests being menacing towards the female cast but theyre more like ideological punching bags than real antagonists. Side note making the rapey cretin of the week a Wall Street jerkoff or an AItouting Silicon Valley techbro doesnt 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 doesnt 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 doesnt know when to show and when to tell and it does both in the most infuriating ways imaginable. Youll 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 hes off larping as a hobo. The final plot twist regarding Skinners drug is staggeringly obvious to anyone with the most surfacelevel knowledge of The Bible. The final episode convolutes what little weve 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 cant 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 halfassed 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 twothirds of the show can be described as nothing happens. You could watch only the first and last episode and youd 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 isnt enough to justify watching outside of AMVs. Maybe Watanabes at fault or maybe hes innocent in this whole affair. For all I know the Toonami execs couldve 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 fauxsocially conscious moralizing thats nave at best and outright ignorant at worst timewasting garbage plots that go nowhere idiotic navelgazing hackish bullshit. This isnt anime its cynical westernized slop pretending to be something it hasnt earned the right to be. This isnt anime its more cultural detritus courtesy of Hollywood.