Which Lazarus Character Are You?

Learn More About Lazarus

Lazarus is Shinichiro Watanabe first original television anime in years, produced by Sola Entertainment and animated by MAPPA, with an initial run in 2025. Watanabe is the director behind Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo, and Lazarus arrived carrying the weight of that history. It is a near-future thriller with a hard clock on it, and it is unmistakably his.

The setup: a celebrated scientist, Dr. Skinner, released a miracle drug called Hapna that the world adopted at scale. Then he disappeared and announced that the drug is in fact a slow-acting, fatal poison, and that essentially everyone who took it will die within thirty days unless he is found. A covert team of five is assembled from people with criminal records, offered erasure of their pasts in exchange for tracking him down. That team is Lazarus.

Axel Gilberto is the centerpiece, voiced by Mamoru Miyano, an escape artist and daredevil whose original three-year sentence ballooned past eight hundred years through repeated breakouts. Christine Blake is a former Russian intelligence specialist who faked her own death and is a superb shot. Doug Hadine, voiced by Makoto Furukawa, is a former academic expelled after clashing with a dean over racist remarks, and he runs most of the team logistics. Leland Astor, voiced by Yuma Uchida, is the illegitimate son of a wealthy family who became its heir through a chain of deaths and refusals. Eleina is a world-class hacker raised inside a cult community.

The action is the other headline. Watanabe brought in Chad Stahelski, the director of the John Wick films, to oversee action design, and the result is choreography built around weight, geography, and consequence rather than spectacle for its own sake. Axel parkour sequences in particular are staged as continuous problem-solving, which fits a character defined by finding the exit.

Music, as always with Watanabe, is structural rather than decorative. The soundtrack draws on Kamasi Washington, Bonobo and Floating Points, and the show cuts to it the way Cowboy Bebop cut to jazz. Sequences are frequently built to the rhythm of a track rather than the other way around, and the score carries a lot of the emotional argument.

Thematically it is about borrowed time and what people do with it. The thirty-day countdown is not just a plot device; it is the show thesis. Everyone on the team already lost their lives once, legally or socially, and the mission offers them a second one contingent on saving everybody else. Watanabe has always been drawn to characters running from a past they cannot outpace, and Lazarus makes that literal.

For viewers, the obvious comparison point is Cowboy Bebop, and the DNA is genuinely there: a mismatched crew, episodic texture over a serialized spine, and a soundtrack that functions as a character. It also sits comfortably alongside Cyberpunk: Edgerunners as another MAPPA-adjacent near-future story about people with no institutional protection running out of time.

So which member of the Lazarus team are you? Take the quiz above and find out whether you are the escape artist, the marksman who buried her old identity, the strategist, the reluctant heir, or the hacker who prefers the shadows.