Anime Director Shinichirō Watanabe's Corporate Dystopias

Whether it's the sprawling mix of frontier towns and multicultural urban mazes of Cowboy Bebop, or the more clearcut contrast seen in Carole & Tuesday's Martian landscape or “Babylonia City” in Lazarus—familiarity bleeds through the various futurescapes in the work of Shinichirō Watanabe. Most science fiction reflects the moment in which it's made, of course – so as Watanabe returns to recurring ideas in these various dystopias, so too does the audience see how the evolution of his point of view is reflected in the very makeup of each of these habitats.

Lazarus focuses on a recurring element of Watanabe's previous shows: an interest in futuristic dystopias where human capital has overreached. The numerous ways capital decays everything it touches are a constant backdrop of Watanabe's work. In Lazarus, this expands to include healthcare, and Watanabe's anime gets at systems of corporate desire to streamline and simplify everyday life, while framing his series (plus a couple of films) through the point of view of the outsiders to these invasive systems, the kind of idiosyncratic weirdos who typically get stamped out for their casual resistance.

In Lazarus, there's an air of pessimism you can see immediately in the design of Babylonia City, the ever-increasing class disparity of the present day represented in its city planning. It's all designed as in-your-face evidence as to why Dr. Skinner, an elusive scientist who designed a cure-all drug named Hapna, which turns out to be also designed to eventually kill everyone who takes it, would hit such a low point of misanthropic despair.

One of the most interesting points of the show is how it studies the ripple effects of the drug's introduction when it seemed to have only good intentions.

Never being sick again is, of course, a massive financial burden off everyone's shoulders. Perhaps Dr. Skinner's thinking is that financial stability leaves more room for solving the climate crisis and changing habits. While this is speculation at this point, as the show is not yet finished, the early episodes of Lazarus hint at this, as do comments made by Watanabe in the lead-up to the series' premiere. The abuse of Hapna is elaborated upon in the show's opening sequences, directed by Shingo Yamashita, with atmospheric wonder and melancholy.

Several lead characters talk about how you could take the drug to dull the pain of a broken heart, how it gives a little high, how some people bought and sold it at a high markup for those without legal access, and how the rich got it first. All of these issues are intertwined, as well as with other existential threats people face in the real world. The second episode, “Life in the Fast Lane,” reveals that the doctor is motivated in part by the rapid progression of climate change, as a scene of a world summit sees him speak about how economic growth means nothing when the world is burning, his words plainly ignored (the U.S. and China reps are the first to leave). It's like how the effective end of the earth comes about via corporate overreach in Cowboy Bebop — told through small pieces of world-building, attempts to create faster interstellar travel inadvertently blew up the moon.

The world's decay via corporate control is less immediate in Lazarus, as exemplified by the rot at the heart of its main setting, Babylonia City.

As seems to be tradition for futuristic fantasies such as this (think Arcane, Final Fantasy, among countless others), Babylonia is shot as a place with an upper and a lower city — the wealth gap literalized in the architecture. As centers of travel and commerce loom high out of reach in quite literal ivory towers, everyone else is situated under bridges or tent cities. The visual contrast between opulent skyscrapers and destitute public spaces and municipal facilities is something animators have played with as far back as Akira and earlier, but Watanabe in particular attempts to directly situate familiar touches of the present day to hammer home the possibility of such horrible contrasts happening to us.

In Lazarus, this extends to his consideration of how different characters move through the spaces he's created, or at least, this is something that the series is beginning to touch on. The second episode prominently features a tent city where one of the main characters Axel was raised – more of the real world bleeds in here as the camp's leader, a trans woman named Jill, has a frank conversation about the high rate of homelessness amongst trans people, while Axel's colleague Doug speaks about his first-hand experience with the racial ceiling of academia. One of Lazarus's main struggles is carrying this thread throughout the show—outside of these moments, the character work is often slight, so the best expressions of this remain in the world-building—in some cases, as the organization of the architecture makes its own point.

There are traces of it in Cowboy Bebop, particularly in how the movie Knockin' on Heaven's Door situates a Martian recreation of New York right next to one of Morocco. Lazarus' nature as an international spy show has facilitated this exploration a little more directly. In a patient third episode, “Long Way From Home,” Axel's excursion to Istanbul, while somewhat heavy-handed, shows the same issues of wealth disparity as those present in Babylonia.

This interest in intersectional struggle runs throughout Watanabe's work. It's part of what makes these worlds feel lived in, with recognizable social ills across multiple demographics, both tying these futures to our present.

Carole & Tuesday, Watanabe's musical drama series co-directed by Motonobu Hori (Super Crooks), expresses some of this overlap through its exploration of music as a medium for people to share in these struggles with each other. As a whole, the series has some of the same appeal as the aforementioned shows, in which a close-knit crew of outcasts rail against a larger system, though it's defined more by its idealism rather than any righteous anger. The eponymous pair, the runaway rich heiress and wannabe singer-songwriter Carole and orphaned working-class girl Tuesday, meet by chance and form a musical duo, dreaming of success together. The catch is that the show takes place in a future where AI songwriting has taken over – a continuation of a thread Watanabe's work with Keiko Nobumoto also pulled on in Macross Plus.

Set on Mars (and, notably, in a shared universe with Bebop and Space Dandy), the vision of the red planet in Carole & Tuesday is split between earthy brownstone buildings and white spires and utopian structures centralized in the city's wealthy center. Music has similarly drifted towards this center of wealth, with pop stars now ready-made by AI, leaving those who work from scratch often doomed to algorithmic obscurity. It's a reflection of how AI has crept into our everyday lives and begun to commodify things, like music, to become exclusively for the privileged.

Though the show eventually is overcome by a naivety about the power of music (Carole and Tuesday are responsible for “7 minutes that changed the world,” but there's no tangible explanation for what that means), some interesting observations spin out of this concept. Watanabe reminds the audience of different forms of protest music — rap is chief among those, with Denzel Curry making a guest appearance on the soundtrack as an enigmatic rapper fighting for Martian independence — as something that cannot be replicated, there's an intent and a history that can't simply be bottled up and sold for mass appeal.

But companies will try anyway — and it's the same commercialization and attempt at commodifying feeling that sits at the heart of the Hapna crisis in Lazarus, and the show's incredulousness at the state of U.S. healthcare, among other things. It's a little didactic, though Lazarus seems frustrated enough on its face to take that somewhere meaningful, compared to the eventual cop-out of Carole & Tuesday, where singing Kumbaya fixes everything. By contrast, in Watanabe's reflection on the slow poison of capital and letting that seep into an otherwise action-packed show, Lazarus is (so far, at least) a more bitter pill to swallow, and all the better for it.