Decades before the internet was something people carried around in their pockets, these words introduced anime fans to a surreal existence where computer monitors served as portals to brave new worlds. Serial Experiments: Lain and its deceptively "ordinary" title character redefined an entire generation's concept of the world wide web, prompting us all to suspiciously take note of humming power lines and central processing units.
Follow along as fourteen year old Lain - driven by the abrupt suicide of a classmate - logs on to the Wired and promptly loses herself in a twisted mass of hallucinations, memories, and interconnected-psyches. Close the World. Open the Next. It's as simple as the flip of a switch. Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman , November 30, Even those not especially well tuned in to anagrams have probably noticed that "weird" and "wired" share the same letters, only slightly rearranged.
That little bit of orthographical synchronicity rather nicely sums up Serial Experiments Lain , certainly one of the weirdest anime of all time, and one which exploits a virtual world known as the Wired, which for all intents and purposes boils down to our very own internet.
The press sheet accompanying this handsomely packaged new set from Funimation Entertainment claims that Serial Experiments Lain "inspired" The Matrix , but lovers of cult television flops may wonder if perhaps Serial Experiments Lain was itself "inspired" by the little remembered series VR5 , which saw star Lori Singer as a telephone engineer lapsing in and out of various realities, with the viewer never quite sure what was actually happening and what was simply part of some mysterious virtual world.
Much the same thing happens to the heroine of Serial Experiments Lain , a young schoolgirl named Lain Iwakura who, as the series opens, finds herself a bit taken aback to receive an email from a classmate who has supposedly committed suicide the week before. There's an awful lot of "inspiration" going around, for lovers of cult film flops may recall something very similar happening in the thriller Pulse.
Serial Experiments Lain is one of the most intentionally intellectually dense pieces of anime ever produced, one which doesn't shirk from exploring, at least tangentially in some cases, some very thorny philosophical and even epistemological questions. As such, this is not typical "popcorn fare", and in fact requires a certain level of concentration to begin to ferret out what exactly is being hinted at, sometimes quite obliquely.
Lain is revealed to be a sweet if perhaps overly passive in her pre-Wired version, anyway young girl in the opening few episodes. She's surrounded by family members who are dysfunctional at best, including her typically dyspeptic if bored beyond tears teenage sister Mika, her oblivious mother who dotes on Mika but usually ignores Lain and her computer obsessed father, whose few interactions with his younger daughter revolve around updating her operating system.
Lain also doesn't seem to be particularly popular at school, though she does have a small coterie of friends, many of whom have also received the mysterious emails from the supposedly deceased classmate. Once Lain accepts the quasi-invitation to enter the Wired courtesy of her ostensibly dead classmate, Serial Experiments Lain begins its phenomenally trippy ride through a number of alternate realities, and, ultimately, alternate versions of Lain herself.
The viewer is consistently kept off kilter by what is happening where, something intentionally exacerbated by a non-linear approach to the story as well as a lot of onscreen data in the form of textual information that is presented as graphics and visual representations of things like online chat boards. As the series progresses, what rather fuzzy lines there ever were between the "real" world and the Wired are blurred to the point where they basically don't exist any more, which brings about one of the series' central plot points: who exactly is Lain, and what exactly is happening to or perhaps because of her?
Serial Experiments Lain is easily one of the most consistently thought provoking anime ever produced, one which deals with issues of identity and community in a "wired" world, and one which actually also touches upon some deeper issues of what exactly it means to be a human in a world so overrun with technology.
The series does have a tendency to engage in perhaps a bit too much psychobabble and technospeak, and there's absolutely no doubt that the intentionally oblique storytelling methods often lead to confusion and consternation, which is also obviously intentional. This is one of the few anime that never, ever dumbs down its content for the lowest common denominator, and in fact insists in its own hallucinatory way that the viewer rise up to its level of "vibration," a la the physical phenomenon of entrainment.
The series may not be overt enough for want of a better term to please some viewers, especially in the show's endgame, when Lain's "true" identity or should that be identities begins to be dealt with though again from an awfully discursive perspective.
This is one of those shows where the hero or heroine turns out to be a perhaps unwitting fulcrum around which everything pivots, and in that aspect at least Serial Experiments Lain may seem less convincing than it typically has been.
Photos Top cast Edit. More like this. Watch options. Storyline Edit. Lain Iwakura, an awkward and introverted fourteen-year-old, is one of the many girls from her school to receive a disturbing email from her classmate Chisa Yomoda-the very same Chisa who recently committed suicide.
Lain has neither the desire nor the experience to handle even basic technology; yet, when the technophobe opens the email, it leads her straight into the Wired, a virtual world of communication networks similar to what we know as the internet. Lain's life is turned upside down as she begins to encounter cryptic mysteries one after another. Strange men called the Men in Black begin to appear wherever she goes, asking her questions and somehow knowing more about her than even she herself knows.
With the boundaries between reality and cyberspace rapidly blurring, Lain is plunged into more surreal and bizarre events where identity, consciousness, and perception are concepts that take on new meanings. Present day, present time! Ha ha ha ha ha Not Rated. Did you know Edit. The extras are all on disc 2, and merely amount to the promo video for the soundtrack CD, and a small collection of commercials, all presented in i, and taken from the original Geneon release.
Conclusion Serial Experiments Lain is a great show, brilliant, thought provoking, intelligent cyberpunk. At the time of release, that technology would be cutting edge, even futuristic, but as time passes, the technology becomes dated, even twee and out of touch, and odd moments of what might have seemed like considered prescience at the time, turn out to be technological dead-ends.
I revisited one of my favourite tech-thriller movies earlier this year, Sneakers, and for once I found its analogue, and cumbersome technology to be a distraction from the story.
The same thing has happened to Serial Experiments Lain in my opinion, although not to as great a degree as with Sneakers. Serial Experiments Lain is a speculative bit of sci-fi that looks at the way people communicate and interact, and combines it with the, then nascent technology of the Internet. A lot of what this show predicted never came to pass, but you also have to remember that Serial Experiments Lain was made when the Internet was but 5 years old or so.
Today, the Net experience is pretty much seamless, and the technology is invisible. But those early netizens of the late nineties had it harder. That was the world of the Internet as existed when Serial Experiments Lain was made, and that is the world that it extrapolates to its near future setting, where high school students are taught how to code in C, and while people may have smartphones of a sort, and high powered computers at home, they still tinker, and know what jumper settings to use.
The kind of kit that they use in Serial Experiments Lain, the technology that they foresaw, is now gathering dust in sheds, garages and attics, and the world has moved on. But for Serial Experiments Lain this is really just window dressing, as the central core of the story still remains strong. The suicide of a classmate sparks a lot of frenzied gossip in class when e-mails from the dead girl start appearing in inboxes. And it seems that Lain is already there. Her friends at school are curious as to what the meek and introverted girl was doing at the Cyberia Nightclub, albeit with a wholly different personality, and people make mention of Lain of the Wired.
How people communicate online is becoming more and more enmeshed with how they communicate in real life, and pretty soon the unreality of the Wired begins to overwhelm the real world. As the two worlds begin to blend, and it becomes clear that whoever controls the Wired controls the real world, conspiracies arise to take control of the Wired, conspiracies for which Lain will be a key player.
And it leads to Lain questioning the nature of her very existence. Each time I watch it, I see it with fresh eyes and find a different angle to appreciate.
The Blu-ray release of this show is good, but not great, with digital banding issues and a couple of up-scaled scenes near the end letting the side down. This is by no means the typical kind of anime or science fiction, as it takes a slower, more complex approach, which might not mesh with some viewers. This is as well written and executed as you could want from a series, very detailed and complex throughout.
This terrific and memorable series has been released in a couple incarnations, with single discs issued and a rare lunchbox edition, complete with soundtrack CD. The case is much like other box sets out there, with a sturdy cardboard case that holds the discs, but this one has a nice touch that makes it stand out from the crowd. A very cool plastic blue shield slides into place over the box, which looks excellent, I think.
I highly recommend this series to anyone who likes science fiction or intense mysteries, especially in this gorgeous box set from Pioneer. The episodes are shown in full frame transfers, as intended.
0コメント