Serial Experiments: Lain is an almost bewilderingly strange and wonderful 13-episode anime series that explored the possibilities of the web, and the interconnectedness of people, before that was a big thing (1998) – and clearly a forerunner to blockbuster films like The Matrix.
The series opens with the suicide of a schoolgirl named Chisa – witnessed by Lain Iwakura, a classmate. The last thing she says is that she no longer needs a body.
Lain Iwakura is a fourteen-year old girl who lives a normal life with her mother (Miho), father (Yasuo) and older sister (Mika). Of late, she’s been kind of spacing out at odd intervals. Three of her schoolmates – Alice, Juri and Reika persuade her to go to a club called Cyberia with them – and people seem to think they’ve seen her there before. All four have received emails from Chisa a week after her death.
When Lain, who has never really been into computers – called NAVI here – finds the email, she persuades her father to get her the latest model. Chisa has told her that she isn’t really dead – she’s just ‘abandoned her physical body and flesh’ and now lives in ‘The Wired’ – a sort of super network that connects all of humanity both through NAVI and its own collected unconscious.
As she gets into the Wired, she discovers that there is a cyber-version of herself that does things she’d never even think of doing. She eventually learns that Chisa isn’t the only person to forsake her physical body for the Wired – a man named Masami Eiri, who wrote a program (the Seventh Protocol) that allowed him to embed himself (mind, conscience, will, subconscious) in the Wired, where he came to think of himself as the God in the Wire.
The company he had worked for, Tachibana General Laboratories fired him for what he’d done and his body was found not long afterward.
Serial Experiments: Lain looks at the possibility that all of humanity is connected on a subconscious level (a reason why we built cities?) and that virtual reality and physical reality are actually layers of a total reality (episodes of the series are layers).
Add in a collective known as the The Knights of the Eastern Calculus – who seem to have an agenda that includes isolating Lain from the Wired – and you have an added global conspiracy layering in. Then there are two mysterious Men in Black, but are they connected to The Knights, Tachibana, Roswell (rumors play a significant role in the series)?
Designed by Yoshitoshi ABe (Haibane Renmei) and directed by Ryutaro Nakamura, Serial Experiments: Lain may not have the greatest animation, but it looks amazing. Shadows are dapple with bursts of blood red; when Lain leaves her normal looking home to go to school, she exits into a nearly all-white setting before it resolves into more normal scenery; Lain’s room goes from completely normal to dark, dank and vaguely steampunkish; virtual conversations appear as writing on vari-colored backgrounds; odd sequences are polarized and rendered in fluorescent reds and greens.
Both the original Japanese and dubbed English casts are very good and, in the English versions, the dubbing is well synchronized. The story, by Production 2nd, is not particularly concerned with being strictly linear and moves freely between physical and virtual realities as though they were truly just parts of a unified whole.
The series’ tagline – Close the World. Open the Next – is seemingly appropriately straightforward, but teases the weirdness to come.
Even the music for the series is an odd mix, from the very middle of the road pop song over the opening credits to the much harder-edged one under the closing credits, it captures Lain’s journey from ordinary fourteen-year old girl to…
Unfortunately, the Blu-Ray set features a fairly weak aggregation of bonus material. The set would score a much higher overall grade if it had been either broadened considerably or released without anything – and trailers for other series are not bonus material – they are marketing.
Features: Promo video; Original Commercial; Textless Opening Song; Textless Closing Song; U.S. Trailer
Grade: Serial Experiments: Lain – A
Grade: Features – D
Final Grade: B