released 22 nov 03 / last mod 01 jun 07 / greg goebel / public domain
* At the beginning of director Ryutaro Nakamura's SERIAL EXPERIMENTS LAIN -- an original anime video, in 13 half-hour installments on four DVDs -- we meet Lain, a 14-year-old girl, a junior high student in a near-future Japan. She is very withdrawn and maybe a bit backwards, walking around at home wearing pajamas with a hood that make her look like a teddy bear. At 14, one would think a girl would be playing harder at seeming like a grown-up.
Lain's uncomplicated existence is disrupted when a classmate, a girl named Chisa who had been spending substantial time surfing the "Wired", as the near-future Internet is known, throws herself from the roof of a tall building. This in itself would not be very distressing to Lain, since Lain barely knew Chisa, but after Chisa's death Lain begins to get email from her. It seems, so the email Chisa claims, that she simply discarded her physical body so that she could move completely into the Wired.
Now Lain becomes more intrigued with the Wired and starts to delve into it, finding the boundaries between the Wired and the real world increasingly blurred, and also finding that she has an alter ego -- another Lain, aggressive and endowed with a cold, malevolent sexuality, completely the opposite of herself. As Lain goes through changes, her friend Arisu -- a warm and kind girl who honestly cares for Lain -- begins to worry about what is happening to Lain. From this point the story descends into a spiral of increasing chaos and destruction.
* I have been becoming increasingly disinterested in anime lately, as much of it seems pretty unimaginative and predictable. That could hardly be said of SERIAL EXPERIMENTS LAIN, which has very little connection to mainstream anime and much more connection to the experimental animation I used to watch in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It also reminds me of David Cronenberg's bizarre live-action movie VIDEODROME from 1983, in focusing on a dangerous blurring of the lines between physical and virtual realities and in having something of the same cold and unsettling style.
The artwork is rooted in traditional anime, at least from one angle, with the character design and some of the "sets" used in the story implemented in very typical anime style and level of quality. This aspect of the graphics, however, is often embedded in surrealistic backgrounds and other details, such as the odd "burning" appearance of shadows, and is interspersed with equally surrealistic computer graphics used to show interface to and travel through the Wired, as well as manipulated photography, such as the running visuals of power lines and transformers.
As far as the story goes -- anyone who is after a typical amusing action-adventure anime will not like SERIAL EXPERIMENTS LAIN. LAIN is generally slow-paced, giving a sense of surreal eeriness, with tedium interspersed with scenes of violence. The script is loose, sometimes excessively so. SERIAL EXPERIMENTS LAIN often succeeds superbly in bringing across its sense of unreality, but in some cases it merely comes across as silly, muddled, and pretentious. The theme music follows the same pattern: often doing much to create the strange mood of this production, particularly in the intro credits segment of each episode, but occasionally falling down on the job.
SERIAL EXPERIMENTS LAIN is labeled "for 16 and above" and I would have to agree that's about right. Younger viewers would not be likely to know what to make of it, and might not handle its cold and lonely atmosphere well. One intense scene, where the evil Lain violates ("invades" would not be a strong enough word) Arisu's privacy, is painful enough for an adult; it would be way too much for young kids.
Overall, in terms of its construction, I have to give SERIAL EXPERIMENTS LAIN a mixed grade. There is much in it that is well done, but I think it would have gone from "interesting" to "superb" if it had been cut to about 9 or 10 episodes from 13, and if the script had been tidied up here and there, using test audiences to identify bits where a little more explanation (or a little less) would have improved the impact of the whole. That said, I have to give SERIAL EXPERIMENTS LAIN a top grade in terms of its enthusiastic willingness to break out of the box of anime conventions and show that much more could be made of anime than otherwise is.
