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Serial Experiments Lain

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Serial Experiments Lain is a thirteen-episode anime miniseries written by Chiaki J Konaka and directed by Ryūtarō Nakamura .

It tells the story of Lain Iwakura as she finds her way through The Wired .

The series was originally broadcast on TV Tokyo from July 6 to September 28, 1998, and explores themes such as reality, identity, and communication through philosophy, computer history, cyberpunk literature, and conspiracy theories.

2.1 Production
4 Theme songs
7 External links

Episodes [ ]

Infornography

Development [ ]

Production [ ].

Serial Experiments Lain was conceived, as a series, to be original to the point of it being considered "an enormous risk" by its producer Yasuyuki Ueda . He explained he created Lain with a set of values he took as distinctly Japanese; he hoped Americans would not understand the series as the Japanese would. This would lead to a "war of ideas" over the meaning of the anime, hopefully culminating in new communication between the two cultures. Later, when he discovered that the American audience held the same views on the series as the Japanese, he was disappointed.

The Lain franchise was originally conceived to connect across forms of media (anime, video games, manga). Producer Yasuyuki Ueda said in an interview, "the approach I took for this project was to communicate the essence of the work by the total sum of many media products". The scenario for the video game was written first, and the video game was produced at the same time as the anime series, though the series was released first. A dōjinshi titled "The Nightmare of Fabrication" was produced by Yoshitoshi ABe and released in Japanese in the artbook Omnipresence in the Wired. Ueda and Konaka declared in an interview that the idea of a multimedia project was not unusual in Japan, as opposed to the contents of Lain, and the way they are exposed.

In 2009, Yoshitoshi ABe announced a spiritual sequel to Serial Experiments Lain called Despera who will reunited many of the staff who worked on Serial Experiments Lain, including Chiaki J Konaka and Ryūtarō Nakamura .

Reception [ ]

Words like "weird" or "bizarre" are almost systematically associated to review the series by English Language reviews due mostly to the freedoms taken with the animation and its unusual science fiction, philosophical and psychological context. Despite the show judged atypical, the critics responded positively to the thematic and stylistic characteristics. It was praised by the Japan Media Arts Festival, in 1998, for "its willingness to question the meaning of contemporary life" and the "extraordinarily philosophical and deep questions."

In 2005, Newtype USA stated that the main attraction to the series is its keen view on "the interlocking problems of identity and technology". The author saluted Abe's "crisp, clean character design" and the "perfect soundtrack." It concluded saying that "Serial Experiments Lain might not yet be considered a true classic, but it's a fascinating evolutionary leap that helped change the future of anime."

In 2001, Lain was subject to commentary in the literary and academic worlds. The Asian Horror Encyclopedia calls it "an outstanding psycho-horror anime about the psychic and spiritual influence of the Internet" noticing the presence of horror lore (like ghost from train accident story) and horrific visuals.

The Anime Essentials anthology, Gilles Poitras describes it as a "complex and somehow existential" anime that "pushed the envelope" of anime diversity in the 1990s, alongside the much better known Neon Genesis Evangelion and Cowboy Bebop.

In 2003, Professor Susan J. Napier, in her reading to the American Philosophical Society called The Problem of Existence in Japanese Animation. Napier asks whether there is something to which Lain should return, "between an empty real and a dark virtual ."

In 2020, the review-aggregation website website Rotten Tomatoes, classified Serial Experiments Lain as one of the 25 anime TV series that have been essential to the medium over the last five decades. [1]

"Serial Experiments Lain helped usher in a new style of anime, of more digitally-produced shows with a glossy bloom and deeper, darker, complicated storylines. In the wake of Neon Genesis tearing up the typical anime playbook, Lain pursues a surreal, interior cyberpunk story about a withdrawn high school girl who receives an email from a classmate who has recently committed suicide. Questions of hyperreality, consciousness, and the everyday tangibility of cyberspace ensue. Lain is pretentious, symbolic, and absorbing – a prime example of a brave new world in anime."

Despite the general positive feedbacks, some negative critics stated the "lifeless" setting it had [2] , how the last episodes failed to resolve the questions, and how the show relied so little on dialogue [3] .

Japan Media Arts Festival 1998: Excellence Prize [4]

Theme songs [ ]

Opening Theme: " Duvet " by BOA
Ending Theme: " Tooi Sakebi " by Reiichi "Chabo" Nakaido

Despite this claim, Lain contains extensive references to Apple computers, as the American brand was used at the time by most of the creative staff.

External links [ ]

Konaka's Official SEL site
Angelic Trust - Lain:Omnipresence
Thought Experiments: Lain
Mebious SEL Wiki
↑ https://editorial.rottentomatoes.com/article/essential-anime-series/
↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20110927060034/http://www.animeacademy.com/finalrevdisplay.php?id=201
↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20110826092828/http://www.ex.org/5.2/25-anime_followup_lain.html
↑ http://archive.j-mediaarts.jp/en/festival/1998/animation/works/06an_serial_experiments_lain/
1 Lain Iwakura
2 Serial Experiments Lain

Cast & crew
User reviews

Serial Experiments Lain

TV Mini Series

Strange things start happening when a withdrawn girl named Lain becomes obsessed with an interconnected virtual realm known as "The Wired". Strange things start happening when a withdrawn girl named Lain becomes obsessed with an interconnected virtual realm known as "The Wired". Strange things start happening when a withdrawn girl named Lain becomes obsessed with an interconnected virtual realm known as "The Wired".

Yasuyuki Ueda
Kaori Shimizu
Bridget Hoffman
Randy McPherson
97 User reviews
33 Critic reviews

Episodes 13

Serial Experiments: Lain: The Complete Collection

Top cast 99+

Lain Iwakura

Additional Voices …

Additional Voices
DJ (Present Day announcer)

Mika Iwakura
Arisu Mizuki

Reika Yamamoto

Yasuo Iwakura

Lain's NAVI …
Miho Iwakura

All cast & crew
Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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Did you know

Trivia The two MIBs actually have names. The name of the short, Asian MIB is Lin Sui-Xi. The name of the tall, Caucasian MIB is Karl Haushofer. His character was the only one to be addressed by name during the series.

Lain Iwakura : No matter where you are, everyone is always connected.

Connections Featured in AMV Hell 3: The Motion Picture (2005)
Soundtracks Duvet Performed by Boa

More to explore

The Ending Of Serial Experiments Lain Explained

Years before social media as we know it, before Cambridge Analytica, before even "The Sims" or "The Matrix," there was "Serial Experiments Lain." This one-season wonder anime explored theories of metaphysics and epistemology with a cyberpunk sheen. It was the blueprint that a lot of media followed, like the "Matrix" series, the "Battlestar Galactica" prequel series " Caprica ," anime such as "Paranoia Agent" and " Paprika ," and IP-laden films like "Ready Player One" and " Space Jam: A New Legacy ."

"Serial Experiments Lain" is about a middle school girl named Lain, who receives an email from a classmate that died. The email explains that this classmate isn't really dead, but rather has merely shed her physical form. She now exists in the Wired (what people call the internet in "Lain") and has found enlightenment/met God in there. Lain delves deeper and deeper into the Wired, finding out truths about herself and the world around her. The Wired starts to affect reality, begging the question: Which world is really real?

Is the Wired real? Is reality real?

"Serial Experiments Lain" starts with what seems like a clear delineation between the "real" world and what goes on in the Wired. One is real, and the other is just communication between real people on a simulated plane of existence. When it's all said and done, the Wired is just a "medium of communication and the transfer of information," Lain's father says to her early in the show. "You mustn't confuse it with the real world." As the show progresses, the difference between reality and Wired get very muddy. Humans abandon their physical form to become programs, and programs become human and warp reality.

Part of this is due to how the internet works in the world of "Lain." The Wired is an online space that has somehow connected to the earth's magnetic field . By resonating with the earth, the Wired taps into a Jungian shared unconscious. Thus, what happens online becomes manifest through humanity's shared perception of reality. Our brains make it real.

Lain eventually discovers that she and her antagonist Masami did not start out life as humans. They are programs that have found a way to shift between the Wired and what we think of as reality. Lain realizes that she can control (or program) both the Wired and our physical plane of existence, like Neo and Bane in the "Matrix" sequels , but years before those came out. The show argues that our existence is defined by others' perception of it. We are other people acknowledging that we exist.

The nature of the extremely online self

In the final episode, Lain chooses to erase herself from existence by removing memories of her from her friends and family. This move underscores the sociological and psychological theory that there really is no such thing as a core self. What we think of as a Self is made up of how we are perceived and interacted with by others. Erving Goffman's "The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life" posits that the self is a character we play in our interactions with others. If you don't have an audience to play that part to, do you even have a self? As Lain puts it, "I only exist inside those aware of my existence."

Removing herself from a fixed point in existence frees Lain to do whatever she wants. She visits her childhood friend Alice as an adult, implying that by no longer being tied to a specific time and place in people's memory, she can now freely move anywhere and anywhen. However, this isn't how the internet works in real life. In an essay for the Ringer , Justin Charity argues that "Lain" presaged many of the ways the self would be destabilized by social media, for the worse. The more online versions of Lain are meaner, more reactive, and more vengeful. A girl who seems completely meek in her real world interactions becomes an avenging troll online. As we've seen with YouTube and Facebook , much of the internet exists to elicit strong emotions in us. Combine this with how online profiles decouple our online words from our faces, and you get anonymous trolls.

Echoes of Lain

"Serial Experiments Lain" was one of the first adult-oriented anime to break through to America. Like " Cowboy Bebop ," " Neon Genesis Evangelion ," and "Ghost in the Shell," it was consumed by a western audience that loved cyberpunk philosophizing. The show wasn't as widely seen as those other anime, perhaps because it never ran on Cartoon Network's Toonami block, but the themes of "Lain" have only gotten more relevant.

We see echoes of the show in films like "Inception" and "Transcendance," which the Daily Beast argued ripped off "Serial Experiments Lain" whole cloth. The idea of abandoning one's body and solely existing online pops up in shows like "Caprica" and " Dollhouse ," which question the idea of a soul and whether it can be uploaded to the cloud. Every person who questions whether this reality is a simulation is, whether they know it or not, following in Lain's footsteps.

The creators of the show went on to lend this philosophical vibe to later works, as well. Screenwriter Chiaki J. Konaka went on to write "The Big O," which also investigated ideas of simulated reality and the nature of memory and the soul. The main three collaborators on the show — Konaka, director Ryūtarō Nakamura, and artist Yoshitoshi ABe — worked together on a show about the unseen world of ghosts after "Lain." They were set to create another show, "Despera," until Nakamura's death in 2013. According to Konaka's Twitter , work recently restarted on the anime, with a major announcement due to come out in 2022.