A while back there was a run on half-priced anime, so I of course had to jump in on it.  Through various means, mostly my beloved Four-Star Video Heaven, I managed to acquire all of a series by the name of Serial Experiments Lain.  I’d never seen this series before.  I’d never even attempted to see it before.  Truthfully, I’d never even thought about attempting to see it before.  But, I had heard of it, I knew generally what it was about, and I knew that it was one of those shows that a lot of people know, so I anticipated it being at least watchable.  And watchable it is, though not in a dark room by yourself I would think.  At least not for people like me. 

Lain is weird.  It’s weird cyberpunk anime.  But it’s well done.  The animation is absolutely beautiful, especially considering that it was made in 1998 and all the advances that have been made in animation technology since then.  I mean, it’s not AWESOME by any means, but it’s good.  It’s good in a sort of unfinished sort of way.  But not like a Noein unfinished sort of way where you’re wondering if they did it on purpose or if they ran out of animation budgets.  More like, the parts that are unfinished are definitely like that for the artistic quality.  And it IS artistic.  I like the small detail points they put in, like how all the shadows have this sort of red dot fill in them.  Good effect.  The characters and faces aren’t anything to write home about, but they are well drawn and the fluidness of their movements and integration with the background is some of the most well-done and not simultaneously obvious CG I have ever seen.  The actual faces and characters are nothing spectacular, but I think its better that way. 

As for content, I’d like to be able to tell you what it’s about, but in order to do that I would have to understand it.  And I don’t.  Not yet anyway, and I’m confident that I could go out on a limb and say that I won’t understand it by the end of the series either (I’ve only watched the first disc really).  This series really makes you think.  It’s a show about interconnectedness really.  At first you think it’s just another take on GiTS without all the badass fighting action, but the more you watch the more you learn.  We start with Iwakura Lain.  She’s in junior high.  She’s the quiet girl, she’s not into the net at all, and she doesn’t even know to check her e-mail.  She wears the most adorable full teddy bear suit pajamas.  This girl is NOT the cool girl in school.  But for some reason, the cool girls in school like her.  We pretty much start the main story with everyone in the class getting an e-mail from a girl in their school who had recently killed herself by jumping off a building in Shibuya.  And Lain doesn’t know about it, because she doesn’t check her mail.  So, she goes, she checks, and she finds an interest in the net.  Her dad is a computer otaku who’s glad Lain is taking an interest finally.  And then the girls invite Lain to the club downtown where apparently all the “bad” junior high kids (whatever that means) hang out.  And this is where things start getting weird.  Lain gets absorbed into the net.  It becomes an obsession to her in a lot of ways.  She has a desire to know.  Her father warns her to remember that the net is not the real world, but she says he’s wrong.  Lain stresses over and over and over again that everyone is connected.  THAT’S the point of the show. 

We get little to no actual insight into the characters.  Lain is changing, the girls at school want to be her friends, but yet don’t, her dad’s a huge otaku, her big sister is a really big bitch, and her mom is disconnected and generally not a good parent.  This is really all we know about them.  Yet that’s ok.  It’s ok because the point is that each of these characters is exactly like someone that we could know.  We’re ALL connected. 

That’s really all I have to say right now.  I’ll check in after we’ve finally watched all of the series (it’s a group venture….everyone involved in the watching has agreed that we don’t want to watch it alone because it’s so eerily weird).  After watching the first disc I kinda felt like my brain was spinning, though not in the same way as GiTS or RahXephon.  I think it’s because I’ve recently read the book Snow Crash which is ironically similar to what’s going on in Lain. I can’t claim to have completely understood that book either, but it certainly helped me grasp the concepts of this show.  Bottom line is that this isn’t your typical anime.  It makes you think, it makes you wonder, it confuses, amazes, and frustrates you.  But it’s so beautifully done that this is definitely worth a watch.   

posted by Yukino @11:23 PM

Well....They Wrapped That Up Well.

Alright.  So Mayama and Dragonslippers and I have finished our "let's all watch Lain together in a room with all the lights on" quest, and I have to say that it ended better than I thought it would.  Lain is an interesting series.  Ok, yes....interesting in the standard way that things are interested (in that it held my attention), but also interesting in that I went in cycles of understanding what they were getting at to completely confused.  Largely within one episode.  We'd end one and I'd think to myself, "Ok, I get that."  And then they'd just go as weird as possible for the entire first half of an episode until I was hopelessly tweaked out, and then they'd be like "you think you get it......well....GET THIS!!!" and throw a wrench in the mix.  This happened like 4 or 5 times probably, my favorite being that at the end of episode 10 I understood, but by the end of episode 11 I was more confused than EVER (and Lain starts out by saying, "I'm confused again."  To which all of us could do nothing but laugh and respond, "No f-ing shit?!?!").  BUT!  The important thing is that, in the end, I came out getting it!  I understood why things were the way they were, and what happened.  I'm not saying I got ALL of it, but I sure felt a lot better than I did after things like Eva and RahXephon.  This may be because of the afforementioned Snow Crash, and because the ending is rather Donnie Darko-esque (Yukino favorite movie cheers!).  But I'm largely pleased. Don't get me wrong, it was a mentally taxing 13 episodes complete with several WTF?!?!?! moments and a lot of going...."I get it...wait, no I don't.", but I was largely pleased with this series.  I'd recommend it, but certainly not to someone who likes their anime light and easy to digest.

posted by Yukino @7:58 PM