How does one defines what SE: Lain is? It is an early very experimental animated series. Which in USA/EU values would be called ART HOUSE. Because this is not DBZ, nor Akira, not Ghost in the Shell. This goes DEEP! It is, something else, in a good way. Psychedelic, deep, questioning reality, questioning values. And it is ancient. This is one of the special titles that is known by Anime fans as an oddity. But a worthy oddity. This is an Anime that makes you THINK. I don't suggest this for Movie Nights unless you are with a very specific crowd that loves DEEP movies. But if you want something that isn't just a cute little anime or action series. You might just want to meet LAIN. And it is worth owning on Blu-ray. Trust me. They don't make stuff like this ... this is trippy and good. And it sets something special. It stays in your memory even after you seen so many other Animated Series... this is so different.
I enjoy Serial Experiment's Lain anime, so wanted to own it in Blu-ray form. It includes a few fun extras such as trailers and creditless OP and ED. It got delivered quite promptly and I was able to start watching it on my Playstation.
On m'a recommandé cet anime un bon nombre de fois. Tout le monde m'a dit qu'il était génial et que c'était un grand classique. Commandé sur amazon, reçu nickel, CD sans rayure, anime visionné. Verdict ? Tout simplement génial. Certes il faut avoir le cerveau accroché pour comprendre à peu près tout ce qui se passe (surtout à partir de l'épisode 8), mais en dehors de ça, je n'ai rien à redire.
Serial Experiments Lain est une production de qualité, qui mérite son statut d'incontournable et qui nous laisse un goût amer une fois qu'on l'a terminé. Pour ceux qui hésite encore, je le recommande fortement, avec Boogiepop Phantom qui est du même calibre côté narration perchée.
J'émets cependant une petite réserve concernant le livret qui est bourré de fautes d'orthographe, là par contre je dois avouer que c'est le genre de chose qui m’énerve un peu, mais bon rien de grave.
5つ星のうち5.0An Eerily Prescient Vision of the Present
2014年7月11日にアメリカ合衆国でレビュー済み
Amazonで購入
It seems with every passing day, we inch a bit closer to the Internet of Things, in which everything from small appliances to large factories will be connected to--and controllable over--the Internet. Consider for a moment that ten years ago Facebook was just getting going and the smartphone was limited, outside of Japan, to the BlackBerry and a handful of Windows Mobile devices that no one particularly liked.
Six years earlier, the Internet was a rough, largely uncharted territory only recently gone mainstream. Sure, it was exciting to be able to access porn whenever we wanted, and playing chess via email with people in South Africa was kinda neat, but no one outside of a very specialized group could foresee how ubiquitous the Internet would one day become. In 1998, to most of the world, the Internet was just a big computer network.
Enter Serial Experiments Lain.
First broadcast in Japan over the summer of 1998 and premiering nine months before The Matrix hit American theaters, Lain tells the story of Lain Iwakura, a painfully introverted adolescent girl living in Japan. At the start of the series, Chisa, a girl from Lain's school, commits suicide by jumping from the top of a building. Shortly thereafter, Lain and her schoolmates begin receiving emails from Chisa stating that everyone needs to come to the Wired as soon as possible because there is a god in the Wired. The Wired is a global information network analogous to the Internet but connected to virtually everything in the world. In order to continue communicating with her dead friend, Lain asks her father to buy her a new computer, called a Navi in the show, presumably a shortening of Navigator, and from there, any summary of the show's plot is going to fail. There is simply too much going on, too many characters with too many motivations, too many red herrings, and too many tonal shifts to keep track of.
Several years ago, I taught Lain as a literature unit in one of my classes. We viewed each episode, discussed the characters and the themes, the complexity of the narrative, in short we READ the series instead of simply viewing it, which I maintain is the best way of approaching Lain. It may not have been my most successful teaching moment, but I still have students now who come to me and talk about it. This is the kind of series that really does stay with its audience, and repeat viewings yield fresh revelations. That is, once the audience gets past one small but significant fact:
Lain. Is. Weird.
We can start with the odd time setting of the series, which is announced at the beginning of most episodes as "Present day, present time," followed by a maniacal laugh and bursts of static. It's an unsettling announcement because, as we move through narrative, we're confronted with a world that resembles our own in many ways but not technologically, though it can be argued that Lain more closely resembles the technological world of 2014 than it did the technological world of 1998. In that sense, though, the opening only becomes unsettling in how prescient the series would turn to be. Regardless, the opening remains unsettling because of a basic perceptual conflict: the "Present day, present time" setting is not the "now" of the audience, but rather the "now" of the series. In essence, the show announces that it is set when it is set.
Adding to the weirdness is the fact that episodes are not called episodes or chapters. They are called Layers, as in a layer that must be peeled away in order to get to the heart of the matter, to make sense of the series as a whole.
And then there are the characters themselves. Lain is an adolescent girl who can barely speak to her own family, let alone her friends. Lain's mother could not be more disengaged from her two daughters. Lain's sister literally disappears before Lain's eyes at the end of the fifth layer only to be replaced by what might charitably be considered a shell of a human being. And Lain's father, who shows the most emotion of anyone in her immediate family, appears to genuinely love his daughter even as he is cut off, sometimes quite literally, from her. One of my favorite shots of the first episode involves Lain asking her father for a new Navi. She walks into his study and is almost completely blocked from him by a kind of wall of computers and monitors. Her father talks to her but never really holds a dialogue with her, instead becoming excited over something he finds on the Wired while Lain is talking.
And that is one of the major themes of the series: people being disconnected from one another. The Wired as a result becomes an intricate metaphor for human interaction: people log on and "connect" with other people, but those connections are fleeting and not real in any substantive sense. Think of it as Facebook. You have 5000 friends on Facebook, but how many of those friendship are really real? How many of them are tangibly real?
This brings up another one of the major concerns of Lain: the question of reality. What is reality? What does it mean to be real? Where is the line drawn between the real and the unreal? And by extension, is it possible for the unreal to become real?
Going back to our Facebook example, many friendships may not be real in literal, tangible sense, but they are real insofar as they are an exchange of interests and communication and intimacies. They may not be as substantive as a flesh-and-blood friendship, but they are still real in some sense. Likewise, the Wired of the series is several times dismissed by characters as nothing more than a fancy way of transporting information, that it cannot be confused with the real world. However, to an introvert like Lain, the Wired represents a means of overcoming her shyness and allowing her truer, fuller self to emerge and interact freely with other people. In essence, Lain chooses a reality in which she have more control. Is it an illusion? Possibly, but it is still her reality.
Of course, we still have yet to discuss how the alien fits into all of this. I don't really have any answer to that.
And how the series ultimately plays out, how it evolves from a scared little girl playing on the Internet to its endgame, is all the more interesting for the way it effectively reframes the narrative. The final four layers can be thought of the story of a god who comes to Earth, forgets it is a god, experiences profound and disturbing loneliness, and inadvertently begins to destroy one reality by grafting a second reality on top of it. It that seems a bit heady to you, you're not alone. I've seen the complete series a dozen times and when I get to those last episodes, I still struggle with making them work.
And that might be the series' greatest failing. It is almost too complex for its own good. Too many questions are left not only unanswered but unanswerable. What exactly happens to Mika when she sees herself at the end of Layer 5? Who are the Men in Black and why are they looking to stop the Knights of the Eastern Calculus? What power does Masami Eri actually wield in the Wired? And in the end, who is the final, top-of-the-heap God?
Lain is a series that comes dangerously close to falling apart repeatedly throughout its run and yet manages to pull it all together into a more or less tight narrative by the end. What's more, while computers have been used a number of times as a metaphor for isolation and distance between human beings, I'm not sure it has ever been as effective as it is here, and the effectiveness has only grown in the intervening years due to our growing technological dependence.
The ending of the series deserves special note for how downbeat it is. Lain does find purpose and peace at the end of the series, but she is arguably even more isolated than she is at the beginning. Conventional interpretation seems to agree that the ending is as upbeat as is possible given the rest of the story, but I still find it very downbeat, very sad.
I highly recommend Serial Experiments Lain. I do advise you to watch it straight through, if possible, and be prepared to do a bit of research on the various names mentioned throughout the series, as that will help to explain some of the gaps.
One of my favourite anime, and a great release. Neat artbook inside, both BD and DVD included of the series. I wouldn't bother with the english dub, as it's sub-par as is typical of most english dubs.
I'm not a huge fan of the 5+ minutes of badly dubbed advertisements before getting to the menu, but otherwise this is worth a buy for fans of the show.
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