Rock is just too down-to-earth for this business.CharactersLain is not a girl I would want to take up in my arms and cuddle. Personally, I would have replaced the ill-fitting alternative-rock riffs for some Berg or Kurtag. A cruel beauty, if you will.SoundThe sound, or rather the lack of sound, suits the anime well, and eerie minimalist electronic music quietly adds to the unsettlement. It is a visual style so abstract it could be called meaningful, a style so distasteful it could be called artistic. The dark red splotches on the pavement hints at a shadowy world that lurks just beneath the real one solid gray figures sit inertly at their desks and on the train, unable to connect to the world around them connected power lines loom against a garish yellow sky, ready to entangle those who walk in their midst – they’re all symbols. Rarely does one come across an anime whose central tenets are linked so closely to how they are drawn. We will follow the mystery as if by masochistic impulsion, stomach the nearly indigestible, and then emerge at the end with our mind whirling but not made any better.AnimationThe animation does its job. The anime burrows under a smothering blanket of metaphors, leading us on and then giving us a paltry return for how much we invested. There have been arguments that Lain does this purposefully so that we can make our own conclusions, but the storytelling isn’t engrossing enough for us to even want to make our own conclusions.
In ingesting the Lain pill, the viewer becomes desensitized instead of enlightened, and eventually he gets lost and stops paying attention.įor all the effort it takes to watch the thing, it leaves one with a diaphanous general idea and little satisfaction. Is it possible, though, for subject matter like this to come in such an unsavory form? The anime’s highly experimental and impressionistic style ends up blurring much of what it wants to say. It uses an innovative, pertinent medium to ask an age-old question. In this way the anime is worthy of praise. As it ponders the consequences of over-stimulation and over-connectedness, we ourselves have to ponder if being connected is the only way to assert our identity. Now, more than ten years later, one could look at Lain and call it even more relevant. It’s like swallowing a series of shots that burn your throat and make you either drunkenly euphoric or nauseous.Īt the time, Serial Experiments Lain was covering ground few had covered before, and people were hailing the work as the turn-of-the-21st-century version of 1984. This anime is a hit-or-miss philosophical cesspool that could either captivate or disgust. If its purpose is to get you thinking, not so much.
StoryIf the purpose of Serial Experiments Lain is to get your mind whirling, it succeeds.
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