Serial Experiment Lain was my first anime after a long time. A lot of free time had I got these past few weeks, which I spent shamelessly watching movies from before the 80’s to way back into the 60’s. Expect reviews. Bwahahahaha!
This show starts out VERY boring, let me warn you. This show was so boring that I couldn’t watch past the first 15 minutes of the first episode and decided to not watch the series. This happened THREE TIMES in the same year. And last week, I made up my mind and decided to sit through it. I’ve been having this anime in my possession for more than a year now and I thought, why not give it a try.
The show was very confusing at the beginning. The characters didn’t really talk that much. It was all too vague and unclear as to what was happening.
I had a lot of questions after only a little into the show.
-Why do shadows show red spots?
-Is it blood?
-If so, why so?
-Why am I still watching this s***?
And in my impatience I began to think the show was very much overrated, pretentious and not worth my time. Four episodes later, my opinion of the show took a complete U-turn.
Story: Not many spoilers… I promise.
Lain Iwakura is a total introvert. She goes to junior high and she doesn’t have many friends. Her family is nothing short of CRAP; computer geek father, deadpan blank mother and an idiot teenage sister. Lain doesn’t talk much to anyone at home either. If I had a family like this, I would run away and join the circus.
A girl in her class killed herself and her classmates start getting e-mails from the dead girl one day. Lain goes back home and asks her father to buy her a new computer(Navi), which is very weird as she never usually goes to her parents’ room at all.
He buys and sets up the new Navi for her and tells her about The Wired (something like a super-evolved form of the internet).
After which she starts seeing weird things, meets complete strangers who seem to know her very well, finds her house under surveillance by some men in black uniforms with strange looking eye gear and also gets mixed up with a maniacally powerful hacker group.
Review:
With a wide array of subjects like conspiracy theory, secret societies, religion, human emotions, psychology; Serial Experiments Lain is by far one of the most confusing yet amazing anime I’ve seen in my life. It has elements of horror and cyberpunk in it too but it is most distinctly a seinen anime with a deep psychological aspect to it.
One thing I respect this show for is that it conveyed an insanely huge message of such a serious nature and all but all this without a single trace of fan-service or nudity of any sort that one might begin to expect from a show of this kind. Yes, I do mean GITS and NGE by that.
The show was very well made and extremely researched. The story telling, though starts out boring, is pretty good and is sort of original in its approach(at that time, surely). Though I must say that fans of Shounen anime will find the series much too slow paced and uncomfortably boring. But trust me, sit it through and you’ll like it a lot.
This show reminded me a lot of Neon Genesis Evangelion and Ghost in The Shell. NGE in that the story is all very depressing and GITS because the whole show is somewhat cyberpunk… I think, and that the protagonist is a female.
And to summarize the entire series up in one word would be: MINDFVCK
Yeah. That totally sums it up.
Rating: Unable to give it a proper rating as I am yet to understand it completely.
Even so, I give it a rough rating of 8.7 on 10.
PS: Fans of the show may want to check out the OST for a track called “Cloudy with Occasional Rain” which has some Sanskrit verse in it and has pretty good beats. All I could catch was “Vande Padmakara(?), Prassana-vadana…”
Watching this show when under the influence of hard liquor and/or any other intoxicants can be very shibby. Very shibby indeed.
- Spoiler:
- The last episode made me smile. It was good. But the end left me with a lot of questions too.
