You can watch as many anime series as you like, but you probably will never see anything like Serial Experiments Lain. Even though the series is nearing its 30th anniversary — it originally premiered in 1998 — it features themes that are relevant to this day, especially now that AI has become a part of our everyday life. If you missed it or felt like giving it a rewatch, MVM has excellent news. The series is getting a Blu-ray release on September 15.
Serial Experiments Lain is the kind of anime series where you have to be careful when explaining it because you can either spoil it or undersell it. For newcomers, it’s enough to know that it follows Lain Iwakura (voiced by Kaori Shimizu in the original Japanese and by Bridget Hoffman in the English dub), a middle school student that tries to live a normal life in Tokyo, Japan. She has a complicated relationship with her family and is a wallflower at school — but everything changes when she receives a message from a classmate that everyone thought was dead.
That’s as far as we can go in terms of story, but a lot can be said about Serial Experiments Lain’s themes and style. If there is one anime series that doesn’t spoon-feed you information, this is the one. Chances are that you will finish some episodes of the series even more confused than when you started. This happens because Lain doesn’t go for easy and direct answers; instead, it flirts with the abstract to leave interpretations as open as possible. The choice to do that is not random: the anime series’ themes include social isolation, our dependency on technology, paranoia, and depression.
‘Serial Experiments Lain’s Art Style Is An Attraction On Its Own
This is all told through a gorgeous and haunting visual style put together by Triangle Staff Corp., an animation studio that brought to life titles like Space Pirate Mito and NieA_7 before closing its doors in 2000. Considered way ahead of its time, Serial Experiments Lain was written by Chiaki J. Konaka (Digimon Tamers) and directed by Ryūtarō Nakamura (Sakura Wars).
Today, it’s relatively easy to connect Serial Experiments Lain with other titles like Black Mirror, Severance, and others. But back in 1998, there weren’t many titles like it. Fans are still wildly supportive of it, though — the series has a near-perfect 91% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes.
The Serial Experiments Lain Blu-ray edition hits shelves on September 15.