The Knights of the Eastern Calculus

I spent 4.5 hours of the past week watching the anime Serial Experiments: Lain. In the USA, animation usually means kids' stuff or funny stuff. In Japan, animation can be as serious as Ibsen. Although the central character of Lain is a girl about 11 years old (the program notes say she's 13, but she seems younger), it's not for kids. Forget Walt Disney, or even Miyazaki; this extravagantly bizarre tale's affinities are with Philip K. Dick and William Gibson. I'm not going to try to summarize the story. It has to do with the virtual world impinging on reality, and memory and identity, and friendship; imagine a cross between Neuromancer and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch featuring Japanese schoolgirls. (There's also some silly talk about God, which has more to do with geeky hybris than theology.)

Lain consists of 13 20-minute episodes (25 minutes, if you count the opening and closing music) that originally aired late at night on Japanese television (so, in a sense, I do watch tv). The drawing and animation is not as lush as in a Miyazaki film, but the art, which features a generous use of computer effects, is adequate to tell the story. And there is a story, though it might be hard to follow for the first few episodes.

Lain is not a complete success. I didn't mind the deliberate pace, but the series overall is too long and repetitious. The explanation of the riddle of Lain is not as interesting as the mystery. Loose ends are left dangling. And there's the unforgivable lapse in a later episode when storytelling is halted for a lecture on Vannevar Bush and John Lilly.

Nevertheless, Serial Experiments: Lain is probably the closest dramatic equivalent of a Philip K. Dick novel ever made, and I recommend it to all connoisseurs of woozy realities. (Let me emphasize again that this is not for children; it will either bore them stiff or give them nightmares.)

*****

Soundtrack: Richard Thompson, "Shoot Out the Lights"

MORE...