Copyright © Triangle Staff * Pioneer LDC

"There is no spoon."
—The Matrix (1999)

A young girl stands on the concrete embankment of a tall building, barely holding onto the safety railing. She doesn't look like a very popular girl, doesn't look like she has many real friends. Sure, there are the so-called friends she associates with at school, but she doesn't have a true friend — one to share her secrets with, one to tell her joys, one to release her problems to. She is not alone, but she is lonely. And as she looks down to the street below that's littered with garbage, prostitutes and drunks, it offers her no solace. And perhaps, as she delicately dangles from the railing, perhaps she wonders "What if."

"What if I let go?"
"What if I die?"
"What if I can escape this place?"
The girl lets go of the railing.

Thus is the opening to Pioneer's domestically released SERIAL EXPERIMENTS LAIN. This eagerly-awaited show travels the gamut between life, death and a compromise of what lies in-between. The title character is Lain, who is much like the girl described above—a classmate of Lain's who leaped to her death to commit suicide. Lain is a sullen girl, her eyes seem to be windows into sadness. Her family life is nothing to speak of -- a catatonic bitter mother, a sister whose only interest is to not be at home and a father who dotes his time on an impressive array of computers.
As Lain walks to school the day after her classmate's suicide, she begins hearing an ominous hum emanating from the power cables strung up all over town. What may be diagnosed as just tinnitus is later revealed to be much more menacing. Once at school, Lain finds out that the deceased classmate has somehow been sending email to everyone in class ... after her death. Written off as a cruel prank by everyone else, Lain digs deeper into the mystery of the eerie email with the help of her personal Navi computer (perhaps the cutest computer I have even seen, iMac not withstanding).
What begins from there is a provocative, engaging and somewhat confusing voyage into the sublime. Visually crafted, LAIN looks to promote not only thinking of the mind, but thinking of the eyes. Psychedelic cut-scenes are liberally laced throughout the show, often with questions about existence. Computer technology is a central theme to LAIN and it is very reminiscent of 1999's Hollywood blockbuster THE MATRIX. As Lain starts to lose focus of what is the real world and what is an imaginary world, the introductory quote becomes quite relevant.
While director Nakamura Ryutaro has done an excellent job with keeping the audience in the dark and yet always wanting to know more, the art values are not up to par (which is becoming an alarming trend with television anime). Pioneer's dub of LAIN is ... adequate. There seems to be a general lack of emotion, but that can be attributed to the fact that everyone on the show is so depressing. Because of the many cut-scenes with questions being posed to the audience, Pioneer has done an excellent job of subtitling them; in fact, they are almost seamlessly integrated.
SERIAL EXPERIMENTS LAIN will take more than the usual four episodes to get a viewer interested in it; that is an obstacle for the show. But once past that hurdle, the trip into the mind's eye is quite spectacular and jolting.

English Version Produced by Pioneer Entertainment (USA) L.P.
Rated for ages 13 Up, 100 minutes
Hi-Fi Stereo
VHS dubbed: PIVA-2231D $24.98
VSH subbed: PIVA-2231S $29.98
DVD (catalog number not available) $29.98
Available now in the USA
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