Serial Experiments Lain

Brief anime review of Serial Experiments Lain from studio Triangle Staff. It consists of 13 layers, each one unveiling the story.

"Present day....Present Time"

All begins with the mysterious suicide of a high-school girl, Chisa Yomoda. Chisa-chan was a classmate of Lain Iwakura, a quiet and introverted, 14-year-old high-school girl. One of the other girls in the class has been receiving e-mail messages from Chisa-chan, and Lain discovers she also has mail from Chisa-chan. In the mail she explains to Lain that she just abandoned her flesh. She assures lain that she still is alive in the 'wired' world.

After getting a new computer (called Navi) and adding a 'psyche' circuit, Lain spends more and more time in the wired network to the point of adding coolant systems in her bedroom for her computer.

Lain's parents are very distant and don't seem like a close-knit family. Lain's older sister is worried about her, but that feeling fades after she sees Lain becoming more involved with the network and encounters a very different Lain on the street than the one who goes to school (possibly a hallucination).

The series mentions Project KIDS, an online game that causes young people to spend hours online, becoming absorbed in the virtual world and eventually losing the ability to distinguish reality from the game. It also mentions a new kind of nano robots acting as new world's drugs and a group of super hackers called Knights who have managed to create specialized hardware to delve deeper into the network.

Lain seems to have two personalities. One is a quiet Lain who goes to school, and the other is a more rebellious Lain who appears online and is even considered a goddess due to her almost omnipresent presence in that subculture. Later it is mention that her parents were part of a project of a company called Tachibana so they are not her real family.

Also it appears that Lain has made public the love interest of her friend at school but Lain from the real world is unaware of that event and the Lain from the network tries to fix that.   Is the real world nothing but a hologram of the information in the wired?

Personal comment:

Serial Experiments Lain is a mystery and psychological thriller series that revolves around the internet and the use of technology and computers to navigate it. It consists of 13 episodes called "layers" with an animation style that blends shadows with traditional animation. It makes constant, and at times repetitive, use of the same scenes and text or audio overlays to convey an idea.

A very recurring scene is that of electrical towers as an allegory of how connected we are in the real world.

My favorite character is Lain, specially her hair design and when she dresses with her bear outfit ^_^. Furthermore, the opening song "Duvet" is catchy and is performed by the Japanese group "Boa".