Serial Experiments Lain

A fairly recent Anime series. It is really good. Deals with the "Wired". It is kinda slow moving and existential. I came across it because I found the first disk really cheaply on a used DVD rack, and I wanted something for my new DVD drive. It hooked me into buying the rest of the disks (there are a total of 4) at $30 a pop. Oh well.

You'll, of course, want the subtitled versions not the dubbed ones. Judging by the first two layers (their term for an "episode"), Lain is full of visual Haiku in the grand tradition of Japanese cinema. It's very strange in some ways, but I mean that in the best sense possible. If I had a DVD drive, I'd probably pick up all thirteen layers. -- SunirShah

I disagree with that "of course." The English dub of Lain is considered excellent, even among Lain fans. There's nothing wrong with it. -- BrentNewhall

I like to hear the original voice actors' interpretations, and have a word-for-word translation. This often means an explanation at the beginning of an episode to explain the subleties of a particular word's translation (like the most common fansubs of InuYasha?), and it also means that viewers must be able to read FAST. Dubbing discards information, replacing it with whatever the English artists thought best. This is not necessarily bad, but I have enough fun with language consternation watching opera (where a 21st century performer might show what he thinks of what a 19th century French composer made of a Spanish librettist's work in Italian, set in Germany and performed in Australia. Cosmopolitan isn't - it's just an increase in vagueness).

Serial Experiments Lain is a Postmodern trip into the world of a young girl who discovers reality isn't quite what it seems... A total head-trip if you watch it all in one go- it will make you re-consider what the difference between the real world and the web is. Absolutely beautiful animation with more than enough trippy hallucination scenes. A must-see for anyone serious about modern anime.

The computers in SerialExperimentsLain are AppleMacintoshes:

http://www.cjas.org/~leng/apple-lain.htm

(Well, sort of. They use "Copland OS", which was the codename for MacOS 8's GUI revamp while it was in development. They don't look at all like any Apple which has ever existed, though.)

Copland wasn't MacOs 8's GUI revamp, it was one of Apple's numerous VaporWare revolutionary next-generation OSs. Alice's computer looks a lot like an iMac. The appearance of "think different" in episode 11 is a bit suspect, too. Okay, so maybe they're not actually macs (in fact, they definitely aren't, as they're made by the Tachibana company), but there's definitely some mac references in there.

There's also an attempt to vaguely imitate it at http://lainos.sourceforge.net/ . It looks like a FreeBSD-derived OS running BlackboxWindowmanager?, although I haven't used it. Also, I agree that the anime series is quite good. -SckotVokes

This movie really bothered me - especially every time I heard "Lain!", or "I'm me, Lain!". . . my name isn't that common, so I'm not used to hearing it used except to get my attention. - LayneThomas