Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #103635 in DVD
• Released on: 2006-11-06
• Rating: Suitable for 12 years and over
• Formats: Box set, PAL
• Original language: Japanese
• Number of discs: 4
• Running time: 325 minutes

Synopsis
The popular, surreal, and addictive LAIN series is collected in this special box set. Similar in scope to EVANGELION and KEY THE METAL IDOL, LAIN is a unique experience that is unabashedly much more bizarre than those groundbreaking and ambitious animes. The day after a classmate commits suicide, Lain, a 13-year-old girl, receives an e-mail from the dead girl: 'I just abandoned my body. I still live here'. Lain then begins to learn that there is an inexplicable link between the tactile world around us and the wired world, the strange virtual universe inside the computer.

Customer Reviews

Weird wired indeed but well worthwhile
It's not easy to say much about "Lain" without giving away plot points - though the plot is not so easy to summarise, come to that, either! Tvtropes calls it "creepy cool shojo cyberpunk", all of which is true enough. Initially it's very hard to work out what's going on, but this is certainly deliberate and mirrors Lain's own perplexity in her very odd and scary world. Eventually things do get clear enough.

If you're well up on classic anime you probably know about "Lain" and don't need my recommendation. If not, I guess it's likely to appeal to the sort of person who likes David Lynch movies AND ALSO "Spirited Away" or "Princess Mononoke". If you think the first half of "The Matrix" is wonderful, and find it disappointing when the film turns into a much more ordinary action movie, then you might do worse than to check out "Lain".

Visually it's very well done and it's continually inventive and intriguing even when obscure.

A final note - the protagonist is a very immature 13 year old girl, but the series is not suitable for very immature 13 year olds. There's little violence or overt sexual content, but there's a good bit of the slightly creepy sexualization of young girls which is obviously no big deal for Japanese audiences but could be uncomfortable for some viewers (maybe more unsettling for uptight old men like me than for actual teenagers, though). Child suicide figures quite prominently in the plot. The general tone is serious and adult and would be perplexing for a young child, but very rewarding for a bright and open-minded 14 or 15 year old - or adult.

The sort of people who like this will like it very much indeed.

Sci-Fi presented as though you're surfing the web
When I read that a girl receives an email from a dead classmate, I thought this series would deal with issues around the afterlife, instead the series is about the possibility of the internet merging with the real world through advances in technology.

The issue I have with the series though is not the subject matter but the way it's presented; in what I assume is the directors attmept to make the programme as close to surfing the web as possible the standard narrative is replaced with a jumpy blast of information which I found hard to follow.

Saying that though I was pleased with the story progression and I think it has taken a rational look at what the future maybe like if we continue to increase our dependency on computers. There are also good points to think about ie. which is the true you: your user profile or the you that goes to school/work etc.

If the storyline was easier to follow this series would have got 4 stars due to the origional story but as I found it hard to follow due to the jumpy narrative presentation it stays at 3 stars