Serial Experiments Lain Was Made by a Team With Almost No TV Anime Experience. The Character Designer Had Never Worked on an Anime Before.
By Jimigrimm
In 1998, a team of first-timers made an anime that a devoted audience has been discussing for 28 years. Director Ryutaro Nakamura had directed OVAs and films but had never directed a television anime. Writer Chiaki J. Konaka had written for live-action and video games but had never written a TV anime script. Character designer Yoshitoshi ABe was a graduate student who had never worked on any anime production. Producer Yasuyuki Ueda pulled them together and gave them a concept: a girl, a global communications network, and the question of what happens when the boundary between the physical world and the digital one stops being clear.
The result was Serial Experiments Lain. 13 episodes. Animated by Triangle Staff. Broadcast on TV Tokyo from July 6 to September 28, 1998. The same year Cowboy Bebop, Trigun, and Outlaw Star premiered. Those shows became gateway anime for a generation of Western fans. Lain became something different: a show that a smaller group of people found, couldn’t explain, and never stopped thinking about.
What the Show Is
Lain Iwakura is a quiet, socially isolated middle school girl living with a family that barely interacts with each other. Her father is obsessed with computers. Her mother is emotionally absent. Her sister ignores her. Then a classmate named Chisa commits suicide, and students at Lain’s school start receiving emails from Chisa claiming she’s alive inside the Wired, a global communications network that functions like a more immersive version of the internet.
Lain investigates. She upgrades her computer. She goes deeper into the Wired. And the deeper she goes, the more the boundary between who she is online and who she is in the physical world starts to dissolve. There are multiple versions of Lain in the Wired, some of them doing things the real Lain never agreed to. The show follows her as she tries to understand what’s happening to her identity, who built the Wired, and whether the version of her that exists in the network is more real than the one sitting in her bedroom.
The show doesn’t explain much. Scenes cut without resolution. Dialogue stops mid-thought. Long stretches of silence are broken by the hum of power lines, a recurring sound that becomes one of the show’s most distinctive elements. Konaka structured it so that understanding comes from feeling, not from following a plot. The production team described their shared goal across both the anime and the accompanying PlayStation game as wanting audiences “to feel Lain, and to understand her problems, and to love her.
A Deliberate Risk
Ueda considered the production “an enormous risk.” He conceived Lain as a multimedia project: the anime, a PlayStation game, and an artbook were designed to work together, each one expanding the story from a different angle. The scenario for the video game was written first. The anime was produced at the same time but released before the game. Ueda’s stated approach was “to communicate the essence of the work by the total sum of many media products.”
He also designed the show as what he called “a sort of cultural war against American culture and the American sense of values we adopted after World War II.” He wanted Japanese and American audiences to interpret the show differently. He built it with values he considered distinctly Japanese and hoped that the gap in interpretation would create “a war of ideas” between the two cultures. When both audiences ended up holding similar views about the show, he was disappointed.
Konaka, when asked if Evangelion had influenced Lain’s themes or visual design, denied it. He said he hadn’t even seen Evangelion until he finished writing the fourth episode of Lain.
The Design Decisions
ABe’s character designs were his first professional anime work. He was a graduate student who had been publishing illustrations online and making doujinshi. Ueda found him and brought him onto the project. ABe went on to create Haibane Renmei four years later, working again with Ueda.
Lain’s visual design was shaped by specific demands from the production team. Her asymmetrical left forelock was a request from Ueda, designed as a mystical symbol to prevent voices and spirits from being heard by the left ear. The goal was to create visual asymmetry that reflected Lain’s unstable nature. Her bear pajamas were a demand from character animation director Takahiro Kishida. Konaka initially opposed them. Director Nakamura explained that the bear motif could function as a shield Lain wears during confrontations with her family.
The opening theme, “Duvet,” was performed by Bôa, a British band. An anime about Japanese identity and the dissolution of reality opens with a song in English by a group from London. The ambient and electronica score was composed by Reichi Nakaido, and the soundtrack became inseparable from the show’s atmosphere in the same way Yoko Kanno’s scores became inseparable from Cowboy Bebop and Wolf’s Rain.
1998
Serial Experiments Lain won the Excellence Prize at the Japan Media Arts Festival in 1998. It aired the same year as Cowboy Bebop, Trigun, and Outlaw Star. All four shows built audiences that have lasted over 25 years, though Lain’s stayed smaller and more devoted than the rest. While the other three found large audiences through Toonami and Adult Swim, Lain found its audience through word of mouth, import DVDs, and later through streaming.
The show explored themes of internet identity, surveillance, and the erosion of the boundary between online and offline life in a year when most of its audience was still using dial-up. The in-show nightclub is named Cyberia, after Douglas Rushkoff’s 1994 nonfiction book about internet subculture, which Ueda has cited as an inspiration for the series. The computers in the show are called “Navi,” and fans have long connected the name to “Knowledge Navigator,” the future-computing concept coined in 1987 by former Apple CEO John Sculley in his book Odyssey. The link has never been confirmed by the show’s creators, but the resemblance, a personal computer that connects everyone to a vast network, is hard to miss.
In 2018, the 20th anniversary brought the entire original production team back together at an event held at CIRCUS Tokyo, themed around the show’s in-universe nightclub Cyberia. Ueda, Konaka, ABe, voice actress Kaori Shimizu, and DJ Chikada “JJ” Wasei all attended. The vocalist of Bôa, who couldn’t attend in person, sent a video message. In 2019, the franchise took the rare step of opening up the IP for individual fan-created works in Japan under specific conditions, an almost unheard-of move for an anime property.
The show’s cult following has never crossed into the mainstream. It has grown steadily for 28 years the way cult anime tend to grow: one person watches it, can’t stop thinking about it, and tells someone else.
Have you seen Serial Experiments Lain? Did you find it through ABe’s name, through the Haibane Renmei connection, or through someone who told you it would change how you think about the internet? When did you watch it, and has the way you understand it changed as the real world has caught up to the Wired? We want to hear.
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