I don't make it a point to cry when I'm watching cartoons, but Lain beat the living hell out of my emotions. Even the opening title sequence draws you in, with its careful attention to camera, style, and its mournful score. minimalist yet so rich that each shot breathes with its own life. There's enough mystery and enough seeds planted to keep the viewer watching from one episode to the next. Serial Experiment Lain is simply incredible. I can't stress how shocked I was when I swapped DVD #3 for DVD #4 and looked at my watch to realize I'd been sitting in one place for over four and a half hours. I figured I'd watch the first four episodes and scrap the rest. Not only did it look like your typical 'what is it all about' anime, but it was a thirteen-episode series, clocking in at well over five hours. I was very, very skeptical about watching Lain. I decided, at that point, that I would never understand anime to a degree where I could be pleased with it, and abstained from watching it for a while (with the exception of the occasional Ranma1/2 episode, at the behest of my then-girlfriend). I grew very tired of essays on where mankind came from and where it was going. I'm not ashamed to admit that I had to watch Akira three or four times before I fully understood it, and Ghost in the Shell had to live in my VCR for a couple weekends until I was satisfied I'd eked whatever shred of understanding out of it that I could. and it's almost totally inaccessible to myself. Navis and Macintoshes are both built by companies named after fruit, Tachibana (a type of orange) and Apple, respectively.Īnime existentialism, generally speaking, is largely inaccessible to western audiences. The HandiNAVI, the handheld computers which both Lain and Arisu used was based off the Apple Newton, the first PDA. The child's Navi that Lain used to use was modeled after the 20th Anniversary Macintosh. The electronic voice heard saying the episode titles is the 'Whisper' voice from the MacOS Speech Control Panel, a program that permits text-to-speech.

All of the Navis shown in the series use one-button mice as Macintosh computers do.

Open the NeXT' is a reference to the NeXT company, founded by Steve Jobs in the late '80s and purchased by Apple Computer in December 1996. Arisu's Navi resembles the original Apple iMac.

Navi's operating system has a graphical user interface (GUI) similar to that of MacOS. The Navis use an operating system named Copeland, which was the codename for Apple's MacOS 8.

The Be company was founded by Jean-Louis Guasse, a former Apple executive. This is a reference to BeOS, whose logo has similar coloring. There are numerous references to Macintosh and Apple Computers: The phrase 'To Be Continued', with a colored 'Be' is shown at the end of most of the episodes.

Serial experiments lain ps1