Serial Experiments Lain

Serial Experiments Lain is a thirteen-episode anime series written by Chiaki J Konaka and directed by Ryūtarō Nakamura.

It tells the story of Lain Iwakura as she finds her way through The Wired.

The series were originally broadcast on TV Tokyo from July 6 to September 28, 1998, and explore themes such as reality, identity and communication through philosophy, computer history, cyberpunk literature and conspiracy theory.

Production
Serial Experiments Lain was conceived, as a series, to be original to the point of it being considered "an enormous risk" by its producer Yasuyuki Ueda. He explained he created Lain with a set of values he took as distinctly Japanese; he hoped Americans would not understand the series as the Japanese would. This would lead to a "war of ideas" over the meaning of the anime, hopefully culminating in new communication between the two cultures. Later, when he discovered that the American audience held the same views on the series as the Japanese, he was disappointed.

The Lain franchise was originally conceived to connect across forms of media (anime, video games, manga). Producer Yasuyuki Ueda said in an interview, "the approach I took for this project was to communicate the essence of the work by the total sum of many media products". The scenario for the video game was written first, and the video game was produced at the same time as the anime series, though the series was released first. A dōjinshi titled "The Nightmare of Fabrication" was produced by Yoshitoshi ABe and released in Japanese in the artbook Omnipresence in the Wired. Ueda and Konaka declared in an interview that the idea of a multimedia project was not unusual in Japan, as opposed to the contents of Lain, and the way they are exposed.

In 2009, Yoshitoshi ABe announced a spiritual sequel to Serial Experiments Lain called Despera who will reunited many of the staff who worked on Serial Experiments Lain, including Chiaki J Konaka and Ryūtarō Nakamura.

Theme songs

 * Opening Theme: "Duvet" by BOA
 * Ending Theme: "Tooi Sakebi" by Reiichi "Chabo" Nakaido

Trivia

 * Producer Yasuyuki Ueda made a controversial statement made in an Animerica interview saying Lain was "a sort of cultural war against American culture and the American sense of values we [Japan] adopted after World War II".
 * Lain contains extensive references to Apple computers, as the brand was used at the time by most of the creative staff.