Serial Experiments Lain

First Impressions - 3.10.05

I thought I’d check out what looked like a good companion to Gunslinger Girl, an anime I’ve heard a lot about over the years since it came out – Serial Experiments Lain. After the first episode, the mood is very slow and ambient, though I’m finding it all slightly pretentious. Still, the image of the computer-addict father hidden behind a wall of screens, as if that’s the only way his daughter knows him, was oddly chilling.

Final Thoughts

Chiaki J. Konaka commands a lot of respect from me. Whenever people mention anime that make them uncomfortable, make them think in new and extraordinary ways, certain series recur again and again. Evangelion is one. Akira another. But then there are Narutaru, RahXephon and Serial Experiments Lain. And all are written or adapted by Konaka. And then there’s Princess Tutu, which is cute but sophisticated and remarkably deep, which he contributed to. Plus Hellsing, which (like RahXephon) I’ve yet to see, but is consistently voted one of the best anime of all time. Success? I’d say so.

I got hold of Lain not really knowing what to expect – I’d heard it was strange and made you uncomfortable, and thought that its subject matter had something in common with Saikano. By the end of it, I was glad that I have watched it through – although I very much doubt I’ll ever sit through it again.

Lain inspires extreme reactions: some hate it instantly, others love it and devote inordinate amounts of time to finding out all the references, all the allusions, and trying to understand this set of strange, disjointed images and themes. When a girl at Lain’s school commits suicide but continues to e-mail her friends, Lain begins to look into the online world known as The Wired – and soon starts to realise that she’s known there. Has she been there before? Are the boundaries between the real world and The Wired falling away? What is reality? Are we nothing but a set of electrical impulses? These questions, and dozens more, are posed over 13 episodes of abstraction, surreal imagery and pretentious dialogue.

I like sophisticated writing. But I cannot stand empty obscurity. I dislike Eliot, Pound, Joyce, Nabokov’s Ada, Plath, Emily Dickinson…and I understand that there are those who enjoy investigating obscure references because the digging is a reward in itself, and the more they understand, the prouder they become of their achievements, but that sort of writing irks me no end, especially when the trail leads only to obscure peculiarities of the author’s life, or nothing at all. Lain suffers this problem – there’s nothing deep or intelligent about a series of in-jokes about Apple Macs (‘Think Different’ even flashes up on the screen), and there’s nothing deep about the pseudo-science, the barely-explored high-concept ideas and recurring images that amount to nothing. The primary aim of a storyteller is to tell a story. That should be the foundation, and if it’s weak, then no matter how beautiful the ivory tower is, it will crumble.

That said, stylistically the show works well. The odd art and jumpy direction work well for the tone of the show, and it DID lead to me spending hours reading up on interesting things, such as the Schumann resonance (near-instant wireless transfer of electrical energy), what foo fighters really are, the nature of plasma, Alfred Nobel's life, Timothy Leary’s hopeless and (for someone so concerned with mind-expanding) hopelessly blinkered rationalising of the irrational with his castles in the mind’s sky, and the interesting sci-fi universe of Cordwainer Smith. For that, I’m grateful. But Lain, despite throwing all those interesting things into the pot, fails to even come close to being as gripping as a few hours on Wikipedia.

(originally written 10.10.05; I have since watched those classic series!)

プリンセスチュチュ / Princess Tutu

As I wrote when I first saw it, ‘Princess Tutu is a wonderful, weird and wacky anime about ballet with a lovely soundtrack [made up of] new interpretations of the great ballet themes by Tchaikovsky, Bizet, Delibes et al. Where else can you see a duck-girl taught by a crazy Puss-in-Boots teacher who threatens to marry pupils if they misbehave watching an anteater girl perform the male part of a pas de deux with a prince in the place of the girl?’ (Oct 20, 2003).

There’s something about Princess Tutu that makes it very, very special. I quite genuinely call it amongst the best anime of all time, and I’d quite vehemently defend an assertion that it’s the very best anime ever to have a very, very stupid premise, stupid name, stupid way of having characters resolve their problems and stupid overall world. Because what Princess Tutu grows from is very daft, and where it goes is masterful. I pity those that can’t get past the name or premise.

Princess Tutu is, probably unsurprisingly, an anime about ballet, and most of the most popular ones get a reference of one sort or another. Tchaikovsky is at the heart of the plot: in a ballet school in a romantic fantasy kingdom, a young girl is at the bottom of her class. Her secret, barely known to her, is that she is in fact not a girl but a duck with a magical pendant: indeed, her name is Ahiru, which simply means ‘duck’, and if she quacks, then she transforms into a cute duckling until she gets into some water, when she changes back. But the pendant allows for a further transformation, from the brave girl into the beautiful ideal ballerina, Princess Tutu. Ahiru is in love with the mysterious Mytho (pronounced ‘Myuuto’, probably better transliterated as ‘Mute’), a quiet and strange boy in the school. But as the mysterious Drosselmeyer sets a new story into motion, all the central characters find out that they are connected to the characters of an old story, and soon are forced to question whether they are real at all, or just characters in a story with an inevitable fate.

The balance of the story works brilliantly, for any audience prepared to give it the slightest chance. The first episodes are carried along by the sheer eccentricity and humour of the world - the aforementioned cats and anteaters, not to mention puppets and strange prawn-like innkeepers. Where normal magical girl series might feature a fight, Tutu features a dance that reveals the innermost heart. Really nothing very compelling, but fun and idiosyncratic enough to engage. But that is when, more or less with the shift to a second season, Tutu got darker and more sophisticated, although the ideas behind the change were obviously in place from the start. By the end, very little turns out as expected. At the time I finished it, (Dec 5th 2004), I ‘felt the end was so unfair on poor Ahiru, the noblest character in the anime, despite her humble nature…’, but the more I thought about it, the stronger the ending was because it wasn’t fair. Princess Tutu is not a story of magical happy endings and contrivances. It’s about a cruel (but likeable) madman manipulating others, and the struggle to stop him.

It doesn’t matter if the idea of ballet puts you off, or the first episodes seem babyish and trivial. Princess Tutu will impress you by the end. I feel I can say that with complete confidence. Its quality by the end is some of the best anime can offer, if not in aesthetic then in writing. And of course, it has some of the best music in hundreds of years.

交響詩篇 エウレカセブン/ Koukyoushihen Eureka Seben / Symphonic Poem Eureka Seven

It took me until the very last episode of Eureka Seven for me to really know whether I thought the series had been a good one or a poor one. And finally, I came to the decision that after all, it was a disappointment.

I watched the first episode when I was searching for a new anime to get excited about, since a lot of my favourite series had come to an end and I hadn’t found anything to replace them. I had high hopes for Eureka Seven after seeing that; the character design and series art were very nice, the idea of surfing in mid-air, on ‘trappar’ instead of water, was very cool, Bones’ animation was up to their usual high standard, and most of all, I took a real liking to Renton. Our protagonist seemed to be a typical teenaged boy, with big dreams, a comic relationship with his grandfather and a charming tendency to act a bit goofy when he was on his own. It soon became apparent that the series was going to be mecha, but it looked like the setting of the world was interesting enough to make giant flying robots work in an interesting way.

But a few episodes in, the tone of the series shifted. Following a mysterious girl he rather fancies, Renton goes to join a group of rebel surfer(‘reffer’)-types he much admired, and we get far too many episodes of them hazing/bullying him, and him just being so totally pathetic and whiny about it that all my initial liking for him vanished. Things pick up a bit as an antagonist who looks like Eureka but is her absolute opposite in terms of temperament makes an appearance, and then again later when Renton leaves his idols in Gekko State and experiences a bit more of the world around him, but apart from those short interludes, the series spirals out of control.

Yes, the planet is covered with ‘Scab Coral’, an intelligent lifeform that only wants to communicate, but it can’t fully awaken because then the ‘limit of life’ will be reached, with apocalyptic consequences, but certain people are in touch with it, or made from it, or have it plugged into their hearts, and then a dastardly bad guy tries to blow it up for no decent reason except some typical bad-guy drivel about purging the world, and then there’s a portal to a promised land, and then all sorts of inter-dimensional hopping and slowly the plot spins and turns in on itself so much that there’s nowhere left to go but up its own arsehole. So in it plunges.

Any plothole can be covered with a new bit of made-up babble that would make the Star Trek writers blush, and who cares if a dozen more are opened as a result? Who cares if there’re impossible odds? The giant robots can be powered up by heightened emotions – but ugh, power-ups can be excused only in the silliest of shounen, not series that attempt to tackle sophisticated themes of existentialism, religious faith and moral relativism. After a while, when yet another term like ‘Command Cluster’ is pulled out of nowhere in another attempt to get the plot to make sense, you just stop listening.

Which leaves the characters. Renton redeems himself after his aforementioned fall from grace after his time with a surrogate mother and father, though it must be said that it’s not really that his character grows up, just that the people around him abruptly change the way they behave. Eureka is nothing we haven’t seen in a million anime already, but she’s sweet. The relationship between these two is interesting, and about the only thing that makes the series really watchable, apart from impressive art/animation. The Gekko State crew (the ones Renton joins), despite a lot of screentime, are mostly totally undeveloped, and I had no connection at all to, say, the bald guy in the engine room by the end. The focus is on Holland and Talho, who get fairly well-developed, but not nearly as much as they should have been in a 50-episode series. The slobbish, discourteous priest was a better character than either of them, despite only being in a handful of episodes.

Far worse, though, was the baddie, a military man called Dewey. He not only had no character, but had to be surrounded by the characterless, because only they would go along with his plans – his only allies that are real characters defect almost as soon as they actually stop to actually think. He wants to bring an end to the world. Why? Well, it’s a bit of a grey area.

Worth noting, though, the cast is unusually racially diverse for an anime, perhaps influenced by Bones’ last major project, Fullmetal Alchemist. There are two black adults in Gekko State, Eureka has adopted three kids – one black, one white and one oriental (and he actually does look oriental, more so than anyone else on the cast) – and, a step or two uncomfortably closer to sheer tokenism, one of the little children that Dewey inexplicably has as his trusted advisers (survivors of some purge or camp – what, no adults there?) is dark-skinned with a bindi. It’s not something you see often in anime.

I think I’d take their stab at multiculturalism more seriously without the bizarre allusions. Lots of anime are very allusive, but usually to religious concepts or mythology. Eureka Seven alludes to…anything it fancies, really. Arbitrarily. Machines are named after obscure British bands like the KLF, episode titles are taken from well-known rock songs or Disney numbers, the three kids are named Maurice, Maeter and Linck (and a Maeterlinck book is glimpsed at one point, not that I can see any real influence from Maeterlinck anywhere...) and an attempt at using trance music is evident. Apart from the latter, which was quite fun, most of these just sounded pretentious or totally pointless and distracting.

In fact, I think they epitomise my thoughts on Eureka Seven – they showed that the writers aimed high, and perhaps even thought they were being sophisticated and eloquent, but ultimately they made a mess of things, and they fell short of what they were supposed to be. But isn’t it better to have a series aim for complexity and erudition than for yet another brainless harem or shounen show to be churned out? Well, no, not in my opinion. I would much rather have a show that has modest aims and accomplishes them with charm than a show like this, that aims to be something greater than the rest, yet falls far short of the mark and ends up being a disappointment.

(Originally written 30.11.06)

Additional: Movie impressions, 24.10.09

I was ultimately disappointed by the series, so was actually quite pleased there was a whole new storyline. It was gorgeous, I much preferred Renton's character arc and the Nirvash redesign was fun. Doesn't quite stand alone, too shallow and bizarre without the grounding of the series, but well worth watching.