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Serial Experiments Lain is everything wonderful about anime. It is violent, dark, scary. In summary: ADULT. Anime tells stories in a visual format that for yea

Serial Experiments Lain is everything wonderful about anime. It is violent, dark, scary. In summary: ADULT. Anime tells stories in a visual format that for years and years you simply could not get anywhere else. Adult genre fiction was not well represented in American media. Even today, adult American cartoons are almost entirely "sitcom" format. They don't want to ever end, and they do not want to tell a story, they want to make more episodes. Today, people are spoiled with their options for genre fiction. Cowboy Bebop blew my mind as a kid. Berserk was also one of my favorites. I did not think anything could be cooler than Vampire Hunter D. This was before Game of Thrones or The Expanse or any number of other amazing science-fiction or fantasy media we have today. Coming from a small town, it felt like a secret that nobody else knew about and I loved immersing myself in this grim, beautiful, foreign worlds[0]. A lot of anime has a lot of gross "fan service" that objectifies their female protagonists, and that is something I was never a fan of. It was something you tolerated because there wasn't anywhere else to go. Lain is a great example of all of this. Where else are you going to get a gorgeously rendered cyberpunk-horror series? 0: Probably at a younger age than I should have been allowed to. Though honestly I don't see myself censoring everything from my kids. Part of the draw was the adult nature and feeling like I was getting away with something.

saalweachter 6y ago
The great thing about animation is that once you accept the cartoonish caricatures as real people, you get all of the special effects for free. You don't have that jarring disconnect between the actors and the (bad) special effects, and you don't need to husband your special effects budget carefully, saving it for a few big scenes. You can fill each frame with impossibilities that are just as real as the people filling them.
- XorNot 6y ago
  This is also why the Star Wars animated series (3D) are such a joy to watch: Clone Wars and Rebels have hands down some of the best space battles ever made in the Star Wars universe. It also lends itself to an odd bit of realism: because its cheaper to animate characters without faces, people actually tend to wear helmets in situations they obviously should.
trentnix 6y ago
A month or so ago I finally watched the Neon Genesis Evangelion series after hearing about it for more than 20 years. After slogging through a few episodes of predictable awkard-teenagers-pilot-giant-robots-to-save-the-world it finally reveals itself as a stunning exploration into the minds of troubled youth who are, effectively, subjected to a barrage of traumatic crises. It's a deep, rich world with complex characters, all with Herculean responsibilities and human weaknesses. I'll have to watch Lain now, thanks to your comment. I enjoy the usual suspects: Akira, Ghost in the Shell (including Standalone Complex), and Cowboy Bebop immensely. I like Robotech, though much of it is nostalgia. But I've found straying from the essentials to be challenging for my very Western tastes. I tried to watch Stein's Gate and thought it was very clever, but the awkward romance and over-the-top characteristics of the main character were a bit too much. Knights of Sidonia and Attack on Titan got too weird, too quickly. I was too old for Dragonball. There's a lot of Western-focused, Japanese-animated options out there, but they almost universally lack the depth of their anime counterparts. I'd love some recommendations if you have any, whether they be newer stuff or classics that I've overlooked.
- Fargren 6y ago
  Anything by Satoshi Kon is great, and in line with what you've been watching. If I had to pick, Perfect Blue for movies and Paranoia Agent for series. In the lighter more children spectrum, Mamoru Hosoda does beautiful things like Summer Wars or The Girl Who Leapt Through Time. The Tatami Galaxy is another great one
- entropicdrifter 6y ago
  If you liked Robotech and Evangelion, you might want to check out some of the Universal Century timeline Gundam shows. Mobile Suit Gundam and Zeta Gundam are the classics, but for something with gorgeous modern animation, check out Mobile Suit Gundam: The Origin, it's a prequel series that follows the main rival character from the original through his childhood and up to the start of the war that's the setting for the original Mobile Suit Gundam. Oh, and check out Legend Of The Galactic Heroes. It's an epic along the lines of Romance Of The Three Kingdoms, with like 30 'main' characters and maybe 300+ named characters throughout its run. Huge in scope and scale, but always willing to take a couple minutes and reflect on philosophy, politics, and the horrors of war. It's a seriously adult show.
anthk 6y ago
European comics and novels did that before Japan ;). And with far more mature and adult themes.
- honkycat 6y ago
  I'm talking about specifically animation, though. There are plenty of examples of excellent novels and comic books from all over the world. However, they represent a completely different tier of production cost. Comics and novels are cheap. Animation takes a team of sometimes hundreds of animators, sound designers, art directors, etc.
  - anthk 6y ago
    >Comics and novels are cheap Manga too, but in Japan it's much better praised than anime.
    - krapp 6y ago
      Most anime is nothing more than advertisements for the manga anyway. That's why most of it never gets a second season.
ad404b8a372f2b9 6y ago
Have any good adult animes come out these past few years? There's always been a lot of gross stuff but I'm starting to lose faith in the medium when I see stuff like Mushoku Tensei being praised as wonderful in the mainstream, the latest few seasons have felt like complete garbage.
- specialist 6y ago
  I quite enjoyed Castlevania. Other than stuff I watched with my kid (Dragonball, Avatar, Princess Monoke, etc) I don't know anything about anime.
- GloriousKoji 6y ago
  Adult as in serious and less mindless tropes and entertainment to touch on more philosophical topics? Wonder Egg Priority comes to mind but due to production delays the final episode won't be coming out until a few months so it will leaving you hanging for the conclusion. In this age of gatcha-game, manga or light novel anime adaptations it's a rare anime only series. It follows teenage girls fighting what are essential nightmares with poppy color and well animated scenes but it's a symbolic battle with serious issues such as hikkomori, homosexuality, sexual abuse and suicide.
- Riverheart 6y ago
  "The Promised Neverland" if you stick with season 1. Heard season 2 went in a different direction from the manga unfortunately.
- lhorie 6y ago
  I've stopped following anime for several years now. The trajectory of one punch man from it's humble doodle-like beginnings to mainstream speak volumes about the state of commercialization these days IMHO. The isekai genre is definitely overused at this point, just as slice of life got done to death before it. Lately, I've been having more luck w/ manhwa (Korean manga). If steampunk sci-fi with social commentary plot is your cup of tea, I've been finding Leviathan enjoyable.
  - 6y ago
grawprog 6y ago
Growing up, i was a lot like you. The stories, artwork and animation in a lot of those darker, more adult animes blew my mind. I remember the first time I saw Akira, like you when I was probably way too young, My mind just couldn't even really grasp what i was watching. I'd never seen anything like that before. I ended up somehow watching a dubbed version of ninja scroll that came on TV some time after that and i was pretty hooked. I find though, I can't get into newer anime, or a lot of newer animation in general these days. I really miss the old style of animation and artwork, both western and Japanese. Every series or movie had its own unique style, some of the artwork was so fantastic and just mind blowing. Some of the landscapes and scenery created in older animation could take you to some of the most amazing or terrifying or strange places you couldn't even imagine. I find a lot of animation to look generic and overproduced these days and in general, the format's become fairly formulaic and nothing really stands out as special in the ways a lot of those older animes did. Don't get me wrong, i have seen some fantastic modern animation. I was speaking more in general. I keep hoping that we'll have this Renaissance of artists who want to go back to the traditional ways just to break this new mold animation seems to have gotten itself stuck in.
- Jtsummers 6y ago
  Getting into anime in the US in the early 00s via friends who got into it in the mid-to-late 90s, there was a lot of filtering that had already happened here in the US. So something sort of missed was the realization that Sturgeon's Law (ninety percent of everything is crap) still applied to anime. It's just that in the US most of what had made it here was generally the better quality by some measure (better animation quality, better story, better characters, etc.). Not universally, crap still made it through, but it wasn't 90% crap. Fast forward to today, you have access to the full gamut of anime series and movies. Completely unfiltered by others unless you specifically only watch things that others (that you have some trust in or similar taste to) have watched and promote. And thanks to legit streaming services and less than legit streaming services and torrents, you can much more easily be one of the first people in the US to watch something so it's now much easier to find the crap if you don't specifically go through the filtering process of time or critics or peer group taste and recommendations.
dumb1224 6y ago
Serial Experiments Lain felt very much like a dark dream when I watched it. And because it was so different from the mainstream stereotypical anime which can easily fit into well defined (and IMO overdone) categories. But I also think it's different from the sort of 'aim at western audience' type of anime (to be frank the appeal is a bit different from asia perspective, at least for me). The dark universes of Akira and Ghost in a Shell have some equivalent in the cyberpunk genre in the west, e.g elements of a dystopian society, which do not feature too often in the Japanese anime world. In that sense Lain really experiments with the genre and rebel against the typical characters and gave it a unique style (hence the name I guess :)
tacotacotaco 6y ago
> Even today, adult American cartoons are almost entirely "sitcom" format. Agreed. Check out Final Space. It relies a bit on comedy in the beginning but grows into a drama. Give it a few episodes.
agumonkey 6y ago
I see no mention of Gunnm (battle angel alita) OAV was nicely done even though short. The manga has lot to offer somehow.
- bsanr2 6y ago
  The manga goes where edgy mainstream sci-fi wishes it had the fortitude to venture. We're talking VanderMeer and Cixin and Dick all mixed in with Peele's brand of politically-aware, existentially-fraught dark humor. People attach their heads to rockets to serve as targeting systems; the genetic engineering virtuosos of Venus eat babies; the most efficient form of assassination is arguably of either the "space karate" or "massive kinetic bombardment" varieties. There's a lot. It's like Tim Burton's Seveneves.
baybal2 6y ago
I watched one Japanese cartoon once in my childhood. There was a flying robots flying killing everybody. Do you know its's name? I always wanted to rewatch it, but have no idea what's its name. I'm trying to piece together what I watched in childhood. Since a few years ago, people who are more into cartoons cued me on that: Blue alien who shoots lasers from its bra is Guyver, and that it's not an alien, and is a guy. A communist coup in space is Ryvius, and on a closer look, communists were actually high class cadets with parents in high up places, and not the other way around.
viraptor 6y ago
> They don't want to ever end, and they do not want to tell a story, they want to make more episodes. For the opposite experience, have a look at UK dramas. They're often mini-series with as few as 6 episodes, well defined story and aren't afraid to try new stuff. For example "Behind her eyes" (not a cartoon) is a recent good one. (don't be deceived by the first episode, it's not as simple as it seems)
vmception 6y ago
There is still a void, which various artists could fill these days. Sadly, if they did I don't think I would hear about them due to the volume of content on streaming platforms. Japanese studio anime follows a formula that you might have noticed. This formula is still unnecessary to western audiences, which has learned to tolerate it. It includes characters with certain hair colors having certain behaviors and relationships to the protagonist, it includes a filler episode at a sauna. Something like Cowboy Bebop would be a hit in the west, for the same reasons that The Expanse - which is not anime - is a hit. But Japanese studios gravitate towards portraying fantasies only relatable and comfortable to a socially awkward viewer, while Western studios don't invest heavily enough into what fans of the medium and anime art-style would like, and still target children.
jkhdigital 6y ago
This same effect can be seen in Japanese games from that era—I didn’t watch much anime, but I was absolutely consumed by Japanese RPGs. Xenogears changed my life.
- m4rtink 6y ago
  KOS-MOS needs to be cleaned - with fire. (I wonder if someone still knows that refferrence, even I can't find it online anymore. :P )
  - bsanr2 6y ago
    The story of how the Xeno franchise just... keeps dropping the ball is not a happy one. Boy, did they knock it out of the park with the one battle theme in the entire first game, though.
bsanr2 6y ago
It's amazing to see mainstream America discover, with our television Renaissance, what most otaku knew and took for granted since the 90s. I hear family talk about the latest It Show, and it's almost word for word what you would have found on the more polite anime forums back in the day. Even the premises echo: of Record of Lodoss War and all its derivatives in Game of Thrones, of Gundam and Cowboy Bebop in The Expanse. Don't think for a second that TV producers aren't mining the rich veins of both conceptual and visual "basic research" anime creators have done on what "works" for the extended fiction format and action-oriented television. The one thing I will say is that, as an anime watcher, you do start to pick up on the repetitive tropes that might have felt fresh in your first few series, and with the aforementioned unsavory pandering towards the figma crowd, American TV that apes anime definitely has me less fatigued or concerned about sharing my enthusiasm with any particular show with F&F.
mintplant 6y ago
> Even today, adult American cartoons are almost entirely "sitcom" format. They don't want to ever end, and they do not want to tell a story, they want to make more episodes. Check out Infinity Train for something different. Ostensibly aimed at kids, but, uh, honestly, I seriously question that based on some of the content in that show [0]. Between that and Over the Garden Wall, Cartoon Network's contributed some great work to American animation in recent years. Amazon's Invincible is having a good run so far, on the side of things definitely made for adults. [0] MASSIVE MASSIVE SPOILER WARNING: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUgeSJhXNeQ&t=64 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUgeSJhXNeQ&t=64

saalweachter 6y ago

The great thing about animation is that once you accept the cartoonish caricatures as real people, you get all of the special effects for free. You don't have that jarring disconnect between the actors and the (bad) special effects, and you don't need to husband your special effects budget carefully, saving it for a few big scenes. You can fill each frame with impossibilities that are just as real as the people filling them.

XorNot 6y ago
This is also why the Star Wars animated series (3D) are such a joy to watch: Clone Wars and Rebels have hands down some of the best space battles ever made in the Star Wars universe. It also lends itself to an odd bit of realism: because its cheaper to animate characters without faces, people actually tend to wear helmets in situations they obviously should.

trentnix 6y ago

A month or so ago I finally watched the Neon Genesis Evangelion series after hearing about it for more than 20 years. After slogging through a few episodes of predictable awkard-teenagers-pilot-giant-robots-to-save-the-world it finally reveals itself as a stunning exploration into the minds of troubled youth who are, effectively, subjected to a barrage of traumatic crises. It's a deep, rich world with complex characters, all with Herculean responsibilities and human weaknesses. I'll have to watch Lain now, thanks to your comment. I enjoy the usual suspects: Akira, Ghost in the Shell (including Standalone Complex), and Cowboy Bebop immensely. I like Robotech, though much of it is nostalgia. But I've found straying from the essentials to be challenging for my very Western tastes. I tried to watch Stein's Gate and thought it was very clever, but the awkward romance and over-the-top characteristics of the main character were a bit too much. Knights of Sidonia and Attack on Titan got too weird, too quickly. I was too old for Dragonball. There's a lot of Western-focused, Japanese-animated options out there, but they almost universally lack the depth of their anime counterparts. I'd love some recommendations if you have any, whether they be newer stuff or classics that I've overlooked.

Fargren 6y ago
Anything by Satoshi Kon is great, and in line with what you've been watching. If I had to pick, Perfect Blue for movies and Paranoia Agent for series. In the lighter more children spectrum, Mamoru Hosoda does beautiful things like Summer Wars or The Girl Who Leapt Through Time. The Tatami Galaxy is another great one
entropicdrifter 6y ago
If you liked Robotech and Evangelion, you might want to check out some of the Universal Century timeline Gundam shows. Mobile Suit Gundam and Zeta Gundam are the classics, but for something with gorgeous modern animation, check out Mobile Suit Gundam: The Origin, it's a prequel series that follows the main rival character from the original through his childhood and up to the start of the war that's the setting for the original Mobile Suit Gundam. Oh, and check out Legend Of The Galactic Heroes. It's an epic along the lines of Romance Of The Three Kingdoms, with like 30 'main' characters and maybe 300+ named characters throughout its run. Huge in scope and scale, but always willing to take a couple minutes and reflect on philosophy, politics, and the horrors of war. It's a seriously adult show.

anthk 6y ago

European comics and novels did that before Japan ;). And with far more mature and adult themes.

honkycat 6y ago
I'm talking about specifically animation, though. There are plenty of examples of excellent novels and comic books from all over the world. However, they represent a completely different tier of production cost. Comics and novels are cheap. Animation takes a team of sometimes hundreds of animators, sound designers, art directors, etc.
- anthk 6y ago
  >Comics and novels are cheap Manga too, but in Japan it's much better praised than anime.
  - krapp 6y ago
    Most anime is nothing more than advertisements for the manga anyway. That's why most of it never gets a second season.

ad404b8a372f2b9 6y ago

Have any good adult animes come out these past few years? There's always been a lot of gross stuff but I'm starting to lose faith in the medium when I see stuff like Mushoku Tensei being praised as wonderful in the mainstream, the latest few seasons have felt like complete garbage.

specialist 6y ago
I quite enjoyed Castlevania. Other than stuff I watched with my kid (Dragonball, Avatar, Princess Monoke, etc) I don't know anything about anime.
GloriousKoji 6y ago
Adult as in serious and less mindless tropes and entertainment to touch on more philosophical topics? Wonder Egg Priority comes to mind but due to production delays the final episode won't be coming out until a few months so it will leaving you hanging for the conclusion. In this age of gatcha-game, manga or light novel anime adaptations it's a rare anime only series. It follows teenage girls fighting what are essential nightmares with poppy color and well animated scenes but it's a symbolic battle with serious issues such as hikkomori, homosexuality, sexual abuse and suicide.
Riverheart 6y ago
"The Promised Neverland" if you stick with season 1. Heard season 2 went in a different direction from the manga unfortunately.
lhorie 6y ago
I've stopped following anime for several years now. The trajectory of one punch man from it's humble doodle-like beginnings to mainstream speak volumes about the state of commercialization these days IMHO. The isekai genre is definitely overused at this point, just as slice of life got done to death before it. Lately, I've been having more luck w/ manhwa (Korean manga). If steampunk sci-fi with social commentary plot is your cup of tea, I've been finding Leviathan enjoyable.
- 6y ago

grawprog 6y ago

Growing up, i was a lot like you. The stories, artwork and animation in a lot of those darker, more adult animes blew my mind. I remember the first time I saw Akira, like you when I was probably way too young, My mind just couldn't even really grasp what i was watching. I'd never seen anything like that before. I ended up somehow watching a dubbed version of ninja scroll that came on TV some time after that and i was pretty hooked. I find though, I can't get into newer anime, or a lot of newer animation in general these days. I really miss the old style of animation and artwork, both western and Japanese. Every series or movie had its own unique style, some of the artwork was so fantastic and just mind blowing. Some of the landscapes and scenery created in older animation could take you to some of the most amazing or terrifying or strange places you couldn't even imagine. I find a lot of animation to look generic and overproduced these days and in general, the format's become fairly formulaic and nothing really stands out as special in the ways a lot of those older animes did. Don't get me wrong, i have seen some fantastic modern animation. I was speaking more in general. I keep hoping that we'll have this Renaissance of artists who want to go back to the traditional ways just to break this new mold animation seems to have gotten itself stuck in.

Jtsummers 6y ago
Getting into anime in the US in the early 00s via friends who got into it in the mid-to-late 90s, there was a lot of filtering that had already happened here in the US. So something sort of missed was the realization that Sturgeon's Law (ninety percent of everything is crap) still applied to anime. It's just that in the US most of what had made it here was generally the better quality by some measure (better animation quality, better story, better characters, etc.). Not universally, crap still made it through, but it wasn't 90% crap. Fast forward to today, you have access to the full gamut of anime series and movies. Completely unfiltered by others unless you specifically only watch things that others (that you have some trust in or similar taste to) have watched and promote. And thanks to legit streaming services and less than legit streaming services and torrents, you can much more easily be one of the first people in the US to watch something so it's now much easier to find the crap if you don't specifically go through the filtering process of time or critics or peer group taste and recommendations.

dumb1224 6y ago

Serial Experiments Lain felt very much like a dark dream when I watched it. And because it was so different from the mainstream stereotypical anime which can easily fit into well defined (and IMO overdone) categories. But I also think it's different from the sort of 'aim at western audience' type of anime (to be frank the appeal is a bit different from asia perspective, at least for me). The dark universes of Akira and Ghost in a Shell have some equivalent in the cyberpunk genre in the west, e.g elements of a dystopian society, which do not feature too often in the Japanese anime world. In that sense Lain really experiments with the genre and rebel against the typical characters and gave it a unique style (hence the name I guess :)

tacotacotaco 6y ago

> Even today, adult American cartoons are almost entirely "sitcom" format. Agreed. Check out Final Space. It relies a bit on comedy in the beginning but grows into a drama. Give it a few episodes.

agumonkey 6y ago

I see no mention of Gunnm (battle angel alita) OAV was nicely done even though short. The manga has lot to offer somehow.

bsanr2 6y ago
The manga goes where edgy mainstream sci-fi wishes it had the fortitude to venture. We're talking VanderMeer and Cixin and Dick all mixed in with Peele's brand of politically-aware, existentially-fraught dark humor. People attach their heads to rockets to serve as targeting systems; the genetic engineering virtuosos of Venus eat babies; the most efficient form of assassination is arguably of either the "space karate" or "massive kinetic bombardment" varieties. There's a lot. It's like Tim Burton's Seveneves.

baybal2 6y ago

I watched one Japanese cartoon once in my childhood. There was a flying robots flying killing everybody. Do you know its's name? I always wanted to rewatch it, but have no idea what's its name. I'm trying to piece together what I watched in childhood. Since a few years ago, people who are more into cartoons cued me on that: Blue alien who shoots lasers from its bra is Guyver, and that it's not an alien, and is a guy. A communist coup in space is Ryvius, and on a closer look, communists were actually high class cadets with parents in high up places, and not the other way around.

viraptor 6y ago

> They don't want to ever end, and they do not want to tell a story, they want to make more episodes. For the opposite experience, have a look at UK dramas. They're often mini-series with as few as 6 episodes, well defined story and aren't afraid to try new stuff. For example "Behind her eyes" (not a cartoon) is a recent good one. (don't be deceived by the first episode, it's not as simple as it seems)

vmception 6y ago

There is still a void, which various artists could fill these days. Sadly, if they did I don't think I would hear about them due to the volume of content on streaming platforms. Japanese studio anime follows a formula that you might have noticed. This formula is still unnecessary to western audiences, which has learned to tolerate it. It includes characters with certain hair colors having certain behaviors and relationships to the protagonist, it includes a filler episode at a sauna. Something like Cowboy Bebop would be a hit in the west, for the same reasons that The Expanse - which is not anime - is a hit. But Japanese studios gravitate towards portraying fantasies only relatable and comfortable to a socially awkward viewer, while Western studios don't invest heavily enough into what fans of the medium and anime art-style would like, and still target children.

jkhdigital 6y ago

This same effect can be seen in Japanese games from that era—I didn’t watch much anime, but I was absolutely consumed by Japanese RPGs. Xenogears changed my life.

m4rtink 6y ago
KOS-MOS needs to be cleaned - with fire. (I wonder if someone still knows that refferrence, even I can't find it online anymore. :P )
- bsanr2 6y ago
  The story of how the Xeno franchise just... keeps dropping the ball is not a happy one. Boy, did they knock it out of the park with the one battle theme in the entire first game, though.

bsanr2 6y ago

It's amazing to see mainstream America discover, with our television Renaissance, what most otaku knew and took for granted since the 90s. I hear family talk about the latest It Show, and it's almost word for word what you would have found on the more polite anime forums back in the day. Even the premises echo: of Record of Lodoss War and all its derivatives in Game of Thrones, of Gundam and Cowboy Bebop in The Expanse. Don't think for a second that TV producers aren't mining the rich veins of both conceptual and visual "basic research" anime creators have done on what "works" for the extended fiction format and action-oriented television. The one thing I will say is that, as an anime watcher, you do start to pick up on the repetitive tropes that might have felt fresh in your first few series, and with the aforementioned unsavory pandering towards the figma crowd, American TV that apes anime definitely has me less fatigued or concerned about sharing my enthusiasm with any particular show with F&F.

mintplant 6y ago

> Even today, adult American cartoons are almost entirely "sitcom" format. They don't want to ever end, and they do not want to tell a story, they want to make more episodes. Check out Infinity Train for something different. Ostensibly aimed at kids, but, uh, honestly, I seriously question that based on some of the content in that show [0]. Between that and Over the Garden Wall, Cartoon Network's contributed some great work to American animation in recent years. Amazon's Invincible is having a good run so far, on the side of things definitely made for adults. [0] MASSIVE MASSIVE SPOILER WARNING: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUgeSJhXNeQ&t=64 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUgeSJhXNeQ&t=64