Eerily echoing footsteps, the hum of electrical cables, the dull underthump of a nightclub, the way the show subverts everyday sounds and makes it all unsettling and otherworldly is effectively accomplished here, and in terms of the Blu-ray’s lossless presentation, comes across well. The stereo audio for Lain is put to some really good use, as this is a show with a strong and imposing sound design, where altered states of mind, character isolation, and the sheer oppressiveness of the technological dystopia has to be conveyed in both the visuals and the audio. A far greater issue because of the different brightness levels is that blacks are never truly black on this transfer, and the contrast is quite disappointing.
I certainly did note this banding straight from the first scene, and it is an issue, although the more I watched, the less it impacted on my viewing. Apparently Funimation used different brightness levels than the Japanese release, and that had the effect of making digital banding more apparent. It’s also worth noting that this Australian release uses the same source as the Funimation disc, and there have been some complaints about digital banding. In addition, during the latter episodes where CG and 2D blended animation is in greater abundance, there are one or two up-scaled scenes, but it’s a small fraction of the overall footage. For ease of animation, and of budget, the shortcut of physically zooming in on a portion of the frame is used, and when that happens, it all begins to look a little SD. Also some of the HD clarity gets lost when the camera zooms in on a scene. You have bold colours, and striking images, but a lot of the energy of the animation is accomplished in post production with digital effects, overlaying weird distortions and the like. Having said that, Lain was never the most detailed of animations, and neither was it the most fluid. Having experienced it on fuzzy NTSC-PAL standards converted DVDs, you can bet I wanted to get my hands on an HD presentation of the show. It was no coincidence that this was also the show that sealed my pact with the anime devil.
After all, this is Serial Experiments Lain, the Yoshitoshi ABe cyberpunk series that rode the wave of the Internet explosion in the late ‘90s and delivered one of the most compelling and engaging sci-fi mysteries that anime has ever produced. I now have the show with the subtitles correctly synced up, and ready to review. It’s taken this long for them to isolate the problem, correct it, and re-author new discs. It isn’t the first time Sony Universal have had that problem with anime on Blu-ray, but I was determined to persevere with this release, and thankfully so were they. The subtitles on the Blu-ray discs in that collection were out of sync with the audio. I would have reviewed this six months ago, as the minute the Australian release was announced, I had it pre-ordered, and it showed up on my doormat not too long after the release date, except that there was a problem with the first Region B release from Sony Universal in Australia. The problem was that it was locked to Region A. Introduction I would have reviewed this a year ago after all, Funimation’s delectable release of this title was packed with physical goodness, artbooks and the like.