#55
Post
by feihong » Thu Jan 19, 2023 6:52 pm
When a show re-uses a lot of clips it's because the production team is feeling the budgetary constraints and/or time constraints of the production process. This happens even on high-budget anime, and a lot of productions consciously build opportunities to re-use footage into their productions (i.e., robot and magical girl transformation sequences, or the ascent to the dueling arena in Utena, for some examples), as a way of combatting high-workloads, burnout, and missed deadlines. The animators on Lain very obviously feel this squeeze, because the same clips keep getting re-used constantly throughout the show, without variation to them (meaning that the animators only drew this much of the shot, and went no further, giving the editor no leader to play around with––this isn't uncommon in animation in general, but if you want to re-use a clip, it's sometimes considered worthwhile to extend it, so that a second viewing of the clip offers more story or character insight, and the makers of Lain haven't done that). Episode 11 is the most obvious example of re-using scenes from previous episodes and editing them to try and make a new meaning out of them; but nearly every episode features a lot of re-used shots.
Besides that, though, when you see these static shots, with a slow zoom in lieu of character movement, it's also pretty obvious the animators are straining their resources to get things done. There's animation details they could add here––they could animate hair, they could animate the character breathing in a loop, they could animate an air conditioner fan blowing on the various hanging wires in Lain's room, or just animate pulsing lights in the room, for examples. Animators look for these kind of details and try to incorporate them into their work––unless they don't have the time/money to make them happen––in which case a camera movement might be substituted for the figure movement it would take more time and resources to draw.
I wouldn't argue that the flat nature of the animation isn't part of the aesthetic of Serial Experiments Lain, and that aesthetic may have suggested the removal of these traditional animation details; but I think it's far more likely that this aesthetic was developed after the production team found themselves staring down the barrel of a very small budget, rather than beforehand. It is unusual for the time that Lain only runs a single season––most adult-oriented anime of that time period got a 2-season order before production commenced on the first season––but Lain did not. Lain was also commissioned as a multi-media production, with comic book, novel and video-game tie-ins intended (I believe one manga doujinshi and one generally hated video game which never made it to an English-language adaptation are the only results of this endeavor), so the whole funding structure of the anime might have been different from the usual––and that never seems to mean a bigger budget for the animators, only a smaller one.
But I do think it's relevant to muse on the idea: does the cheapness take you out of Serial Experiments Lain?
For me it does. The scenes and even just the basic drawing compositions have so little life in them, it's hard to look at the characters as human figures to invest much intellect or emotion within; if there is an equivalent of "persistence of vision" that applies to the way we assemble details of character and story in our heads to create the semblance of a life-like structure, then Lain does not meet the threshold of that persistent lag. And the aesthetic that is built around this scaled-back approach to the art is much less involving for me than in the better anime I've seen––there's a deliberate inscrutability to the narrative approach for most of the episodes, a waiting for plot and character elements to connect together episodes down the road, with only silence and repetition in between these moments and their meeting with meaning, sometimes hours later in the show. I'd compare this to Twin Peaks: The Return, which offers up a similar structural proposition. What makes that show demanding of my attention for every second, whereas I found Lain hard to pay attention to at all? To me there's an issue of energy at play here; Twin Peaks: The Return offers you the quivering energy of real human beings on camera––frozen in space, perhaps, barely able to enunciate words in the case of Dougie Jones and The Fireman––but filled with possibility. And every still shot, drawn out past the point of all patience in The Return, vibrates with the potential for something to happen. An actor might reach across the space; that big glass box might suddenly fill with inky black liquid, if you avert your gaze for a second––then what might happen? The stand-off with a pair of bloodthirsty gangsters might resolve differently than what we expect, because there might be a cake in a box someone happens to be holding, and one of these guys had a dream the previous night in which these exact events unfolded––the result of a dozen little, flat or inconsequential-seeming narrative strands laid down over hour after previous hour of the series. But the relatively frozen animation of Lain never offers that feeling of potentiality, or the joy of connecting up ideas we thought might never coalesce into meaning. The clips of animation in Lain will not alter from the last time we saw them. The figures in the composition won't suddenly start to move with intent; the show trains us to expect nothing of the kind, because nothing of the sort ever happens––Twin Peaks: The Return trains us to expect the sudden change of state in a scene, just when we least expect it. To my mind it's the difference between a riveting watch and an exasperating one.
Last edited by
feihong on Thu Jan 19, 2023 9:01 pm, edited 2 times in total.
I think the sequence over the first two episodes where the characters watch the featureless box, waiting for something to happen, is the show being very instructive about what to expect from it. For me, the instruction was really helpful.