How did Yoshitoshi ABe design Lain?
A face built from arguments: almost every famous detail of Lain’s design was somebody’s demand, and ABe kept the receipts.
Yoshitoshi ABe came to Lain with an unusual handicap: he had never read manga as a child, it was off-limits in his household, and he cites “nature and everything around him” as his major influence. For Lain specifically, he has named the artists Kenji Tsuruta, Akihiro Yamada, Range Murata and Yukinobu Hoshino, in a line he traces through Japanese illustrators Kyosuke Chinai and Toshio Tabuchi. What he drew was a character meant to look unstable at a glance, and the production made sure of it.
THE DEMANDS
Design by committee, in the best senseThe forelock, Ueda’s demand
Lain’s long lock of hair over her left side was producer Yasuyuki Ueda’s requirement. The asymmetry was deliberate: a mystical symbol, meant to stop voices and spirits being heard through the left ear, an unstable silhouette for an unstable girl.
The bear pajamas, Kishida’s demand
Character animation director Takahiro Kishida insisted on the bear pajamas (bears being a trademark of the Konaka brothers, though Chiaki Konaka first opposed it). Director Nakamura’s reasoning: the pajamas are a shield Lain carries into confrontations with her family. At the Cyberia nightclub she wears a bear hat for the same reason.
The X clip that never was
ABe’s original hair clip was an interlocking pattern of gold links that would snap open, or rotate until the X became an =. It was dropped for the simplest of reasons: no scene ever has Lain take the clip off.
THREE GIRLS IN ONE DRAWING
The design does the psychology
The three Lains, in ABe’s hand
The shy child in pajamas, the bold network self, the sly third presence. The anime never explains the split in a speech; the character design carries it, and the scripts kept the three apart by writing Lain’s name in kanji, katakana, and Latin letters.