The "Anime Essentials" anthology by Gilles Poitras describes it as a "complex and somehow existential" anime that "pushed the envelope" of anime diversity in the 1990s, alongside the much better known "Neon Genesis Evangelion" and "Cowboy Bebop". Professor Susan J. Napier, in her 2003 reading to the American Philosophical Society called "The Problem of Existence in Japanese Animation" (published 2005), compared "Serial Experiments Lain" to "Ghost in the Shell" and Hayao Miyazaki's "Spirited Away". According to her, the main characters of the two other works cross barriers; they can cross back to our world, but Lain cannot. Napier asks whether there is something to which Lain should return, "between an empty 'real' and a dark 'virtual'". Mike Toole of Anime News Network named "Serial Experiments Lain" as one of the most important anime of the 1990s.