I’ve become much more selective in the anime I watch as I’ve gotten older, but I will always appreciate a well written and well animated story. In the past 12 months I’ve only enjoyed three series enough to watch them past the first couple episodes (GITS:SAC, Last Exile, and Wolf’s Rain).
>>22 Just look at the typical anime. It's full of pans, zooms and speed lines. The background is static, only their mouths move most of the time, or that glittery eye thing they do.
Yes, a lot of the most popular anime is complete shit, but many anime fans don’t seem to care about animation quality. They say they do, but they are really taking about style. For example, I went to an "Anime Hell" showing at an anime convention, and one of the clips was from an '80s anime movie. This was smooth full-frame hand-drawn animation of classic Disney quality, but most of the audience still laughed at it.
The irony is, the slick anime style that most under-20 anime fans think is so cool is actually very generic and commercialized in Japan. In fact, the most popular anime shows among American anime fans tend to be the same shows that are commercialized and mass-marketed to a pre-teen or junior-high aged audience in Japan.