alleged that 90% of animators quit their jobs in three years

Insane number. But not implausible to me. Bad working environments with impossible schedules do that.

I wish they would improve working conditions. As an industry, or through regulation because evidently, the industry doesn't.

To finance it - I wish they would make anime more easily accessible and buyable.

Less oppressive checkboxed mass/standard productions would surely improve what we see as products too.

Man, why is Twitter X so popular. I hate the closed platform, unordered tweets and replies, no contexts on tweets, segmented content and texts. Otherwise I would have explored and added more links and context.

That leg is attached above the hip 👀

man I'm just sad they ruined season 2 after the great season 1

I am a skeleton

In Overlord, there's a scene where the skeleton protagonist eats a cookie and catches the crumbles crumbling out of his jaw with his hand below. :D

oh, I see, those round edges are for the nose

I think this clip only works for those who have already seen it and remember. Without the context, it's just random accusations without much in-scene.

Stitched tongue?

Kagami no Kojou is great. A movie from 2022. (Is it "less-known" or "hidden"? AniDB has only 95 votes, so I thought it would be. But MAL has 6k.)

Now and Then, Here and There is great. A series from 1999. Outside of the dated 480p visuals it’s exceptional. It has great depth. my short review and a clip

Ascendance of a Bookworm. A really good one!

Those sound interesting, thank you for the recommendation. I'll definitely take a look. I'm intrigued about how blindness is represented and integrated.

Great, exceptional anime!

https://i.imgur.com/XGgAJni.jpg

And Yet the Town Moves (2010) is very good. The first half of the season is great. A frantic, wild comedy. The second half(?) felt to me like it lost its core, and went on side tangents [and style] that I didn't enjoy.

The video I linked went into that as well. The clickbait title says it's a federal crime. Later on, when they actually go into it, they show and quote the law, and given that the package was sent to Crunchyroll, despite being addressed to a person at Crunchyroll, may be fine and depends on how the court interprets it.

Clean image (NSFW)

Subs bigger file size than the video

Yeah, Now and Then, Here and There is definitely heavy in parts of the series.

I've thought about the clear inner voice during watching too. I found it acceptable, not that detrimental. Something different could have had more impact, but I didn't find it that bad.

It's certainly the easier way in terms of directing.

I loved Vision of Escaflowne back in the day. (In 2006 I rated it 9/10 apparently.)

I wonder how it would hold up if I were to watch it today.

I don't think it's about "everyone". It's about production companies picking what's popular, the currently popular theme, and produces shovelware standard-productions in a narrow, uninspired target-audience checkboxing way. They contract producers and creatives, but restrict them and likely invest so little that it ends up with what it is. The industry as a whole, many titles, end up as forgettable, mediocre, similar shovelware.

Much like Hollywood produced an abundance of hero movies until everyone was sick of it. Or how EA produced the same sports game each year. Or Call of Duty. Or Battlefield.

I agree with there being a lot of sub-par and mediocre productions, and the overpowered, harem, and video game elements are big offenders and indicators of what most of the time end up as bad products.

I enjoyed Reincarnated as a vending machine. Simple formula, very forced, but hilariously absurd.

Most overpowered protagonist anime end up between bad and awful. But The Eminence in Shadow makes use of it as poignant satire. And I remember seeing another series where they made it work through enemy hybris, and the punishment/revelation was satisfying enough that it worked, in large part through direction and production quality.

The most "wtf" regarding isekai I recently saw was when the entire series was not about being an isekai, but - not at the begining nor end - they put a random scene in where the protagonist had a vision from modern Japan city and was like "what is this about?" and that was it. Maybe they included it just so it can have the isekai product tag? I have no idea.

Coming back to the original theme and hypothosis, the differentiation of and popularity of fantasy vs isekai escapism is interesting.

Ghost in the Shell is certainly fantastical. Enjoying or viewing or getting invested in fantastical stories is inherently partly escapism too. Isekai specifically puts a - most of the time - normal modern human into a fantastical setting though, materializing escapism as a fact on the protagonist.

I'm not sure there's such a hard line to draw though.