60s-early 90s anime, apart from shonen Dragonball- or Pokemon-type stuff, and shoujou stuff; especially adult-oriented stuff. Anime has degenerated into several broad categories still persisting: Kids shows and fight-manga adaptations; and girl's anime. These two haven't changed all that much. It's the rest that's gone right up its own ass. You've got maybe one or two series with really mature, complex storytelling per year, then the remainder is veiled pornography, often pedophilic. Like just enough distance that you can maintain a fiction that you aren't jacking to it. There's a gradient between that and girl's anime, of all things.
Anyhow, this transition probably started in the early 90s, and got really fucking creepy in the mid 2000s. Kids growing up now know what anime and manga are. They get it on some level. They may embrace the creepy shit, or reject it, and they may embrace the more literary stuff. But stuff like Robotech/Macross or old Gundam shows, or Galaxy Express and such might be hard to get. They don't fit into modern pigeonholes. They aren't quite as "deep" as Ghost in the Shell or Berserk or Planetes or Kaiji or whatever, and they clearly aren't strictly for kids, and they aren't pseudoporn. They might have some appeal, but the visuals are mostly pretty terrible by modern standards, so they might never sit through it to get to the core of what appealed to us old people.
