I don't know what happened to anime, but it's lost a lot of what makes animation interesting. Animation allows stories to go to magical and impossible places. It also simplifies shapes and forms in interesting ways. A lot of western animation and earlier anime have wildly different character proportions and use shape language and exaggerate characters. They also used to have very whimsical and softened background painting. Even a realistic anime like Whisper of the Heart feels magical with the way they portray 90s Japan.

But modern anime feels like the same semi-realistic male and female frame with a hodge hodge of different eye shapes. The backgrounds are all ultra realistic and boring. The animation itself is stiff and dull. The roundness that defined Disney, Tezuka, Ghibli and early DragonBall has been erased for very angular and boring realism.

We have to go back...