I am troubled when people deride an animation for being too “old” without considering its other merits, and I think it’s a matter of broader perspective.

While we can look at older animation from our perspective today and see how far we’ve come be it 2d or 3d, don’t forget that today will become yesterday and years down the line the industry will have progressed even further technically and technologically, as well as in the realm of ideas (I hope). It feels kind of odd to think that all this fancy stuff going on today may even become laughable in the future, but as I think about it more I begin to wonder if the technical stops becoming a factor as more and more time passes. That is to say, if I were immortal and could watch hundreds of years of animation go by, I think after a while I would stop caring about realism or the pursuit of realism. Realism is just an example and it could be anything.

That all said, I personally also tend to put great emphasis on watching an animation with knowledge of the context in which it was produced and shown, because many achievements made by animations have to be viewed through the lens of society or history. It’s the other side of the coin perhaps, that while I can argue against people not watching an anime because it’s old, I can’t argue against people watching it for that very same reason.