Animated shows/animation quality

I feel that a large part of my interest in an animated show is tied to the quality of the animation, tied with the quality of the plot/characters and the quality of the voice acting. I tried to watch Dragon Ball Z Kai, and found it tough to stay invested because I found the animation to be relatively sub-par. Conversely, I really enjoy the animated Harley Quinn show as much for the 'visual' quality as I do for the voice acting and the writing. I find that Z's animation suffers by comparison even more to pieces like Ninja Scroll or Ghost in the Shell, which I get may be totally blasphemous or heresy in some people's minds, but I just couldn't stick with it beyond the first 2 episodes or so. Is there something wrong with me? And is DB Super more proficiently animated?

I am not an animator so take everything I have to say with a grain of salt.

Still, I think that comparing Ninja Scroll and especially Ghost in the Shell to Dragonball Z is unfair for several reasons. Firstly, runtime - Ninja Scroll and Ghost in the Shell are movies. I don't know how long Ninja Scroll is but GITS is like an hour and a half long. DBZ consists of 22-minute episodes - nearly three hundred of them. The budget for DBZ needs to be spread over a whole hell of a lot more than Ninja Scroll and GITS.

Secondly, production time - I don't know how long GITS and NS were in production, but I bet they had a lot more time to get those movies finished than DBZ animators had to get episodes finished. As a result, DBZ has fewer frames of animation.

Third, Dragonball Z does have some episodes that look great. Kai touched things up a lot, though sometimes they made it worse by fixing things in a way that sticks out like a sore thumb. Long-running anime shows tend to have periods where you can tell they're saving on budget for the bigger moments down the line. For as maligned as it sometimes is, there are parts of the Buu Saga that really stand out. I guess spoilers, but Goku vs Vegeta and Goku vs Kid Buu stand out in my mind.

It might also be that you don't like Dragonball Z, and that's OK too. There's a lot of anime out there, a lot of it's really good, a lot of it looks really good, and if Dragonball Z isn't doing it for you I'm not going to claim that you should stick with it.

I don't have much of an opinion on Super. It's probably better than Z in some technical terms, but I just didn't like its style as much.

I will say that shows like Avatar and Steven Universe made it really hard for me to go back to anime shows since 95% are terribly animated and have worse pacing. Not even OVAs look much better than the TV shows nowadays. Still have a fondness for some shows, especially from the 80s and 90s, though.

It doesn't help how route and checkboxy/tropey most shows are. I don't speak Japanese but when I try watching some new anime show I am still able to predict what the characters are going to say next with embarassing accuracy.

For me, it varies greatly from case to case, sometimes I like things because of the story, sometimes it's because of the animation. 🤔💭

But I tend to tilt towards story scoring most of the time, although I do like eye candy. 🍭👀😝

I watch both anime and western animations, and the most recent thing that was hype and I think lived up to the hype was the animation for League of Legends produced by Netflix: Arcane.

I can say the animation is amazing, also I've watched a few video essays, dissections on YouTube about it, I have interests in how authors write their stories and stuff like that too. That's why it's so interesting to me also, even if the lore was based on a game, (which I quite like the original lore too.) 😁

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Meanwhile, I like random anime's, and for western stuff, all AVATAR stuff checks my boxes, also add adventure time and Steven universe in to the mix. Maybe gravity falls too.

I'm not a super nitpicky person. 🤣