"no anime newer than Eva" sounds like a self-important wank. I can only think it was meant half-jokingly. NGE is kinda childish. I'll take Mushishi, Kino's Journey, Kaiba, Tatami Galaxy.
http://wiki.evageeks.org/Statements_by_Evangelion_Staff#Reliable_and_well-known_sourcesYou can fin plenty of quotes about what Anno had in mind and how he drew on his personal experiences for the show, but very little of it suggests he designed the whole thing as a fuck-you to the viewers, hence why I say that's a creepy-pasta above. They always have a grain of truth, but an underlying conspiracy theory.
Maybe it was a "fuck you" letter to himself, after all he did nothing and wallowed about for 4 years while other people were still doing stuff. It makes no sense for him to blame everyone else for that.
Also, he criticized Studio Ghibli because he thought there works were getting too nice and family-safe. If he was
also criticizing other works at the same time for being too sexy and adult, then the guy would just be an a-grade tool, basiscally: someone who isn't happy no matter what comes out unless it's his exact personal tastes. Not too "family", just the exact
amount of "dark" that he likes etc. Risk-taking, but not
too risk-taking etc.
That "country of children" quote was NOT about the effects of otaku culture. Only a small percentage of Japan are otaku. It's important to put quotes in context:
Anno understands the Japanese national attraction to characters like Rei as the product of a stunted imaginative landscape born of Japan’s defeat in the Second World War. “Japan lost the war to the Americans,” he explains, seeming interested in his own words for the first time during our interview. “Since that time, the education we received is not one that creates adults. Even for us, people in their 40s, and for the generation older than me, in their 50s and 60s, there’s no reasonable model of what an adult should be like.” The theory that Japan’s defeat stripped the country of its independence and led to the creation of a nation of permanent children, weaklings forced to live under the protection of the American Big Daddy, is widely shared by artists and intellectuals in Japan. It is also a staple of popular cartoons, many of which feature a well-meaning government that turns out to be a facade concealing sinister and more powerful forces.
Anno pauses for a moment, and gives a dark-browed stare out the window. “I don’t see any adults here in Japan,” he says, with a shrug. “The fact that you see salarymen reading manga and pornography on the trains and being unafraid, unashamed or anything, is something you wouldn’t have seen 30 years ago, with people who grew up under a different system of government. They would have been far too embarrassed to open a book of cartoons or dirty pictures on a train. But that’s what we have now in Japan. We are a country of children.”
Yes, he called Japan a "country of children" but omitting the first part gives a distorted view of what he was talking about. The entire post-WWII generation up to 60 year olds are the "nation of children", he didn't single out otaku culture as the cause of this, nor state Evangelion as the cure ... he singled out the "different system of government" of previous generations, not otaku culture or anime/manga as the cause.
There's also a quote where he talks about sex fan-fictions but he says "every generation has that, because sex sells". So he has no real "moral decline" quotes that can be attributed to otaku culture.
He mentions sailor moon, because he was directing a shoujo anime and watched an old shoujo anime for reference, commenting it "looks old" and that the world is divided into pre-Sailor Moon and post-Sailor Moon eras. This is more a comment that Sailor Moon was game-changing for shoujo anime, making everything before it seem dated overnight, rather than that Sailor Moon was some great malaise on the industry.
His real major complaint is that he believes digital animation processes and CG are "changing the aesthetic" of anime: so his real thing is "why can't we paint it on cels like the olds days?", but simultaneously criticizing the new generation for not doing enough to create their own style and copying from the past. Seriously? Those two criticisms are totally at odds with each other.