Have you seen, IDK,
Mushishi or any other show like that or are you only conversant in the animes that typically get popular in the West? Which tend to be Japan's saturday morning cartoons btw, not the highly regarded ones.
Try
Sakimachi no Appollon for example, which is a music anime, episode 1 has an awesome drumming scene. Never seen anything that cool in a Western cartoon.
The real issue is when most people say "it's shit" what they
don't realize is that they actually mean "the stuff that my culture imports is prediminantly the worst shit". e.g. Japanese manga sales charts include all genres equally represented whether that's action, historical, sports, drama, romance, horror. Whereas in the West it's wall to wall dragonball knock-offs and "big-boob" sex mangas (they don't even appear in the top 50 mangas in Japan yet literally hit #1 in the nytimes manga sales). The west is
selectively purchasing only the shittiest shit. And it's not that unpredictable, since the high-selling mangas in America resemble the high-selling comic books in America. All superpower bullshit basically. The manga sales in Japan don't look anything like that. A thoughtful drama manga is just as likely to be a top-seller as some action one, in Japan at least.
Personally I find even the better American 2D cartoons to look really crudely drawn compared to the best animes. Invader Zim is not great drawing skills.
e.g. show me something with a noir-style like Ergo Proxy or Psycho-Pass that's made in the West? Anything? I mean here's Gravity Falls:
I mean, I hear the writing is good, but the artstyle is rubbish if you're not a three year old. And compare that to something like Ergo Proxy (which isn't the
best looking anime by a wide margin)
i'm going to stick with the latter and give the former a wide berth because I'm not a three-year old. Sure people can say that they artstyle in anime is crap, but what exactly are you saying is
good then? I've put this questions to a number of people on different forums over the years and they never actually cough up any western series that has this supposed "good" cartoon art style.