Now that I have your attention, did anyone else start rewatching it after the thread about what version to watch the other day? I vaguely remember watching the old dub when it was first airing in the US back in the 90s, and watching the remastered dub now I'm surprised at how well it holds up, all things considered. Except for the heavy overuse of flashing lights as a cheap to animate special effect, that part fucking sucks since I have to either physically cover my eyes or alt-tab until it's through with it.
I also keep getting distracted trying to pick out all the little labor saving animation tricks they used and trying to figure out how they managed to make such janky animations actually look decent, as well as wondering why modern low-budget animation can't manage the same effect even though modern tools should make it even easier and faster to use the old stylistic tricks. Is it just a matter of janky cell animation needing a very specific set of skills that no one today cultivates in order to look good?
I've just gotten through the tree arc. Weirdly, despite being 46 episodes long the first season felt like it was fairly well paced for the content it had; there were definitely filler episodes but it didn't really drag all that much, and the in-episode pacing got better the further into it it got. In comparison the first arc of the second season felt like an absolute slog, despite being much shorter - most episodes felt like nothing really happened and the action scenes getting taken over by increasingly long reused move sequences got old fast. While that particular labor saving trick is understandable in context - you make one intricately animated sequence and then use it over and over and over indefinitely instead of spending more on bespoke animations - goddamn if it doesn't get tiring to watch.
There's also the issue that while overall it seems much better than one would expect something from the early 90s to be, there's some creepy shit with a central conceit of the story being that the 14 year old main character is the fated soulmate of a guy who seems to be in his early 20s because the moon despot did a Third Impact after some guys with swords ran to the moon on a cloud, and that their relationship is portrayed 100% positively with him being a moral compass who's helpful but never oversteps the main character's personal agency. I can't decide if it gets some credit for making him an impossibly perfect passive wish fulfilment object for the main character (and thus does better than the typical anime things where he would be the viewer insert and Usagi would be the viewer wish-fulfilment prize) or if that just makes it worse by narratively contriving to make a relationship that would be extremely creepy and predatory IRL ontologically ok.
Overall though, it's a decent nostalgia trip that's making me realize just how formative it was on my imagination as a kid, and even now is making me think a lot about the technical and structural parts. But if the pacing doesn't get better in the second arc of season two I don't know if I'll manage to get through it, and I might just stop and go watch the much shorter reboot instead.
A major point to consider is that Sailor Moon was a long running weekly show that went on without breaks for years. Shows like that, no matter the era, require more limited animation tricks in order to deliver an interesting visual product because they will have less movement than 10-20 episode seasonal shows . Also idk what you mean by "janky animations" but Sailor Moon actually moves more and has better, less janky animation than most modern shows of similar length and production.
There is truth that some of the techniques used have faded out and that makes it harder for limited or long productions to deliver a pleasing show visually. Stuff like stylized still frames, color swaps, pans, triple takes and more limited comedic acting with great expressions are somewhat of a lost art form. Either because a some were achieved by analog cel photography and their aesthetic doesn't go well with digital colors and computer compositing but mostly because there is market demand to storyboard shows in a flashier way "like other big hits" and bad productions have lost the ability and realism to try and work around their limitations . Also younger generation of artists simply didn't grow up with those aesthetics so they won't try to reproduce it
Another thing to note is that it was simpler to make a competent looking show back then because simple cel photography of hand painted backgrounds its hard to fuck up aestheticaly. Computer compositing gives people way too many tools to fuck up the aesthetic with filters, digital effects, 3d assets etc being heavily used and usually in a bad or rushed ways due to production issues usually since compositing is also the last thing done. That's why there are 10 isekai every season that look like bland ass aestheticaly . They would be equally crap story wise in the 90s and they wouldn't move more but the art direction, backgrounds etc would have looked at worst cool. Same with sailor Moon. It relies on great backgrounds and color design but in a modern paradigm for a long running show that aspect would look worse and blander
Lastly anime productions are in their worst state ever. Its horrid really. 2-3 great looking shows each season hide the fact that the rest are completely broken, taped together in the last minute and rely on armies of inexperienced animators to patch them up. The production process hasn't been simplified by became more and more complex and fragmentated and without a system of mentorship in place the talent required isn't replaced in good rates despite the fact that many people world wide work o anime nowadays.
I'm thinking mainly of how many scenes are just completely dead still except for a few small moving bits and how often animations end up being like one static image that just gets moved through the shot. Or how sometimes the individual drawn figures are clearly flawed in ways I associate with modern amateur-mistakes-to-avoid examples I've seen in art tutorials. I'm struck by the fact that it still looks good despite those rough edges.
I'm not just thinking about professional published materials here, but also short animations done by single people or small teams. Like even where what seem to be the same tricks are getting used, and there's more detail or whatever, it just doesn't make it work. So that's the point I keep distracted by and realizing several minutes later I'd completely tuned out what was going on thinking about the animation, trying to divine what it is that divides sort of rough, stylized animation that looks amazing from rough, stylized animation that looks bad, even when the latter has more things that should be going for it.
Yeah, what really got me started down this rabbit hole was seeing a video a month or so ago from an artist trying to work out a labor efficient way to rotoscope CGI to make it look good instead of horribly jarring and out of place. It left me wondering if modern tools can be synthesized with older techniques to create something that's less labor intensive than the old methods but still looks good in a way that the results of the modern tools generally don't.