I think I understand now, why lots of young anime fans don't like older anime.

There are pretty much the two reasons people miss out on good shows, superficiality and prejudice.

Superficiality doesn't bother me as long as they're aware of it, but the clueless prejudices can really get annoying. A lot of people have no idea about animation and call any show with a shiny color palette 'well animated' while older Movies which often have objectively better animation than a lot of recent TV series (since Movies always tend to get higher budgets) apparently have 'shit' visuals simply because they are 'old'.

Which brings me to the next issue: Randomly calling anime before year X old is some of the weirdest bullshit I've ever seen in any medium. When it's not uncommon to refuse to watch shows before 2010 or even 2012 anymore, that's just mind-numbingly stupid even if you are extremely superficial and only care about visuals. There's no way around it. The whole idea that the year of production has more to do with the visuals than the individual situation of that anime (like budget and production time and staff) is retarded. The decade may be relevant, but even that's a stretch since there are huge variations in budgets and animation quality in every decade.

I've seen dozens of shows (well, mostly OVAs or Movies) from the 80s or 90s (or even older) that without a doubt have better and more fluid animation than a lot of the TV series nowadays. When combined with a 1080p BD remaster they can easily compete with anything the medium has to offer.
The only(!) thing that has consistently changed without COUNTLESS exceptions is the color palette thanks to the switch from cel animation to digital animation, but if colors really are THE main and most important criteria for your enjoyment you might as well watch a colorful screensaver or watch Iblard Jikan 26 times instead of some 2-cour show with a story and characters that don't care about colors.

So in the end I think the vast majority of those people are just gravely prejudiced and give 'old' (whatever year that is) anime basically no credit in the visual department for no other reason than having a random production year attached to them. That combined with the general human laziness when it comes to trying out anything new or unfamiliar leads to this 'I don't wanna hear about it' attitude and when put on the spot to say why they refuse to consider 'old' series they just make up some reasons on the spot.

It wouldn't be so annoying if half the time it weren't the same people that whine about how 'normal' people look down on anime and don't even give it a chance just because it's animated/japanese and how people make fun of anime without knowing what it's really about etc... Then they go and do the same with 'old' anime simply because it's 'old'. In both cases people think they know something without ever really giving it a try, and judge it accordingly because it's the easy thing to do. But in reality animation CAN tell great and mature stories and old anime CAN look amazing, period, and unless you either accept that in both cases laziness is (or is not) a valid reason for not checking something out that you're unfamiliar with, you're a hypocrite. And I hate hypocrites.

It's especially bad when they have some 'old' favorite anime that they probably watched before they started paying attention to the production year and then proceed to call them 'exceptions' for no other reason than having seen and liked them despite their age. But of course they still don't consider that tons of other 'old' anime could also be 'exceptions' since they adapted the 'new = better' policy at some point.

Speaking of which, I also think the whole 'newer is always better' thought process is partly a symptom of the times we live in. Just take a look at how things are advertised. "You don't need to keep up with your old phone from 3 months ago but get the BRAND-NEW model today to get on the same level as your friends!!!" or some bullshit like that. Everything, everywhere constantly tells everyone that new = better and old = throw it away even if it's still usable (the best thing that can happen to old things is that they get recyled and turned into new things!).
So yeah, I'm not blaming people for having these tendencies, I just blame them for never thinking twice about them but instead religiously believing in them. I've confronted tons of people that avoided older anime and usually it comes down to the deep-rooted belief that old has to be worse by default (at least when it comes to animation). It gets even more ridiculous when those statements leave the field of technicality (animation) and enter the field of arts (music and artstyles). Way too often have I encountered people who really thought that art or music has to be 'better' in new series simply because they are new and stuff gets 'better over time'. I'm not even gonna explain how stupid and detached from reality that assumption is because it should be self-explanatory.

That's pretty much all I have to say about the topic after countless encounters with that type of fan.

But there's one last thing I want to say using this post as an example for something I see often:




PLEASE stop assuming that we love an old anime because we watched it 10 years ago. WE DON'T.
We love them because we truly enjoy them from today's perspective, because we believe them to hold up to today's standards in all relevant aspects. Because we just think they are good.
I've watched the vast majority of my pre 90s anime in the last 3 years and I love tons of them. Watching new anime is no reason to 'be unable to watch' old anime and saying old shows were only good when they aired is just ignorance.

Why do people prefer modern anime/media?
(Reasons I've heard before):

Well, there is an objective difference in black and white/color or silent/sound movies, but beyond that the vast majority of biases against older anime do not hold up when you have actual experience with the medium. Ugliness is hardly dependent on age, there are all kinds of artstyle in both new and old anime so just generalizing one as 'better' as the other in terms of artstyle is just silly. There isn't nearly enough consistency to generalize it like that in the first place. There is no reason to believe that the quality of artstyles in general have drastically improved over the last 20 or 30 years. There have been masterpiece paintings long before anime even existed. Art doesn't get better or worse, it comes in different shapes at any given time, even if there are certain trends.

Low resolution is a factor for a lot of old anime, but there are also dozens if not hundreds out there that have remastered BD versions that give you all the hand-drawn glory of cel animation with the level of detail a 1080p resolution provides. And more are getting that treatment every year. In fact, those anime have true HD 1080p resolution because they are scanning the original drawings at that resolution for the remastered version, while almost any 1080p version of modern anime is simply an upscale and they're produced in only 720p. So if you have a hard-on for resolution, old anime should appeal to you more than modern ones.

Slow pace should be obvious that this is something found in both old and new anime, just like the opposite. Old anime may have more series that are 50 episodes because that was more common back then compared to having lots of 1-cour teasers for the source material with the option for sequels which is the current trend. That can translate to a slower pacing, but it doesn't have to. In any case both trends have their pros and cons, but pacing isn't really one of them.

Bad animation is the biggest myth of them all. If you know your shit you know that TV anime from the very start was very budget oriented so they could be affordable (Thanks, Tezuka) and the budget-saving techniques have only been refined over the years. But at the end of the day most tv anime still spend a lot of their time on stills or quasi-stills with mouthflaps and really good sakuga scenes are rare. Of course there are exceptions that have a higher density of great sakuga scenes (like One Punch Man or Space Dandy) or somehow have the fluidity of a movie despite being a TV series (Nichijou) but there are also old TV series that look really good in their remastered versions. Urusei Yatsura or Ashita no Joe for example.

What has actually improved is mostly the amount of special effects and filters that can make things seem sparkly, exciting and whatnot, but that has little to do with actual animation of key frames since it's just additional layering via computer programs.

And that's only speaking of TV series, a field where, in average, animation has improved slightly over the years (which doesn't mean there aren't old shows that can hold up to today's standards).

The most important thing is be aware that TV anime still have very limited budgets and a decenty budgeted OVA or movie will almost always look better in terms of pure animation quality. That has always been that way, and an anime movie that had amazing animation in the 80s will still be better animated than 99% of all modern TV shows. Great animation movies are basically non-stop sakuga scenes which is something no TV series can afford.

And lastly good animation is not just fluidity and amount of frames per second, it's also the ability to pay attention to details like conveying weight or momentum and other difficult things. Which again is not an ability bound to a certain decade, but rather dependent on the individual director/animator.

So in my experience a lot of people who avoid older anime like the plague are full of misinformed prejudice and don't actually know why they are avoiding them so they make up reasons based on those popular prejudices instead of actually seeing for themselves and trying to figure out the actual reasons they don't like them (if there are any). It's just easy and safe to stick to what you know and that's understandable, but using that as a basis to just make everything old seem worse in all kinds of categories is an individual decision, not a justified, objective reason.

And in general anyone who names an arbitrary year as the unbreakable border is someone I can't take very seriously because the assumption that there is any one particular year where everything changed alone just shows a lack of information and common sense. Even when anime visuals were undergoing a visable change in the early 2000 (and a bit before that), transforming from cel animation to a more cgi-oriented approach, it was an ongoing process that took at least half a decade, during which time there are hit and miss shows every year, some looking okay and some very ugly.