Personally while I love and appreciate the XY Series as well, Sun and Moon is just on a whole another league for me.
After 20 long years of being on air, the Pokemon anime found itself a formula that it applied on every series, whenever the games came out, Ash went to the region said games are set and, traveled around the region, made friends, caught new Pokemon, collected badges and lost the league, this is the "basic plot" of Pokemon summed up in one sentence, even when this is done well as is the case in the XY Series, watching the same formula again and again got repetitive in my opinion.
Sun and Moon, while retaining the core themes and concepts of the previous seasons, took a very different approach, Ash didn't travel, he did make new friends but those were his "classmates", Yes, he went to School, he didn't collect gym badges as there are no gyms in the Alola Region but he did participate in the Island trials, so here are my thoughts.
Characters : 8/10
The Sun and Moon Series, despite having a way bigger cast than the previous seasons, developed each and every member in some way or another which I didn't think was possible for the Pokemon anime, Ash himself didn't get "reset" like he did in the Best Wishes series, he very much retained his skills which manifested in the XY Series, but one problem I had with XY's characterization of Ash is that outside of battles, he was quite stale. Sun and Moon fixed that, they made him childish and goofy while still badass and serious, a perfect mix.
Story : 9/10
The series has no "main story" all the small arcs and episodes build up to give us a really great Pokemon experience. Lillie's growth from a girl who is afraid of Pokemon and had problems with her family to battling her own brother in the Pokemon League and mastering a Z move was quite fascinating to see.
Other characters like Sophocles, Kiawe and Lana got growth as well, Mallow despite being a okay character didn't get much development but she got an amazing episode which was episode 108, what shined was how the stories were connected to the main cast, we already talked about Lillie's story, that same story developed Lusamine, Gladion in more ways than one, that story itself made Gladion Ash's rival.
Other small arcs like The Guzzlord and Zeraora mini arc or the return of Brock and Misty were really fun to see. It was really sweet to see all the interactions and relationship the characters shared, from the father and son dynamic Ash and Kukui had to Guzma who was sorta like a "dark version" of Ash, who quit his dreams after facing failures too many times.
Animation : 7/10
The new artstyle which cause a lot of controversy especially because of the look of Ash was implemented to enhance the character's movements by making the designs simplistic with less shading and details, the animators' job became a lot easier as opposed to the well detailed designs of XY, while this sounds good on paper and the character animation did factually improve a lot, the battles for some reason were lackluster in terms of animation, despite being well written if a battle looks boring, it loses a lot of points, why do you think people like Ash vs Kukui? it was well written AND well animated, the next series is also taking this simplistic artstyle approach but my only hope is the battles look as good as the character animation does which is honestly amazing and the best in Sun and Moon. The backgrounds too look the best out of any series prior to it.
Music : 10/10
Nothing to say, Pokemon, be it the anime or the games, never disappoints with music, from beautiful remixes of games' tracks to original tracks, Shinji Miyazaki is consistently amazing, this was his last series as the music scorer of Pokemon Anime, next series its Yuku Hayashi who is amazing as well (he did the score for My Hero Academia)
Overall : 9/10
Sun and Moon is just fun, it has a lot of ups and downs but which series doesn't? ignore the artstyle and give it a try, you won't be disappointed,
