Obligatory shoutout to [email protected] if you want a more anime-focused discussion. Of what I have watched (or seen enough of to make a judgement) there are a couple standouts. Note that I haven’t really watched much western animation in recent years.

• Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End - [email protected]
• The Apothecary Diaries
• Heavenly Delusion
• Delicious in Dungeon - [email protected] - This one is done by Studio Trigger, so it is a bit stylized, but I adore the animation in this series
• Jujutsu Kaisen - I haven’t watched this, but I have only seen tremendous praise for season 2’s animation (despite the studio’s working conditions)
• Demon Slayer - another show I haven’t watched, but have seen plenty of gorgeous clips

Wildcard answer would be Star Wars Visions. Each episode is done by a different animation studio, so it can be up to personal preference as to which ones you like, but there are some great showcases in the show.

Edit: If you care a lot about animation quality, I would recommend checking out the SakugaBlog. It goes into deep dives on Japanese animation. For example, they did a whole running series on Frieren (link to the first article).

A lot of the anime-related communities have consolidated over time to the ani.social instance. There are historical reasons for this (largely due to hostility from the ml admins), and if you want a brief history for just the general anime community, I previously wrote a post here.

That being said, the ani.social instance has been growing with new communities being added. Here are the more active ones:

General Communities

• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]

Series-Specific Communities

• [email protected] - Delicious in Dungeon community
• [email protected] - Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End community
• [email protected] - My Deer Friend Nokotan community (currently airing show)
• [email protected] - Dan Da Dan community (show airs this fall)
• [email protected] - Dragonball community

Misc.

• [email protected] - Very new community just started by @[email protected] about vocaloids. Check it out!
• [email protected] - Community to discuss and share videos from and about vtubers
• [email protected] - Community about Japanese voice actors behind the scenes

A couple fandom communities:

• [email protected] - Currently airing show, has weekly discussion threads
• [email protected] - Show that will be airing this fall, has threads for manga chapters
• [email protected] - Show that aired a couple months back, currently mostly fanart posts
• [email protected] - Show that aired a couple months ago, currently mostly fanart posts
• [email protected] - Community to discuss Japanese anime voice actors behind the scenes and share clips

This is an excellent point that I thought about when a previous community I was active in got shut down on the ml instance due to some admin whims. Since then, for the two communities I run, I have an external wiki that I maintain with things like complete rules or an index of past weekly discussion threads, etc. These wikis are set up on a VPS that I am responsible for, independent of the host instance of my communities.

ani.social and the admin, @[email protected], has been excellent, and the instance is a logical place for anime/manga communities. I have also tried to keep up donations to keep the server running, but people’s lives change, not always by choice. Having some form of communication independent of the lemmy instance makes sense for those scenarios, if for nothing else except for communicating a migration to a different instance.

Filterable post flairs and instance-agnostic links are my two biggest wish list items that I think would go a long way to making that specific community much nicer (speaking as a mod).