A lot of the time it seems like it's for the best to wait a long time to adapt something, especially when we're talking about Live Action adaptations of significant prose works of Sci-Fi or Fantasy, it can take 20 or even 50 years for the technology of Film making to catch up to the imagination or the original author.
However the thing about Otaku media is that the aesthetics of where Otaku culture was at that time are more important then the geopolitics or fashion trends of the real world. In any other context something being too much a product of it's time just means you adapt it as a period piece, but Otaku art is different.
Boogiepop and Others, YU-NO: A Girl Who Chants Love At The Bound of This World and Magic Kaito 1412 are examples of source material from the late 80s or 90s that didn't get a proper Anime adaptation till the 2010s. And I like all three of those Anime to varying degrees, they are all good shows. But I can't help but feel like something is lost in them being done in these very modern artstyles when at their core these are 90s characters who should be immortalized with 90s character designs.
Animation is not limited in what things it can show the way Live Action is, even TV Anime which is done on more limited of a budget was in the 80s already doing some High Fantasy and Hard Sci-Fi. However the aesthetics and styles of Anime constantly evolve, and with them the very tools used to animate are replaced. So it's really just not even possible to animate something today but make it look like it could have been animated in the 90s, the substances behind 90s Animation no longer exist, so nothing animated now can ever be Homousian with 90s Anime.
As someone who lived through the 90s I can still sense the 90s sensibilities in these Anime in ways I can't really explain, even though at least two were updated to the present in the adaptation. But that's all the more reason why their looking so standard 2019 feels off.
It also matters that all three were works who's source materials were very influential, a lot of stuff following trends they set got animated way sooner. But when those of us who know try to explain that to the average contemporary seasonal Anime viewer, it's hard for them to even believe us when YU-NO looks at first glance like every other generic Isekai of 2019.
It helps that we got glimpses of what aesthetically a more contemporary Anime for each of them could have looked like. YU-NO has the animated opening cinematic made for the Sega Saturn port and the absolute madness that was it's 4 episode Hentai OVA. Boogiepop Phantom was basically an animated side story made in 2000 and serves as the only Anime I've ever felt was drawing aesthetic inspiration from Serial Experiments Lain. And Magic Kaito made a number of appearances on Detective Conan, most notable are the first half hour of episode 219 and OVA 4 which each adapts a story of the Magic Kaito Manga.
That's not to say they needed to be adapted immediately, lots of great Anime came 5ish years after it's source material, sometimes one decade proves to not be too much.
I've argued before that the 2000s were the most transitional decade in Anime history, so maybe that's the real problem. Some 90s source material is done well adapted in even the late 00s, and plenty of great 2010s Anime was adapted from even early 2000s works. It's particularly the change to digital Animation that makes it hard for most 90s Character designs to feel right in modern Animation.
Maybe it's not absolutely only an Anime thing. The DCAMU adaptation of the Death and Return of Superman doing at times scene for scene recreations of stuff from the original 1992 Comic Book storyline but in their New52 based artstyle feels similarly off-putting, more so since I fundamentally hate the New52 style more then I do almost any Anime artstyle. But this kind of thing is I feel more pronounced in the way Otaku aesthetics work.
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