This is just an animated movie cartoon right, is it really that deep?
I don't think Kung Fu Panda is particularly deep, but probably is deeper than a lot of other Hollywood films. I'd say the deeper animated films I've seen are Secret of Kells (largely an adventure story, but very in depth with regards to dark-age Irish history/legends/mythology).
There are a lot of in-depth Anime movies, hard to pick anything in particular that stands out. Tokyo Godfathers, and Wolf Children, probably affected me emotionally the most (despite being mostly mundane situations). I think a lot of the more sci-fi / dream / supernatural stuff loses points due to technobabble (Ghost in a Shell, Evangelion, Paprika), but these are also deeper movies than typical.
Tokyo Godfathers / Wolf children manage to be deep about a relatively mundane subject. Homeless people for Tokyo Godfathers, and Wolf Children is basically a simple "raising a young girl / young boy" story, with the wolf-myth just largely representing the uncertainty that all mothers face when raising kids for the first time. Despite being about mundane subjects with only the barest of myth/sci-fi/fantasy in it, these movies seem to discuss the human condition better than many other films (even contrasted to other anime films, like Evangeleon)
I think you can mostly ignore the technobabble without issues, most of the time it's here for the setting but not necessary. For example, Akagi and Ten (mangas by Nobuyuki Fukumoto) feature a lot of mahjong, but mahjong is secondary to what's really happening, which is a clash of multiple personalities/ways of life. You can usually see this because the important moments don't usually feature the technoblabble part. The gambling house arc in Akagi doesn't feature any mahjong, yet is the point that defines Akagi as a character. The last three volumes of Ten also don't feature any mahjong, and are in my opinion the most beautiful manga chapters ever written. Evangelion is so loved because the characters are flawed humans trying to go through life, the setting is almost secondary. Patlabor 2 features large robots in a sci-fi world but the politics are the same as ever.
All of these stories are stories about humans before everything else, which is why they are so good.
I agree that its largely ignorable. Actually, the "technobabble" adds a lot of flavor and "coolness" to a lot of situations, so its fine for my reptilian brain.
The issue is that every minute of technobabble on the screen is another wasted minute from a storytelling perspective. When you watch a denser film (like Secret of Kells), that's lacking any of that techno-babble... or even something like Fate/Stay (which largely cuts out the techno-magic babble aside from a few key phrases), the storyline is heavier and denser. More things "happen" because there's less "filler technobabble" going on.
So when we talk about pleasing my "higher-order" brain (as opposed to my reptile brain which is pleased with the technobabble + explosions), my high-order brain enjoys the character interactions and the deeper analogies to the human condition.
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So from the "higher-order" perspective, something like Tokyo Godfathers can tell a fuller story in a shorter amount of time, because there's less technobabble eating up the screentime.
But it's funny that you pick something like Fate, in both the original Stay Night (the visual novel) and Zero (the light novel), there is a lot of technobabble. It gets cut in the anime adaptations, along with most of the interesting parts of the characters and the story. The original Stay Night by DEEN was a weird mix of all three routes, not great by any means but at least brought something new, UBW was butchered, and I'm trying to keep things civil so I won't talk about Heaven's Feel. Zero had the same treatment, most of the internal dialogue of characters was cut, leaving a story with half-baked characters and trying to compensate with the visuals.
> So from the "higher-order" perspective, something like Tokyo Godfathers can tell a fuller story in a shorter amount of time, because there's less technobabble eating up the screentime.
That's true. However, I think time is not always a hard limit. Sometimes the movie being slow is part of the experience. It is something I like a lot, so I probably have a bias here.
Fate/Stay anime is interesting as a series and as a storytelling medium.
On the face of it, it feels like Fate/Stay is a soft-magic system where the magic is called out as magic and rarely elaborated on. Here's healing magic here, or noble phantasms over there, or reality marbles, or whatever.
But in actuality, Fate/Stay is a hard-magic system, supported by the depth of the original story. All the magic has rules. They just skip over the rules explanation in the anime, because they don't have the time for it (ie: they chose not to have time for it, and focus on other elements of the story).
I agree that pointing out to the audience the hard-magic system and its rules probably would be beneficial. On the other hand... maybe not? All of the anime (including the Tsukihime and Garden of Sinners anime/OVAs) consistently skip over these explanations and just leave it up to the audience to figure out the rule system on their own (if they care).
"Story told as if it were soft magic", but with a hard-magic reference point thanks to a series of in-depth rules published in that visual novel that a much smaller portion of the fanbase has read is... fine. Its like how Lord of the Rings has all this history in the Silmarillion that 99% of readers don't know about. If the audience cares about the details, the original VNs / wikis / etc. etc. exist. If they don't care about the details, all the better, they didn't want to hear the explanation in the first place.
Its a compromise system, but its an interesting compromise. Frankly, a lot of audience members are happy with the soft-magic hand-waved explanations given in the anime.
I don't think Fate/Stay is a "deep" anime, not on the levels of the other shows I've discussed. But it still shows how cutting out the techno-babble in the actual anime (and just handwaving the details) increases the density of the show. Especially because the "harder" fans know how in-depth all of those explanations actually go.
There's nothing about the medium that says how good the message is. If anything not having to work with human actors and real world physics should give a bit of flexibility in the storytelling.
The real depth, in anything insightful said, is created by the listener and how they choose to take the words to heart.
This is what life all is about.
The good bits of Rick and Morty are very short, maybe 1-minute sections of episodes. Morty's relationship with Planetina was one of the deeper moments of all of season 5, except it is summarized in maybe 90-seconds of story at the most.
And its really not much deeper than "some eco-friendly people turn out to be eco-terrorists", and that's enough to ruin a relationship. Yeah, sucks for Morty, but... its not exactly a particularly deep message (deep in the context of the rest of the show, yes. And I definitely enjoy those kinds of moments. But something needs to be longer than 90-seconds of story for me to call it "deep", especially compared to other things I've seen)
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I dunno, as far as technobabble / nonsense words go, I prefer Evangeleon from that perspective. There's a lot to be said about Shinji's exploration of his depression (caused by Gendo, his father's, obsession over the Human Instrumentality Project).
Rick is just a toxic asshole that the show forces you to watch. Someone like Morty should have run away / cut Rick out of his life a long long time ago. At least in Evangelion, Shinji is actively trying to cut out the entire mecha-project out of his life (running away multiple times), but since Shinji is one of the few candidates who can pilot the mech, he's forced back into the job over-and-over again (unlike Morty who seems to just be this passive guy who is needlessly picked on by Rick for 5 seasons).
If nothing really matters, then Morty could just leave and that's that (and the fact that this hasn't been explored across ~5 seasons shows the limitations of the relatively shallow, episodic format... forcing Rick and Morty to be friends again by the start of the next episode to keep things serialized). What makes Shinji's situation unique is that Shinji's worth as a pilot is more than he gives credit for, and each time he tries to leave, a disaster occurs. Each time Shinji does fight, a disaster also occurs by his hands. So Shinji's confusion and depression is far more understanding.
Ex: Shinji's relationship with Toji evolves over a few episodes, and is deeper than all 5 season's of Morty's development.
Shinji is forced to pilot the mech in episode 1. Shinji's inexperience with the mech causes collateral damage, and Toji's sister gets trapped in the rubble. Toji bullies Shinji until Shinji saves him in the next fight, as Toji didn't realize the issues of being a pilot. The arc culminates as Toji himself becomes a pilot, and Shinji is forced by his father to destroy Toji's mech. Shinji is being forced to follow Gendo (his father's) plans as scripted out by "The Dead Sea Scrolls" (aka: technobabble), but the important thing is that Gendo's ambition for the project is so great, he's willing to traumatize his own son over it. Shinji x Toji's relationship is just one sacrifice Gendo makes, and Shinji's depression goes even deeper because of it.
The Toji sub-plot is all wrapped up before the 10th episode, and is a side-story at best. Its barely a spoiler IMO. What makes Evangelion great is that its filled with these interactions: Misato's interactions with Ritsuko, Ritsuko interacting with Rei, Rei interacting with Asuka, etc. etc.
Its filled to the brim, not all of the interactions are depressing, some are ridiculously over-the-top / campy (especially the excuses for fanservice scenes), but the "serious story" that's told over the 26 episodes (or 4 OVA movies for the new timeline) is pretty good. Albeit heavily laden with long-winded dialogs about Selee, Three Magi computer system, Dead Sea Scrolls, AT Fields, the 2nd, 3rd, or 4th impact events and Hedgehog's Paradox (Okay, Hedgehog's Paradox actually is relevant and the running theme between all of these characters. But a lot of the other stuff doesn't matter, lol).
Neon Genesis Evangelion, really did the Nihilist thing better though. No matter what Shinji tried, things kept getting worse. Rick is "too obvious" of an asshole. Gendo (Shinji's father) is better, because nominally speaking, Gendo is working on a project to literally cancel out the apocalypse that's occurring in the series.
So when Gendo says "Get in the mech and fight that monster", you generally know that Shinji (probably) should do that, you know, to save the world. The long-term effects of this decision (as well as the alternative decision: for Shinji to run away from this responsibility) are explored in the short 26 episodes of the series.
When Rick says "shove these 'Mega Seeds' up your ass Morty", I'm not entirely sure if Morty should comply with that. They have some foreshadowing going on for the "what if Morty stopped listening to Rick all the time", thanks to the "Alternate Universe Evil Morty" plotline going on, but we've had like 4 episodes so far with that character? And most of the time, that character doesn't interact with mainline Rick/mainline Morty.
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The show is randomly pretty good with some relationships. Rick x Unity was a good episode, as was Morty x Planetina. Otherwise, I think its largely just a comedy show where ridiculous things happen in a crude manner, with a mildly Nihilist perspective on events.
A lot of R&M scenes are due to incredibly poor decisions of the main characters: Rick outright lying to Morty and then hiding the lie through toxic interactions (its your fault Morty). Morty becoming so overly influenced by his sexual desire to potentially cause a world-ending (or universe-ending) event. Jerry wimping out of some fight. And these decisions are largely encoded into the format of these characters. These characters rarely "try something else", because doing so would break the serialization format (ie: the golden rule of American cartoons. Do not change the characters).
Grave of the Fireflies is depressing as fuck and definitely does not skip the serious stuff.
The way it is made does not allow any conclusions to be drawn about its depth.