Planetes, hard science fiction about the day to day life of a working class debris deorbiting crew in LEO about 50 years from now

Odd Taxi: a taxi driver gets roped into a Yakuza heist

Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!: 3 girls scrap together an anime for their school’s film festival *(sounds like a recipe for pedo shit but the show avoids that)

Revolutionary Girl Utena. Incredibly stylish. About gender roles and sexuality in a way thats a lot more nuanced than most modern shows. This was the show that convinced me that that one meme about the curtains being blue was actually bullshit, because all the symbolism is super dense, with some of it being obvious enough to penetrate my teenage skull and some of it only making sense on a 3rd or 4th rewatch. My favorite anime of all time, can make me cry and cheer out loud in the same episode. Incredibly queer, if that’s a selling point, though it was limited in how explicit it could be since it aired in a children’s timeslot in the 90s. Ikuhara (the director) went on to direct several other incredibly unique and fascinating anime that also fit your criteria, though I don’t like them as much as Utena. On youtube.

Madoka Magica has some great art direction, if you watch til the end of the first episode you’ll see what I mean.

The mid 2000s Higurashi anime is a fantastic horror series with a really cool concept and some fun twists. If you like it, you should read Umineko, which is by the same guy and is a 10/10 horror mystery about a shitty rich family being slowly killed off on their private island by a ‘witch’ that has supposedly haunted the island for decades, while the main character tries to prove that the witch doesn’t exist. It’s one of my favorite works of fiction ever, but the anime is dogshit.

All of these have content warnings out the ass, so I can share those if you want.

Paprika, Tokyo Godfathers, and Satoshi Kon’s other works are some of the most imaginative and strikingly edited films out there.