Obligatory shoutout to !anime@ani.social 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 - !frieren@ani.social
• The Apothecary Diaries
• Heavenly Delusion
• Delicious in Dungeon - !dungeonmeshi@ani.social - 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

• !anime@ani.social
• !manga@ani.social
• !lightnovels@ani.social

Series-Specific Communities

• !dungeonmeshi@ani.social - Delicious in Dungeon community
• !frieren@ani.social - Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End community
• !nokotan@ani.social - My Deer Friend Nokotan community (currently airing show)
• !dandadan@ani.social - Dan Da Dan community (show airs this fall)
• !dragonball@ani.social - Dragonball community

Misc.

• !vocaloid@ani.social - Very new community just started by @hisao@ani.social about vocaloids. Check it out!
• !vtubervids@ani.social - Community to discuss and share videos from and about vtubers
• !seiyuu@ani.social - Community about Japanese voice actors behind the scenes

A couple fandom communities:

• !nokotan@ani.social - Currently airing show, has weekly discussion threads
• !dandadan@ani.social - Show that will be airing this fall, has threads for manga chapters
• !frieren@ani.social - Show that aired a couple months back, currently mostly fanart posts
• !dungeonmeshi@ani.social - Show that aired a couple months ago, currently mostly fanart posts
• !seiyuu@ani.social - 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, @hitagi@ani.social, 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.