Focus primarily on faces. Draw them properly. Use elegant models. Trace them from photogrammetry captures. From people doing as desired for a scene. Until generating such can be done from the mind without dependence on a reference. Cover faces with ninja masks to limit the need to draw detail. Excuse being either they are ninjas or covid/a successor virus/polution.
Lots of backgrounds, never revisited at least not in the same way, not from the same angle. Lots of locations some stung together forming a theme and some wildly different.
Use old cell shading. Overbright lighting and blooming. Use grounded voice acting. No regulars. Sounds that suit characters and will never be heard again, people who do other things for a living and whose voice has just been happened across, not a big deal for them to read out lines or say what they'd say in a situation, animators coming after a storybouard or an acted out scene.
Concept artists, architects, engineers, mechanics and anyone specialised as needed coming together to make what is animated realistic, workable, adoptable if manufacturing picked it. Doesn't need to be a lot done on screen, but it has to be grounded. Things happening need to have gravity. Consequences carried on. Minor ones stacking to majior ones if not checkeded and countered. Too much going on to be in control of much. A fight even just for control of self and own actions.
If there's gunplay people die, it's no magical affair, it's an undesired culling of the meat of the story, missing parts afterwards. Things falling into the gaps they depended upon prior. Limping invalids that don't have a future, dirtied by disaster, infection recognized by all including a mirror.
