I'm one of those grognards who can say I was into Anime before Anime was cool and then settled to where it is now, although my interest had admittedly faded to an extent with time, largely due to the market having become so flooded and the annoyance of having to wade through tons of crap to find something that is decent. What's more as I became more used to Anime's tropes I started to find them kind of annoying and predictable, even if at one time they were fairly new.
That said, one thing I learned early on is that ALL anime is directed at a young audience with rare exceptions. Anime is designed for a mass market, with the pop culture trends in Japan being based around whatever anime is current. The target audience is tweens and young teens for 99% of it no matter how it might seem. The exceptions are some shows like the old "Those Who Hunt Elves" which were intended for a nighttime slot, and for an older audience. Some shows that go on to become franchises like Dragonball, Naruto, or perhaps most famously the various Gundam series represent something of an exception given that they have lasted for very long times and entertained generations of kids coming up. Being transient is why most Anime series are over and done with within a single season, with some rare shows making it two, and others are done within 12 to 13 episodes being intended as half season fillers for youth programming blocks. Apparently Japanese TV is organized a bit differently, where in general a full season will be 26 episodes running every week for half a year, where a half season is a 13 episode series that runs for one quarter of the year, with new projects and titles being developed every year, with new projects starting as soon as the previous ones go out the door. One odd occurrence apparently is how American and other non-Japanese fandoms have literally kept IPs alive long after their expected deaths because the US will frequently get things 1 to 3 years after they came and went in Japan and became yesterday's news to everyone but the hardest core nerds, but a solid American following can see those IPs become successful yet again, To be honest I think in realizing what a big market the US in particular can be Japan started to spend too much time calculating the US market and what work over here, and in doing so lost part of the spark that was making it successful, especially in terms of catering to political correctness and not wanting to run afoul of US censors.
At any rate the point here being that Anime for the most part is still very much children's entertainment in Japan despite some older folks being interested as well. Japan isn't the Nirvana for nerds a lot of people convinced themselves it is. As people get older they tend to move away from Anime and more towards Japan's regular dramas and
such of which there are many. The youth distinction goes beyond simply "Shonen" or "Shoujo" which mostly designates it being written for a specific audience. It's the same as say the young adult novels of my youth having some aimed at boys, the various teen detective and adventure novels, and some being directed at girls like the "Sweet Valley High" and "Babysitters Club" series. Of course there are shows that fit neither designation as they are not aiming specifically at one audience, for example right about the time I was moving away from young adult fiction entirely "Fear Street" and various knock offs were becoming huge because it appealed to both genders within that demographic. Of course the content in some of those started to freak parents and parental groups out and eventually it moved entirely to "goosebumps" though young adult literature has seen a resurgence via the success of things like Twilight, Percy Jackson, Insurgent, Hunger Games, etc... albeit today most of it in the US doesn't intentionally label itself the way they did when I was younger. The young adult sections of my local book stores actually had pink and blue coded shelves, one area being for stuff like "The Hardy Boys" and knock offs, Seven Citadels, Last Legionary, and other such series for boys, and the other full of various "Sweet Valley" products. One of my jobs as a young adult was temp work in relocating a Waldenbooks from one area of a mall to another, and one of the things they were doing was restricting so they would have a place to put all the young adult horror books of which there were tons ("Fear Street" had so many knock offs like "Zodiac Club", "The Nightmare Room", and other series) into a gender neutral section which was new to their larger store.
At any rate, the easiest way to tell what age group an Anime is intended for is to find out what network aired it and in what time slot, more than looking for any particular designation. Contrary to some portrayals The Japanese are not all degenerate perverts, "Hentai" is not shown on normal network TV, and as I mentioned before "Those Who Hunt Elves" was one of those that had an "adult" time slot being a show literally about a bunch of weirdoes trapped in a fantasy world running around stripping elf babes to see if they had runes on their bodies that were part of the magic spell that trapped them there. It was not particularly graphic or pornographic, but that premise meant it was not considered suitable for the same age group as other Anime.
One final point I will mention is that while it's based on now much dated information, one thing to consider is that your average American TV show operates at a "mental age level" of about 8 years old. This has nothing to do with the intensity of content, but the complexity of ideas and the stories being told. Basically your average 8 year old can sit down and figure out what's going on with a prime time TV show, even one aimed at adults, without much of a problem at all. You probably don't want him to watch "Sons Of Anarchy" because of the content itself, but he'd have no trouble getting the gist of what's going on for example. In comparison Japan's programmed operated at a "lofty" but still kind of sad mental age level of about 11 or 12. Basically to really "get" a story you might have to grasp some basic metaphysical or scientific concepts that you normally only run into in sci-fi and fantasy books, as well as being able to deal with surrealist elements being moved in and out of a "real" story. Basically Japanese programming seems "deep" simply because it considers the lowest human denominator to be a little higher than American networks (though I'd argue it's going downward as the global market influences it more and more). One of the shows used as an example was "Revolutionary Girl Utena" back in the day (Sons of Anarchy was not itself used, that was my example), that show was broadcast in a lot of countries. It doesn't speak well of Americans, and even worse of Europeans (where the show was actually shown on TV) that people had a hard time figuring that one out since it relied heavily on both story reality and story surrealism at the same time, where you had to understand that what you were seeing is not supposed to be taken literally (although some things were), given that almost everything in the story was a metaphor. According to this study Americans have an average "mental age level" of about 9, with Europeans and the Chinese being about 7 or 8, and Japan being around 11 or 12. Japan preferring to deal with Europe though because they have been less picky about censorship laws. The argument here largely being that China was being judged heavily by it's movie industry, and how a lot of their films were propaganda vehicles intended to discourage critical thinking and subtly reinforce specific imagery (for example notice the subtle and understated use of the color Red in the movie "Hero", which has been compared to the US say making a pseudo-historic action movie where everything in every scene is draped with Red White and Blue bunting to make sure the patriotic undertones are not going to be missed), that and well, we've all seen HK action movies which are easy to parody (this week on Kung-Fu Theater....) that isn't all they produce of course but this is an average, not judging things by the most intellectual productions produced. With Europe you look at things like the BBC and really when viewed objectively their sitcoms and sci-fi shows aren't any better than those elsewhere, and indeed apparently some of them rate worse. Of course as I understood this study and how it was conducted if it had happened within the last decade it would probably bring doubts as to basic brain wave activity among Americans and Europeans due to reality television. I'm sure something like Jersey Shore would have had to lower the overall rating substantially given how popular it was. Some people might take this out of context, and it's no longer current, so please don't, the basic point isn't to say "ha ha, your people are dumber than ours" or the promote the Japanese as some kind of intellectual giants, it's more a matter of saying the modern media is dumb and doesn't exactly encourage people to want more. America also fared well by being pretty much #2 probably due to it having it's fingers in so many media pies, with most entertainment coming from Hollywood which has the best writers and the biggest budgets, drawing people from all over the world to produce American media. Every nation with media production is also accepted as producing some really deep things, but again this was about the average. The only group I felt was probably being picked on was the French because of the way this very old study talked about how a lot of French film making tends to wind up being so deep that it inverts on itself and becomes incredibly dumb, France having once apparently seen a movie produced which was literally a guy photographing a red balloon floating into the sky among different backdrops and was all about the emotions it could elicit in the viewers. I believe the article commented that when France produces enough "Real movies" that aren't arthouse cinema in one way or another it might be possible to give it a fair rating (whether this was later done or not I have no idea), but given France's long term contributions to film I felt they were being picked on, it seemed a lot like the criticisms gamers make of David Cage nowadays.
... and I'm rambling again and got well off topic, the point of that big rant was basically that yes, Anime in a lot of cases is "smarter" than what you see elsewhere, in pretty much any part of the world, but that's not because it's really all that intellectual, simply that it actually writes at the age level it's supposed to be for (but arguably Japanese media doesn't go beyond that peak enough to affect an average). Consider for example how many people simply can't even begin to comprehend the ending of "Neon Genesis Evangelion" even with the creator having explained it point by point and the US publisher (AD Vision) putting up a page called "The Human Insturmentality Project" spelling it all out since so many people showed up. The same has happened with a LOT of Animes over the years, and it ultimately comes from the same basic place that eventually all the metaphysical ranting and weird concepts wind up being important to the story, compared to say Star Trek where you can ignore all the technobabble since what happens is easy for anyone to understand, you don't see say the crew of The Enterprise suddenly floating around as balls of light in a void trying to re-corporealize themselves in time to save the universe based on logic explained across eight episodes, yet in Anime stuff like that can, and does happen, and more frequently than most people might realize (or it did).
