Its a fantastic underappreciated series. The story is an excellent one, the cast is fantastic, and its gripping from start to finish. It could give many series a few tips on how to do backstory effectively.
The character designs are retro, which for some may be offputting, but I found the designs grew on me after a while. There is a Ghibli feel to this series and I believe some Ghibli staff were involved.
On a more serious note, the production leaves a lot to be desired. WHile not bad, it is very low budget and shows up in the action and designs. Especially the mechanical designs really, 'easy to animate' seems to be the order of the day, which translates to 'no moving parts'.
What I found to be the most severe problem was the series ambivalence towards its protagonist. He is a pure virtuous hero, but very uninteresting, surrounded by a cast of very interesting characters. As a result its hard to engage with him. Only Miyazaki can make interesting pure-virtuous main characters, like Conan, Nausicaa, Pazu, Sheeta, Lana, and Ashitaka. This situation actually gets worse over time, the opportunity to integrate him into the story properly at a great-exposition-moment is actually squandered. At the end of the story he starts to feel like a secondary character - you should never demote your lead like that.
These are nitpicks, but I felt that the latter stopped this from being one of the greats. Its just a really good adventure anime instead. It did everything else so well - even down to really fleshing out secondary characters like Mulder & Skully, and the story itself is wonderfully imaginative and entertaining.
