“Subcontractors usually painted anything type-related in an anime by hand, so it was a novel idea at the time for a director to use desktop typesetting to exert typographic control.”
Sci-fi anime in 1995 used sans serifs. Hideaki Anno picked a heavy serif out of a specimen catalog and squashed it. The typeface was plain because it was rushed and drawn by an inexperienced team. That plainness is why it worked. Twenty-five years of imitators followed.