People focus on the wrong aspects of this scene. Each item is a physical object that exists in the real world. 80s artists would draw something, for no reason other than to sketch a detailed refrigerator or Computer to prove they could. The character is just punctuation.

Notice how she has a discoloration on her hand where her ring should be. Notice how the eraser has been used with shavings implying she's always manning the desk for police transmissions. The world that character lives in is real, it just happens to be anime.

(No Source on this): Someone told me Masamune Shirow story boarded this entire OVA, so that would explain why it's so well done scene to scene. Has anyone heard anything similar?

I think it’s because of the nature of OVAs you could animate ANYTHING and it was allowed. Unlike tvs and movies where you have restrictions. Unfortunately today OVAs can no longer make a profit, and no one has that much extra cash anymore, so no one’s making them.

Pale imitation of the original

This is from Black Magic M-66 (1987)

We need to normalize artists flexing their subtle storytelling skills again. Without saying anything you can figure out so much in these few seconds.

the volleyball propped up on the books is so oddly specific thats its probably just based on Shirow's (or whichever artist worked on this scenes) actual messy ass desk at the time

they were drawn like that because the economy was in a bubble and they could afford to throw that much money at the animation

My take is lineart animation reached its peak just before computer animation became cheap and widespread. Then, it decayed because CG was good for making consistent static backgrounds and polygonal 3d objects, but not for making commonplace animated objects interact and "exist". Now they can be much better, but the line art tradition of hyper realistic worlds is nearly lost.

I love how faded the text she writes is, like the pen's running out of ink