[This following contains spoilers, including for the main 'twist'.]
Studio Trigger's BNA: Brand New Animal isn't quite great, despite the well-earned bona fides of its director and writer. The animation is neither going to give Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann a run for its money, nor leave anyone wincing. The music, especially 'Light Running', is fairly good; the voice acting and sound effects are workable but not memorable. The story doesn't lend itself to the carefully plotted lines of Full Metal Alchemist or the philosophical debates of Ghost In The Shell, but... well, actually, I'm not sure I can genuinely say it avoids the failings of Soul Eater, whether the weak narrative pacing or the utterly unimpressive final bout. The show might become a furry fandom cult classic, but even there, think Aggressive Retsuko, not Zootopia. It's good popcorn flick, if you already have access.
It is, however, interesting.
Baffling Naive Animosity tells the story of Michiru Kagemori, a beastperson totally a human who, after turning into a tanuki raccoon, finds herself thrust into a world and facing distrust she never considered. Faced with potentially hiding away the rest of her life, she takes a risk, runs away from home, and instead travels to Anima City, the only place beastpeople can live openly and, perhaps, one that might be able to cure whatever disease caused her transformation. In the process, she meets and tags along with Shiro Ogami, a wolf beastman with a deep-seated hate of humans and an incredibly fortuitous name. Only it turns out to be a little more complicated than that...
BNA is, unsurprisingly, a story of discrimination. In its world, beastpeople, anthropomorphic people who can temporarily take a human form, are considered untrustworthy, uncivilized subhumanpeople, prone to violence and theft. The main character is introduced hiding from a (baseball) bat-wielding gang; the second episode introduces the beastman slave trade. Of young children. Who normally would never have the opportunity to learn how to read or write. Anima City as a whole doesn't just face the overt effects of serious poverty, but also explores less clearly evil examples of exploitation: there's a certain tension between 'free medical care' and 'coerced exploitative medical experimentation', or between bulk sales of useful goods versus glorified scams. Even rebellious human teenagers that treat beastpeople like counterculture icons don't necessarily care about them as people or even as groups of people so much as symbols.
In this sense, it's a dime-a-dozen.
[Last chance to avoid spoilers.]
But that does not say it's about one type of discrimination. The central conceit of humans versus animal-people lends itself (if at someone awkward ways) to discussions of racism, and that's an obvious surface read when discussing immutable traits with a clear genetic component and physical expression. A one-episode named character's arc is very distinctly a reference to baseball's color line, but the episode itself has a number of references to the Black Sox scandal (including a possibily-innocent star player known for losing shoes), and the rest of it's coded far more heavily by class. Another episode's antagonist flies somewhere between freedom fighter, political extremist, undocumented immigrant, ethnic minority known for travel, simple terrorist, and political assassin. The Mayor was a survivor of a WWII-era concentration camp performing abominable and generally murderous beastman experiments, but in alternative to the obvious villains and victims, could also be the Japanese army experimenting on the Chinese. And while not explicit in the text, there are some fairly obvious parallels between Michiru suddenly transforming just before high school graduation, moving away to the city, celebrating in a parade where she can finally feel like a person again, and even once able to fit in with 'normal' people again, finding attempts to do so incredibly uncomfortable. It's not about lesbian or transgender experiences, but it's not not about them, either.
Bring No Allegiances isn't just about discrimination as experienced from the outside, either. There's a grand total of one significant named character who shows up in multiple episodes and is human; he's utterly contemptible and a jerk, but ultimately a pawn. Michiru only escapes that baseball-bat-wielding gang with the help of the weasel mink beastwoman Marie Itami, who promptly also shakes Michiru down for all of her cash, and then, after discovering the tanuki beastwoman totally-human raccoon-imitator had a holdout wallet, shakes her down again. Much of the story (arguably too much, since the first seven episodes only glance at the bigger mysteries driving the series) focuses on a number of these (sometimes anti-)villain-of-the-episode hijinks, where all the villains are beastpeople. The slave traders are sending beastpeople children to human buyers, but the slavers are beastpeople themselves.
There's a long-standing criticism of media, where it's hard if not impossible to make a genuinely anti-war movie, where "to show something is to ennoble it". Works about discrimination sometimes fight a similar thing: it's not quite as hard to show a pathetic racist as a pathetic warrior, but it's far easier to accidentally let a cartoonish type of racism take center stage than a Manicheaen philosophy of war. That's even harder for works about systemic discrimination: even many well-written stories on that topic fall to modes that suggest if only this one asshole had fallen down a well, or if this one well-mannered hero had been listened to, perhaps everything would have been okay.
This isn't that sort of story. Nor is it the sort where the downtrodden's masses own problems are solely due to their innate vices, or the bad overt acts of a handful of stereotypes. Marie Itami, that aforementioned mongoose mink beastwoman, is perhaps the best distillation on this matter. She's a scam artist and a petty thief, but she's also providing communication and water purification services to people who otherwise don't have them (if at inflated costs and poor quality). But if anything this is table stakes, as we're introduced to beastman cheaters, sexists, racists, child traffickers, murderers, terrorists, and pop stars, all with causes, and all who our protagonists have cause to treat with, sometimes in the very middle of their worst acts and sometimes because of those bad acts. Even the best have feet of clay, constraining the ability to handle outside threats or reasons that they have contributed to their problems.
Brave New Animorphism also extends that to our protagonists. It's not unusual for Message Fiction to have the person who's long been inside (less charitably, 'stereotypical part of') a culture be grumpy, standoffish, and not!xist, Shiro definitely hits the major points for that character archetype; if anything, he's a bit more morally uncomplicated than the typical character from the archetype. He blames a species for the genocide enacted by a small portion's ancestors, and is willing to be violent or even murderous to those who betray 'his' side, which comes across pretty sympathetically when the 'betrayal' in question is bombing a festival.
What it does with Michiru is somewhat more unusual. She too is selfish, pig-headed (mostly not literally), hilariously naive, readily compromised in her principles, and impulsive to a fault, as typical for the genre; like most more recent and 'mature' pieces in the genre, she's called out for it.
What's more interesting is that she believes she genuinely isn't a beast(wo)man, to the point where she actively requests a blood test that can identify hiding beastmen (and doesn't that say a lot for the setting in its very existence) while stuck showing off her paws and muzzle. Even when she gains the ability to transform into a human shape, and she no longer finds that shape comfortable; even when other beastmen think it's weird how much time she spends in anthropomorphic form, and even as we see her human less than the beastmen ideologues. No one believes that she's really a human -- luckily, given Shirou's later bursts into a rage at the thought of beastmen being turned human -- and to the extent that any character touches the matter seriously, it's either to respond with anger that Michiru considers her transformation a disease, or fear that such a transmittable beastman disease would cause humans to act against Animacity.
And then the story answers that question with a shrug. In one of the first episodes, Michiru demands a blood test normally used to identify beastmen, while she has a muzzle and paws; to no one's surprise but her own, it identifies her as a beastperson. By the denouement, Michiru (and another human-turned-beastman) are exposed to several matters that ping off of beastmen religious and social dogma, and are not just immune but confused that they'd even matter (the show pointedly doesn't display the big bad's reaction, though most of his goons are susceptible). The question "is Michiru a beastwoman?" might be useful in certain contexts, but it's not really coherent standing alone.
It's not the only story to take that response, but it is fairly unusual for doing so in the 2020s, in a fairly mainstream (uh, for anime) piece.