How to crop 480i MPEG-2 video?

[sawtaytoes]

Hello! First time posting .

I have a native widescreen (not anamorphic: has black bars) DVD set for an anime I imported from Japan (Betterman). From what I understand, since it was 1999, this show was natively rendered this way (with the black bars) rather than being anamorphic like later digital-native shows.

I originally purchased the Blu-ray, but it's a horrible, blurry upscale, so I refuse to use it on principle. I then paid a bunch of money again and got the DVD set only to find out the quality is awful (tons of MPEG artifacts) and it's got black bars.

I also acquired the US DVD, and it's even worse quality. Visible pixels everywhere!

I'd like to remove these black bars and make it a more native resolution; even if I have to cleanly upscale to 1080p24 as losslessly as I can, but because it's telecined, that's difficult to do.

Actually, I'm not even certain it's telecined. If I go frame-by-frame in MPC-HC, each frame has a new image. Typically, I have to press the "step" button 2-3 times to progress to the next frame of animation. Either they did digital compositing or something else is up.

1. My first thought was to at least losslessly crop the original MPEG-2 stream in the MKV container.
2. Then I was thinking I could try my hand at performing an inverse telecine to get it to 24p. This is more advanced, but at least doing the crop could let me see if it plays back in Plex.

I've never used anything outside of MkvToolNix and ffmpeg, and any *synth program seems daunting to me. Each time I've tried to use one, it's always way too complicated. Never "install this and run this command", more like "install 50 tools, copy directories around, convert to AVI, and do some magic".

Is it possible to do this in a simpler way or is it going to always be the most complex approach possible?