On the early animations you have to hold it down for quite a long time as it needs to wait for the animation to loop. The next update (in a few days) will make the animations skip immediately.
Once you fight a boss once, you get the option to skip all the animations for their fight :).
Hi again! Just to let you know both of these issues are now fixed. Pressing shift will now instantly skip cutscenes, and you can adjust the battle animation speed in the settings to make it go faster :).
