Best Anime Openings Ranked

It works because it is not trying to sell you the story. Almost every other opening on this list shows you characters and hints at conflicts; Tank! establishes a tone and trusts you to follow. Yoko Kanno wrote a piece that stands entirely on its own as music, and the sequence is edited to the horns rather than to the narrative. More than twenty-five years on it has not dated, because nothing about it was chasing a trend in the first place.

It is doing something almost no other opening attempts: telling you what the series’ sense of humour is before a single episode plays. The references are not decoration, they are the joke, and the joke is that Chainsaw Man treats cinema history the way Denji treats everything else. Stylish, violent and very funny, sometimes within the same second.

Very few anime songs have escaped their series this completely. It has been covered, remixed and performed to death, and it survives all of it because the performance is genuinely raw rather than stylised as raw. The sequence pairs it with Kaneki fracturing and reassembling, which is the whole first season compressed into ninety seconds.

It is a karaoke standard in Japan, a stadium singalong, and the answer most non-fans give if you ask them to name an anime song. The sequence is dense with symbolism — the Sephirot, the cross, Shinji framed alone — almost none of which makes sense on a first viewing and all of which does later. Longevity like this is not something a production can plan for.

It arrived at exactly the right moment and defined what a hype opening sounded like for the next decade. The rhythm is a march, the vocals are declamatory, and the visuals are built around scale — small people, enormous enemies. Hearing the opening bars still produces a physical response in people who watched it week to week, which is the highest compliment an opening can earn.

What makes it exceptional is economy. In ninety seconds you understand that this is a story about two brothers, that something went badly wrong, that the world is large and dangerous, and that the tone will swing between adventure and grief. Openings usually manage one of those. It also has one of the cleanest transitions in the medium, cutting on the beat into the episode proper.

It became a phenomenon in its own right — chart-topping, endlessly covered, and for a period genuinely inescapable. The sequence is more conventional than most of the top ten, showing characters and hinting at fights, but it executes the convention better than almost anyone. Tanjiro’s determination is the whole emotional register and the song matches it exactly.

Influence is the argument here rather than craft. For millions of people worldwide this was the first anime song they ever heard, frequently in a dubbed and re-recorded local version, and it has been re-released, remixed and re-performed for over thirty years. The sequence is dated in the way only late-eighties animation can be, and that is a large part of the appeal.

Whatever people now think of the series, this opening defined a moment. It is the sound of the early 2010s isekai boom, and it made LiSA a headline artist rather than a session vocalist — which is why she also appears at number seven on this list. The imagery of a vast virtual world with two small figures in it is still the best pitch the franchise has made.

This is the best foreshadowing on the list. Nearly every image in the sequence corresponds to something specific, and the series is structured so that you cannot possibly decode them in advance. Rewatching the opening after the finale is a genuinely different experience — and few openings can claim that the sequence itself becomes a piece of the story.

The contrast with Guren no Yumiya is the point. That opening was humanity assembling to fight; this one is humanity being walked over. It is heavier, uglier and much less triumphant, and it correctly refuses to make the final arc feel heroic. SiM were an unexpected choice and it turned out to be exactly right.

It is the opening people reach for when they want to feel fifteen again. The imagery of feathers and open sky against a series largely about loss and separation gives it a bittersweet quality most shonen openings do not attempt. Ikimono-gakari were already a major band, and this remains the song most listeners associate with them.

The opening does not hint at what is coming, and that is the design. It sells youth, music and possibility for eleven episodes and then keeps playing, unchanged, while the series moves somewhere else entirely. By the final stretch the cheerfulness has become almost unbearable, which is a trick very few openings pull off simply by staying the same.

It fits a series that is fundamentally about escape planning under observation. The sequence also hides a considerable amount: symbols, silhouettes and framing choices that mean something specific by the end of the season. UVERworld deliver exactly the kind of driving rock the material needs, without ever sounding triumphant.

The mismatch is deliberate and it is the best joke in anime openings. Watching the cast dance before an episode about someone’s worst moment being replayed to them produces a specific kind of unease no straight-faced opening could manage. It is also, separately, an excellent song — which is why it escaped the series and became a staple.

Subtlety is not attempted and is not wanted. The opening announces that this is a story about a young man who decides he is God, and it does so with enough operatic conviction to make the melodrama feel earned rather than silly. It set the visual template that a decade of psychological thrillers borrowed from.

It is the most technically restless opening on this list and the only one where the medium is the message. Mob Psycho is a series about enormous power held by someone determined not to use it, and the opening communicates that by being visually overwhelming while the boy at the centre stays completely still. Studio Bones effectively used it as a showreel, and earned it.

Swapping a theatrical goth-rock opening for something this abrasive halfway through was a strange decision and completely the right one. By this point Light is no longer a student with a notebook, and the series needed an opening that stopped being stylish about it. Divisive on release and increasingly well regarded since.

It is a period piece and that is exactly why it endures — hearing it puts people straight back into a specific window of the 2000s when Bleach, Naruto and One Piece were the entire conversation. Orange Range were everywhere at the time, and the song is the sound of a genre at its most confident.

It arrives late enough that the nostalgia is built in: the audience has grown up with these people, and the opening quietly leans on that rather than trying to establish anything. The result is one of the most beloved openings of the series’ back half, and a reminder that an opening can succeed purely by knowing where the audience already is.