Best Anime Openings
Settle it: two at a time →The skip button is the honest test. A great anime opening is one you still let play on episode twenty, because the song, the cut of the animation, and the show have fused into a single thing. That is what gets ranked here: TV anime openings judged as openings rather than as standalone singles, which is why a modest track welded perfectly to its series can sit above a chart hit that never fit its show. Anything from nineties broadcast staples to whatever aired last season is fair game.
Ranked by 2 people · 15 items
Gurenge (Demon Slayer) is first on the 2 ballots cast so far.
Global Ranking
LiSA's chorus hits like the water effects it plays over, and it became the rare opening your relatives might recognize. Inside the show it works; outside it, the verses are plain enough that Kaikai Kitan does the modern shonen job with more personality.
Still a karaoke fixture in Japan three decades after Evangelion's 1995 debut, which is absurd for a song welded to a show about depression and body horror. The mismatch is the appeal. If it drops points anywhere, it is that the opening's rapid-fire imagery does more work than the tune.
The ache in Ikimonogakari's melody and its lyric about a bird finally taking flight carry more longing than most of the episodes it fronted, and hearing it replays the whole era for people who have not touched Shippuden in years, even though it loses any pure adrenaline contest to Guren no Yumiya.
Yoko Kanno's big-band jazz over hard-cut silhouettes, and title sequences in and out of anime have been borrowing from it ever since. There is nothing to sing at karaoke, which is about the only contest it loses.
TK's falsetto cracking over that guitar line is the sound of Kaneki coming apart, and no other opening here matches its lyrics to its protagonist so exactly. The song outgrew a show whose later seasons most fans would rather forget, which is a strange kind of victory.
Yui carries the Elric brothers' guilt in the opening bars, and Brotherhood's whole promise sits in that sprint through the title cards. It reads as ordinary pop-rock until you have seen the show, which is exactly the kind of dependence an opening should be rewarded for.
The template for every hot-blooded shonen opening that followed, Kageyama's vocal included. Nostalgia does heavy lifting: strip away the memories of the show and it is a fairly simple song, but almost nobody who watched anime in the nineties can strip them away.
Flow bottles the arrogance of Lelouch's first season, all strut and forward motion. The band's Naruto theme is more famous, but this fits its show tighter. What it lacks is a moment that stops you cold, which A Cruel Angel's Thesis delivers before its first chorus.
Linked Horizon's choral bombast made Attack on Titan feel like an event before the first episode was over, and the salute became a convention ritual. Subtle it is not, and by the tenth listen the theatrics wear thinner than Unravel's ever do.
Yoasobi built an unreliable-narrator character study into a pop song, and in 2023 it crossed over to global charts in a way no anime theme had before. The catch is the reverse of We Are!: the track is so complete on its own that the opening can feel like its music video.
Eve's slippery vocal lines and the dance-heavy animation set the style that shonen openings have chased ever since. It is the modern pick over Gurenge for anyone who wants personality instead of impact, though it lacks a chorus casual listeners can actually shout.
For a generation of nineties kids this melody, usually with rewritten lyrics in their own language, was the first anime song they ever memorized, though the thin retro production means it now runs on memory more than on merit.
Shoko Nakagawa sings the way the show fights, pure forward momentum with zero irony. It gains everything from context: Gurren Lagann's escalation makes the song feel bigger every arc, while on its own it is a bright, ordinary piece of 2000s J-pop.
JAM Project playing the hot-blooded anthem dead straight over a hero who is bored of winning: the show's entire joke compressed into a hook. Away from the gag it is a stock JAM Project track, and it needs its series more than the series needs it.
The mission statement of the longest-running shonen juggernaut, sung like an actual pirate crew recorded it. Every later One Piece opening is a variation on this one. It is corny and dated in production, and it is completely inseparable from the series, which settles the argument.
