The 25 Greatest Anime Openings Ever Made, and What Each One Gets Right

Ninety seconds is enough time to tell an audience what a show believes. The best openings do not summarise the plot; they establish the register — comedic, tragic, absurd, sincere — and set the pace at which the series intends to move.

Storyboard credit is the single best predictor of quality. The names that recur on the greatest openings are the same names that turn up on the most technically ambitious episodes of the year.

If you want the vocabulary behind the animation calls in this list, start with our sakuga explainer.

Our top slot goes to an opening that changes its own choreography as the season progresses — a rare production luxury and a direct statement about a cast that will not end the story as it began. Second place goes to a single-take-feeling sequence built on match cuts, where every transition is motivated by a shape rather than a beat drop.

Third and fourth are both music-first entries: the visuals exist to serve a track that would chart on its own. Fifth is the purest example of tonal misdirection in the medium — a bright, poppy sequence attached to one of the bleakest shows on this site.

Full disclosure on methodology: we weight rewatch behaviour heavily. An opening you skip after three episodes is not a great opening, regardless of how good the first viewing felt.

Cut length is the invisible variable. Openings that feel energetic usually average under one second per cut in the chorus, while openings that feel monumental hold shots for four or five seconds and move the camera instead.

Colour scripts matter more than character cameos. The sequences that endure use a restricted palette per section so the final chorus can introduce one new colour as a payoff.

For the show-level version of this argument, our Jujutsu Kaisen Season 2 review tracks how MAPPA's direction uses the same restraint inside episodes.

We revise this ranking every six months as new seasons air, and reader nominations decide two of the twenty-five slots. Send us the sequence you think we missed.

The full audio-visual hub lives at openings hub, and the soundtrack companion piece is at soundtracks hub.