10 Greatest Anime Openings Of All Time

By John Cunningham / April 2, 2022

A great intro gets a show off to a great start, a key fact taken very seriously in the imaginative world of anime. While the effort is almost always there, not all openings are created at the same level. The less than stellar ones are highly skippable, a nuisance to fast forward to get to the show. The best ones, however, demand your attention, endlessly rewatchable as you continue to spot new details and appreciate the excellent music selection.

There are other shows, typically the longer running epics out there, that seemingly change up their openings every couple of episodes. While they freshen up several elements, they often stick to certain tropes and concepts enough they wind up recycling earlier ideas. Many of us will have noticed the most common of anime opening tropes: characters running for unspecified reasons and of course flocks of birds cropping up here and there. While entertaining, the overuse of such imagery allows the more creative, more impressive openings out there to rise to the surface. With the latter in mind, here are anime’s 10 greatest openings.

10. Death Note

Death Note had the unenviable task of living up to the hype surrounding the immensely popular manga when it debuted on screens in October 2006. With creators determined to capture the magic of the source material, they did not disappoint. As a medium, TV can provide a host of sensory options not available to the printed page, building the atmosphere of its story before it’s even really started.

The viewer is bombarded by a series of frantic images as The World by Japanese rock band Nightmare (later replaced with the heavier What’s Up, People? by Maximum the Hormone) plays furiously in the background. Eye catching, scary and practically bursting out of the screen with energy, Death Note’s opener commands the attention of the viewer.

There are many anime openings one could consider charming, catchy, moving, even beautiful. Death Note leaves such adjectives at the door, providing a ferocious audio-visual frenzy of hot-tempered emotion. In this regard, Death Note’s opening is a perfect fit for the anger and pain of the lead character, Light Yagami, and the budding darkness within his troubled spirit.