Let the Beat Drop: A Closer Look At Anime Openings

Anime is a complicated beast. The complete package of anime consists of animation, voice acting, and directing with each of those parts breaking off into other smaller pieces. It’s basically like trying to follow the remnants of a heart that gets broken in the Kingdom Hearts series; however, there is another part of the anime package that I personally think is just as important as all of the others: the soundtrack. To be more specific, the actual opening song of the show. Thanks to the second Dragonball Super opening that hit me like Worldbreaker Hulk a while back, I was inspired to take a deeper look at this piece of the anime puzzle. This is a deep rabbit hole because a lot of shows have multiple openings each with their own mission to accomplish. To properly attempt to show appreciation to these openings, I’ve used a scientific approach to create a few categories to put most anime openings into. These categories are:

Hype Misdirection Funk Tone Shifts Foreshadowing Hybrid

By using these categories, we can try to assess exactly why each show accomplishes its goal. Sometimes the opening song is the first thing that viewers see and hear; it’s also the first thing that viewers skip or fast forward through which means that either the opening didn’t appeal to the viewer, or it just wasn’t good all around. So, let’s get started! Hype The first category is hype. The openings that make you want to try to punch the shit out of a wall or at least the first villain you can get your…