LET'S ROCK 2! My Favorite Opening and Ending Credits of 2024

We’re at the end of 2024, and so once again it’s time for a yearly round-up of anime opening and ending credits. Keep in mind that these are personal picks, not meant to assert "the best" by any means. I likely missed many great sequences. Since I found the selection of ending credits this year to be a bit weaker than the opening credits, I put them all together in one list rather than breaking up “opening credits” and “ending credits” like last year.

If there’s a theme, I would say it’s “sensory overload.” So why not start with the most "sensory overload" anime of the year by far?

Best Credits Sequence Involving Trains: "GA-TAN, GO-TON" by Rei Nakashima

Train to the End of the World

GA-TAN, GO-TON, GA-TAN, GO-TON, shushu train! Before Train to the End of the World solidified as an absurdist comedy anime in its second half, it maintained just enough horror atmosphere to keep the audience wary. This opening sequence captures the unpredictable energy of those early episodes. Certainly there’s a “cute girls doing cute things” coziness to Shizuru and company’s life on the train. But there are also jarring moments like a cut to the girls sleeping in the dark where the theme song drops out completely. Every time I see that sequence, I ask myself, “are they dead?”

The “I Love Gacha Games” Award for Anime Based on Gacha Games: "Seishun no Archive" by The Abydos High School Countermeasures Committee

Blue Archive The Animation

The opening credits sequence for Blue Archive The Animation, which adapts a popular phone game for television, rushes through so many characters, set pieces and off-kilter visual ideas that just watching it feels as if you are downloading the entire phone game into your brain. Not everybody will vibe with Blue Archive’s sugary aesthetic of cute girls with guns riding bicycles to the sound of cheesy 2000s era synths. But I can’t help but be charmed by this sequence. There are so many little easter eggs that clearly foreshadow elements from the game, yet pass so quickly that only a master of the pause button could hope to catch them all.

Best Spider-Verse-Like: "Jikai Yokoku" by Tatsuya Kitani

Go! Go! Loser Ranger!

The release of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse in 2018 began a sea change in 3DCG computer animated films. The majority once pursued realism through the advancement of technology. Now a growing number of animators aim to augment or even break that realism via variable frame rates, painted surfaces and increased stylization. Two great film examples from this year are The Wild Robot and Ultraman Rising. Meanwhile, Fortiche’s series Arcane continues to redefine what is thought to be possible for 3DCG television animation.

I see the opening credits for Go! Go! Loser Ranger! as being in dialogue with this aesthetic movement. From the opening seconds which cycle through at least a dozen alternate logos, to the non-stop shifts between 2D and 3D animation, the sequence never lets you catch a breath. The accompanying song is constantly interrupted by a children’s choir mirrored in the animation by tiny sketches engaged in blink-and-you’ll-miss-it hijinx. I love this sequence in all its stylistic chaos, and hope we’ll see more like it as the anime industry continues to experiment.

Best Oddly Modern Opening for a Fantasy Show: "poi" by Saucy Dog

Yatagarasu: The Raven Does Not Choose Its Master

Yatagarasu’s opening sequence is deceptively simple. A procession of faces, eyes and lips. Then a procession of important objects: koto, comb, kimono, fan, letter. The sun rises and sets, as the lamps are lit in the palace. We see each of the main characters in their centers of power. Finally, a raven transforms into a boy, the rain on his face a link to the man introduced at the very start.

It’s a different sort of sequence from earlier Studio Pierrot fantasy series like The Twelve Kingdoms and Yona of the Dawn. Those carried themselves with a sense of restrained majesty. Yatagarasu by comparison is very contemporary. Yet it’s quite careful all the same. For all its elaborate world-building, Yatagarasu is a mystery series, and its opening credits play the cards very close to their chest. The meaning of certain characters and objects introduced here change drastically on rewatch.

If I have a complaint about the sequence, it’s that it remains the same for the second arc of the series. That part of Yatagarasu shifts to a different genre and set of characters; it really could have used its own opening credits to sell the change in focus. But when an opening credits sequence is this confident, why not reuse it?

Best Use of Mixed Media: You Are Ms. Servant, Beastars Final Season Part 1

I was excited for the opening credits sequence for You Are Ms. Servant because it was set to feature the first anime theme song commissioned from one of my favorite bands, tricot. (I wrote about them for Crunchyroll News not so long ago.) But while the song is indisputably a tricot song, what stood out to me most about the final product was the visuals. That is to say: they are bonkers. Woven through these ninety seconds are papercraft, puppetry, live action food footage and photoshop effects. It’s a sequence that proudly bears its own artifice, no matter how alienating that might be to the audience.

The same creative team returned later this year to tackle the new opening credits sequence for Beastars. They had a high bar to clear; it’s tough to compete with the first opening’s stop-motion dance between a very cute Haru and Legoshi. To their credit, though, their creation bangs. There’s a swagger to it that makes me excited to see how the series ends, which is a feat considering the disappointment I’ve heard regarding the source material’s finale. I’m excited to see these folks continue to play around in future projects!

Best Use of an Eyeball: "Kaiju" by sakanaction

Orb: On the Movements of the Earth

The protagonist of Orb is heliocentrism, the notion that the sun (rather than the Earth) is at the center of the universe. So how do you build an opening credits sequence around a concept like that? Orb does it slantwise. Like with Yatagarasu’s opening, a procession of simple images: men in cloaks embracing the sun, a burst cherry, a handful of bloody coin. Not to mention the falling necklace that morphs into an eyeball—just as we, the audience, watch the stars. The Orb anime is anything but subtle, but that just makes it a perfect match for its similarly bombastic source material.

Most One Piece Opening Credits Sequence: "Uuuuus!" by Hiroshi Kitadani

One Piece

At over a hundred volumes of comics, over a thousand episodes and fifteen films, One Piece is a behemoth that has intimidated generations of anime fans. Its scale has grown to such a ridiculous extent that you could tell a fully fleshed story in the margins without ever once touching the main cast. (In fact, that's precisely what One Piece Fan Letter did in 2024, and it was excellent.)

The greatest compliment I can pay to One Piece’s twenty-sixth anime opening sequence, then, is that it captures the series in totality. It’s all here: adventure, goofy comedy beats, giant scale action and an overwhelming number of characters and settings drawn from the full history of the source material. It even hits a few notes that I don’t always expect from One Piece: quiet sadness, fairy tale horror, a hint of mystery flavored just enough by the animators that it feels distinct from the comic’s deep lore.

The vocalist, Hiroshi Kitadani, sang the very first One Piece theme song “We Are” back in 1999. If that song once stood in my mind as the greatest summation of One Piece’s appeal back then, this new sequence does the same for its present and future.

Favorite Opening Credits of 2024: "Otonoke" by Creepy Nuts

Dandadan

Say it with me: Dandadan, dandadan, dandadan, dandadan, dandadan! I thought about using this opportunity to write about Creepy Nuts and their other big hit of 2024, Mashle’s second opening “Bling-Bang-Bang-Born.” But while that sequence is excellent, it doesn’t move me half as much as the Dandadan OP. This thing is undeniable from the first three seconds and doesn’t stop thrilling until its time is up. It was incredible even in its bastardized form as part of this year’s Netflix leak.

What I love most about this sequence is how it captures the full tonal range of Dandadan. Sure, the heroes smirk at the audience and dance up a storm. We see stylized versions of the show’s various monsters that are alternately threatening and goofy. But there’s a quiet sweetness to Momo’s hands twisting on themselves as they reach towards the sky, then transformed into a manifestation of her psychic powers. The climactic shot of Okarun morphing into a monster hits not with an anisong power cord but instead a beat of chill longing.

This is a sequence that fully understands that Dandadan is an earnest romantic comedy as well as a supernatural shitkicker. Even if Masaaki Yuasa is no longer at the studio Science Saru, I’m happy to see opening credits storyboarder Abel Gongora carry on his legacy here.

Best Duet: "Soen no Shozo" by Ryota Suzuki and Yohei Azakami

Brave Bang Bravern

Brave Bang Bravern is a wacky military science fiction show about a giant talking robot who teams up with the JSDF and United States army to save the world from an alien invasion. So why is its ending credits sequence a sentimental duet between the two main characters? Well, why not? Brave Bang Bravern may disguise its true nature under several layers of genre pastiche and postmodern irony. But its ending credits are a promise to the audience that the deeply weird show they are watching is at its heart a sincere gay romance. “Trust us,” the show says, even as every one of its other moving parts makes the audience ask, bemusedly, “what the fuck?”

Best Ending Credits Sequence of 2024: "Crazy for You" by Kylee (performed by Shion Wakayama)

Makeine: Too Many Losing Heroines!

I haven’t seen Makeine: Too Many Losing Heroines!, but I don’t think you need to in order to appreciate how good its second closing credits sequence is. It’s a work of standalone artistic excellence that simultaneously feels nostalgic and like some kind of immaculate space object. What does unrequited love feel like? Maybe something like tearing your way out of a translucent cocoon, or planting seeds on a distant planet? Running across endless water reflecting the skies? Watch this sequence and you’ll know. And then, just as the sequence soars towards catharsis, the heroine wakes up in the bath, a jolt of dreamy realism in the midst of fantasy.

The other ending credits sequences for Too Many Losing Heroines! are excellent as well. I particularly like the first, seemingly a throwback to Gainax’s live action ending credits sequences of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Works like these give me hope that talented artists still have room to make their mark in the increasingly conservative television anime industry.