I vowed to not spend 11 months procrastinating this time around and let the record show I meant it. The winter 2021 premieres are already trickling out, but before I dive headfirst into those, there’s one piece of 2020’s unfinished business to attend to (well, regarding anime, that is). You either love it or love to hate it: the annual rundown of my favorite opening theme songs is back, on schedule for once, and it’s in peak form as it’s ever been.
No, seriously, 2020 was a really good year for OPs overall, so much so that it made the usual slog—watching every opening to debut in the last calendar year—surprisingly manageable. Some assaults to my faceholes snuck through as always, but for once the issue wasn’t what to add so that I’d reach 25 worth praising, but what to cut. I’ll address some of those bubble entries in a minute, but more importantly, I need to recap the criteria for what’s eligible and valued on these lists:
- The OP must have debuted in 2020. It can be from a show that premiered before 2020 or that will continue airing after, but the OP in question had to debut this past year.
- I don’t need to have seen a show in order for its OP to be eligible on the list, but recognize I’m inherently biased towards those I have seen since I’m able to parse additional context from them. OPs of long-running shounen adaptations, kids’ shows, and idol hell tend to be absent here for that reason.
- Movies are also excluded; these are just OPs from TV anime and ONAs.
- My rankings are somewhat arbitrarily based on music composition, audio production, lyrics and delivery, visual production, audiovisual sync, originality, and pretty much any other metric you could think of. Some of these aspects are weighed more than others based on what I feel the OP in question was trying to accomplish, but I don’t give these individual metrics ratings of their own during the ranking process. The pros and cons of each still ultimately come second to my personal enjoyment.
- On that note, never forget that the following is all just my personal opinion. You’re entitled to disagree and I expect that you will. If you decide to reach out asking where X or Y is, just remain civil and don’t act in bad faith. I certainly welcome you responding with your own favorites.
You ready? I’m ready. Let’s get this countdown started!