The Best Anime Openings of the 1990s
The '90s is where a lot of anime's modern identity got locked in — the decade swings from jazz instrumentals to shoegaze static to unapologetic sports anthems, often within the same TV season. Ten picks below, chronological rather than ranked, each with a note on what made the opening itself worth remembering.
Yu Yu Hakusho: Ghostfiles
An upbeat, almost sitcom-cheerful opening for a show that would spend its later arcs on some of the darkest tournament-arc stakes of '90s shonen — the tonal gap widens the longer the series runs.
Slam Dunk
A straightforward, high-energy J-pop opening that became inseparable from the show's cultural footprint in Japan, where Slam Dunk did as much to popularize basketball as any real-world athlete of its era.
Ghost in the Shell
Sets a clinical, unsettling tone for a film more interested in the philosophy of consciousness than action-movie spectacle — foreshadowing the influence it would go on to have over a generation of cyberpunk media well outside anime.
Neon Genesis Evangelion
The decade's most recognized opening even outside anime fandom — a soaring, unabashedly pop arrangement that sits in direct tension with the show's psychological unraveling.
Revolutionary Girl Utena
A defiantly theatrical, almost operatic opening that matches a series built entirely around ritual, repetition, and subverting fairy-tale tropes from the inside out.
Berserk
A somber acoustic opening that sits at odds with the show's brutal content — a mismatch some fans read as intentional irony and others as simply a product of its TV-budget era. Either way, it's one of the more debated openings of the decade.
Cardcaptor Sakura
The defining CLAMP magical-girl opening of the decade — bright, breathless J-pop that set a visual and tonal template a lot of later mahou shoujo openings would go on to echo.
Cowboy Bebop
A big-band jazz instrumental with no vocals at all, which was itself a statement — a show built on genre-mixing needed an opening that sounded like nothing else airing that year, and got exactly that.
Serial Experiments Lain
An English-language shoegaze track over glitching, static-laced visuals — a deliberately alienating opening that primed viewers for one of the strangest, most internet-prescient shows of its decade.
Hunter x Hunter
A deceptively gentle, morning-themed opening for the original 1999 adaptation — years before the franchise's reputation for psychological horror fully emerged in its later arcs.