Cardcaptor Sakura
CLAMP's magical girl, with a new costume every episode and three separate openings across the run.
Cardcaptor Sakura kept one opening title sequence, 81 seconds long, across season 3.
At 81 seconds, it opens well above the 58-second median for animation sequences in this catalogue.
The opening titles
Season 3
81sThe third opening, Platinum, from October 1999, and unusually for anime it is posted with the Japanese staff credits still on it rather than creditless.
More animation opening titles from the 1990s
1 sequence
One Piece
The longest-running opening rotation in television — more than twenty distinct sequences over a quarter of a century, each announcing a new arc.
- Season 1
2 sequences
South Park
A banjo, a cut-paper Colorado town and four boys at a bus stop — re-recorded and re-animated repeatedly across nearly thirty years while staying recognisably the same twenty-nine seconds.
- Season 1
- Season 15
1 sequence
SpongeBob SquarePants
A sea shanty led by a painted pirate head, in call and response with children — one of the most universally known pieces of television music written this century.
- Season 1
2 sequences
Family Guy
A musical number performed by the family about how television used to have values — a sitcom opening from the 1970s, done straight and then undercut.
- Season 1
- Season 10
2 sequences
King of the Hill
Four men drinking beer in an alley, and a guitar riff. Thirty-one seconds that tell you the show has no interest in going anywhere.
- Season 1
- Season 14
1 sequenceNeon Genesis Evangelion
Ninety seconds cut faster than the eye resolves, with whole frames of text and diagram flashed for one frame each. Yoko Takahashi's theme is bright, major-key J-pop laid over imagery that is doing nothing of the kind, and the mismatch is the point rather than an accident.
- Season 1