TV Asahi recently surveyed 1,740 overseas anime fans to determine their favorite anime theme songs and Oricon News shared the top 20 here. The results are interesting… I think there’s a lot of recency bias going on. Idol and SPECIALZ over Tank! is crazy. A Cruel Angel’s Thesis is well placed. I have never watched Evangelion (and won’t) but it’s a classic that I listen to regularly.
The results of the survey (or “World Anime Song General Election”1 lol) had me thinking about my top anime songs, and while it would be too hard to rank them, I’ll share my top 20:
And to be fair to me, I only started rewatching anime in the last 4 years, so please excuse my more “recent” inclusions!
- Hirose Kohmi – “Groovy!”
- MOB CHOIR – “99 (TV Edit)”
- Do As Infinity – “深い森”
- Mawatari Matsuko – “さよならbyebye”
- T.M. Revolution – “HEART OF SWORD～夜明け前～”
- BoA – “Every Heart -ミンナノキモチ-“
- Namie Amuro – “Come”2
- Do As Infinity – “真実の歌”3
- Kenshi Yonezu – “KICK BACK”
- The Seatbelts – “Tank!”
- VAUNDY – “裸の勇者”
- See-Saw – “Obsession”
- Meu – “らしくいきましょ”
- Gen Hoshino – “Comedy”
- L’Arc～en～Ciel – “READY STEADY GO”
- the pillows – “RIDE ON SHOOTING STAR”
- LiSA – “Gurenge”4
- ROUND TABLE – “Let Me Be With You (feat. Nino)”
- Kensuke Ushio – “デビルマンの歌”
- Two-Mix – “RHYTHM EMOTION”
Honorable Mentions:
- Mawatari Matsuko – “ホームワークが終わらない”5
- Akino Arai – “昼の月”
- Yoko Kanno – “MYUNG Theme”
- Junko Iwao – “Scarlet”
- Ayumi Hamasaki – “Dearest”
- Aimer – “残響散歌”
- VAUNDY - トドメの一撃 feat. Cory Wong
- Takahashi Hiro – “太陽がまた輝くとき”
- 世界アニソン総選挙 ↩︎
- No Namie on YouTube… or Apple Music… or anywhere. ↩︎
- You might be noticing a trend… and that is that I love Inuyasha! The anime can be pretty hit or miss, but it a solid run of banger after banger when it came to theme songs. ↩︎
- The First Take version absolutely clears ↩︎
- You can assume that “微笑みの爆弾” is riiiiight behind every Mawatari Matsuko song on this list. ↩︎