Analytical Approaches to Anime Song (Anison)
Organizer(s): Stephen Tian-You Ai (Harvard University)
Chair(s): Liam Hynes-Tawa (Harvard University)
One of the most influential of Japan’s cultural exports is anime, animated shows for television. Anime episodes feature elaborate opening and ending title sequences (OP/ED) featuring theme songs called anison (“anime song”). These songs have achieved great popularity both in Japan and abroad, often overshadowing the popularity of the TV show itself. For example, “Idol” by YOASOBI, composed for the anime Oshi no Ko (2023), recently topped the Japan Billboard 100 for a record-setting twenty-two consecutive weeks (Trust 2023). Anison includes a wide variety of musical genres and presents challenges to those seeking to describe its common features outside of the fact that it was created for anime (Kitaba and Drexler 2024).
This session argues that music theory, in interrogating the musical materials and structures of anison, can uncover commonalities in a genre that is internally diverse and ostensibly inconsistent. Furthermore, this session mediates a gap in literature pertaining to anison and anime in general. Anison has not been studied in musical terms, historically receiving the most attention from media theory, anthropology, and area studies. In such writings, insights regarding anison are often drawn obliquely through the analysis of extracted lyric, leaving form, melody, harmony, and rhythm unexamined (see for example, Steinberg 2012). In doing so, such writings position music as an added value to image or narrative. Entering this interdisciplinary conversation, this session seeks to reframe and relativize the role of anison vis-à-vis anime with the methods of music theory.
We ask three questions: What listening experiences does anison afford? What is musically unique about anison? What are some ways to enter into scholarly conversations surrounding anime as music theorists?
In triangulating anison’s formal parameters, structural relations to the broader anime media system, and subsequent transformation by fans on digital platforms, this session emphasizes anison’s contexts of production, circulation, and reception in analysis. While this session is focused on anison, it suggests broader approaches for the analysis of transmedial musical objects, a perspective that is essential to understanding the role of music in our audiovisual culture of ever-increasing digital media connectivity.
Presentations of the Symposium
The Anime OP(ening): a Corpus Study of Anison
Tan Nazaré
Independent
This paper presents a corpus study comprising 348 anime opening credits (OPs) released between 1989–2024, to highlight formal and audiovisual conventions. The author gathered data on 200 OPs from the top 200 anime on MyAnimeList.net, and on 148 OPs from the Japan Billboard Hot Animation year-end charts from 2013–24. The corpus encodes information regarding an OP’s associated anime, musical form, vocals, and visual devices. In doing so, this study enables an in-depth look on how formal characteristics work in tandem with visual images to capture viewers’ attention.
This study complements broader corpora on contemporary J-pop—such as Ramage’s (2023) research on the Royal Road progression—and extends Nazare’s (2023) research on anison’s form archetypes and expands their “historico-hermeneutic” approach (Martin 2024).
The first significant finding concerns trends in OP’s form, or the “OP format.” With very few exceptions, OPs are adapted from a full-length musical track averaging 2–4 minutes. This adaptation typically results in an abridged verse–chorus form: a “call” (described below), a verse, a prechorus, a chorus, and an outro (usually a postchorus adaptation). The second finding reveals that the majority of OPs analyzed (77.1%) feature a timbrally bright, loud and memorable introduction (a “call” section). This short and distinct section positioned at the start of the OP, functions as an attention grabber. The call is differentiated from similar formal units such as “overture choruses” (Nobile 2020), “chorus-first forms” (Ensign 2015), “core-based intros” (Summach 2012), and “buildup introductions” (Attas 2015) in two aspects: calls are texturally busy and often timbrally bright (Malawey 2020) and anticipate a musical climax, usually the chorus or postchorus.
These characteristics are not Japan-specific: this study motivates research in cartoon music trends in the West, too. For example, the tritone chorus in The Simpsons or the shout “Yabba Dabba Doo” in The Flintstones both fit the description of a call section. This study shows that both the OP format and call are part of a thought-through framework to entice the viewer, motivating them to watch the anime about to start.
Anison’s Incomplete Narratives: Media Mix, Musical Form, and Divergence in "The Tatami Galaxy"
Stephen Tian-You Ai
Harvard University
In 1963, Tezuka Osamu made the startling decision to sell the anime, Astro Boy, at half the cost of production. Facing budgetary constraints, Tezuka had to consider external sources of revenue, seeking partnerships with Meiji Chocolates to recuperate costs. This set a precedent that henceforth embedded anime within the Japanese “media mix” strategy (Steinberg 2012b).
This paper demonstrates how anison’s musical forms express media mix logics by engaging with narrative theory, a shared concern held by music theory (Almén 2008) and media mix studies (Ōtsuka 1989). In doing so, I propose a transmedial Formenlehre of anison that emphasizes divergence over form theory’s usual concern for unity (Dahlhaus 1975). To this end, I engage Ōtsuka’s theory of “narrative consumption” (1989), which underscores the capitalistic imperative to build in a certain incompleteness into a media mix’s “grand narrative.” According to Ōtsuka, a media mix sells “small narratives” in the form of products to individuals, who purchase small narratives in order to consume progressively more of a grand narrative. Under this paradigm, the grand narrative, crucially, cannot be complete; incompleteness allows a grand narrative to continue producing small narratives to be sold, allowing the media mix to generate capital ad infinitum.
I argue that anison expresses such incompleteness in its disarticulation of musical form and distribution across multiple media, and demonstrate this formal tendency through a case study of three media objects for The Tatami Galaxy (2010), each featuring the anison, “Kami-sama no Iu Tōri.” Each iteration of “Kami-sama no Iu Tōri,” in order of release, elaborates on the incomplete musical form of the previous by introducing new formal units. After presenting excerpts of the anison in the preview video and ED, the soundtrack album discloses that a proper sectional verse–chorus form (Nobile 2020) ultimately fails to materialize following the music in the ED; an evaded bridge results in a rapid piling up of choruses in VCU2 (Figure 2). Here, by refusing the central structuring dialectic between verse/bridge and chorus of verse–chorus form (Covach 2005), the anison’s form is rendered incomplete, allowing for the possibility of further additions.
From End Credits to Endless Loops: Intermedial Palimpsests of Momoiro Clover Z’s “Nippon Egao Hyakkei”
Sam Falotico
Eastman School of Music
In 2012, the J-pop idol group Momoiro Clover Z (MCZ) released “Nippon Egao Hyakkei,” which served as the ED to the anime Joshiraku. Originally composed to complement the anime’s playful commentary on traditional Japanese culture, the song unexpectedly experienced a resurgence nearly a decade later as a viral sensation on TikTok, which prompted MCZ to re-release the song as a live music video. This paper explores how “Nippon Egao Hyakkei” transcends its origins as an anime ED, navigating cultural boundaries, media platforms, and temporal contexts to manifest as a global digital phenomenon. Specifically, I draw on Henry Jenkins’s (2006) concepts of media convergence and participatory culture, positioning them alongside theories of intermediality (Rajewsky 2005, Steinberg 2012), to analyze “Nippon Egao Hyakkei” as a case of an intermedial palimpsest—a term I develop to describe how media formats actively and dynamically interact with each other over time to generate new meanings of a previous work.
“Nippon Egao Hyakkei” juxtaposes traditional Japanese aesthetics (scales, instruments) with contemporary J-pop idioms (rap-like verses, dense textures), establishing the song’s intertextual dialogue between tradition and modernity while simultaneously enhancing its suitability for its original anime context. In its 2021 revival, TikTok users gravitated towards the song’s catchy verse, set in a fast tempo with a driving groove. “Nippon Egao Hyakkei” functions as a participatory musical text where users engage less with its lyrics or cultural connotations and more with its energetic and performative immediacy. Such a shift illustrates how platform-specific consumption alters the perceived meaning and function of a musical work. Moreover, these TikTok loops likely inspired MCZ to release a new version of the song (their “ZZ ver.”) along with a full-length music video.
By examining “Nippon Egao Hyakkei” as an intermedial palimpsest, this paper demonstrates one way in which anime music is shaped by temporal and relational interplay across digital media. This framework not only underscores the song’s ability to adapt, persist, and resonate across diverse cultural and media landscapes, but also sheds light on broader discussions about technological mediation in musical media.
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