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A Sunday List Of Liked Things: Shaft Animation Openings

As a new feature here on Fair Use Law, every Sunday we'll be posting a few themed youtube videos that summarize and itemize a variety of things the geeks at End Game Studios can't get enough of. To get the ball rolling, we start things off with Shaft anime openings. Known for being an animation studio with a unique and off-beat sense of visuals, each and every one of their openings could justifiably be a legit music video.

To start things off, here's one of my personal favorites. It's Shaft's opening to their season of the Negima? anime featuring one of the most frantic opening themes ever combined with some awesome visuals:



Now for something a little bit more rocking: the opening to Maria+Holic. When you have an anime about a boy disguised as a girl to attend an all-girl school rooming with a closeted lesbian, there are some interesting ways you can go with the opening of said narrative. Shaft decides to go completely insane and make up 4-5 other ways to go about it in full red paint-as-blood splatter gory:



Time for even more rockin' J-Pop with the opening to Pani Poni Dash, an opening that explains nothing about the anime it bookends yet still includes enough awesome visuals to retain your attention until the episode starts. And this was just the 1st of 3 different openings this series had:



And we end things with the weirdest opening yet, if that's even possible. Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei has had many many openings and endings in its various series. This one comes from the final Goku Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei OAD that came with the series' manga as a special incentive and seems to throw all its other openings in a blender and hits frappe. It almost seems like a Franz Ferdinand video directed by David Lynch: