LogFAQs > #942149757

So I guess I should get to the top 2, huh? Drum roll...

2. Paranoia Agent - Johnbobb
https://youtu.be/0nttSKBJ38k

Unique: 10
Story: 8
Music: 9.5
Animation: 8
Personal: 9.75
Average: 9.05

This intro blew my mind the first time I saw it (which was before I decided to do these rankings), to say nothing of the brilliant mindfuck of a series that goes with it. Its horrifying without any hint of horror and unsettlingly beautiful. And it almost defies description, let alone scoring with traditional factors, but that is what Im attempting to do.

Lets start with the obvious, this intro is exceedingly unique, perhaps more so than any other intro. We see a series of characters standing before various backgrounds ranging from the mundane (such as a garbage dump) to the fantastic (falling from the sky). And the one thing each of them has in common is they are all laughing hysterically as if theyve lost all control over themselves. Stranger still, we get a kind of ghostly image of each character projected before them when they first appear. And just when you think youre starting to get the idea, it really starts getting weird with a character laughing before an enormous mushroom cloud, later followed by a character standing on the Moon, laughing away as explosions can be seen all over the Earth in the background. And thats not even getting started on the music!

The theme song is epic and almost cathartic in its power, but when you stop to listen to the lyrics such as a magnificent mushroom cloud in the sky, or how exhilarating the song gets at the moment of displaying that mushroom cloud, its also kind of disturbing. One thing I particularly love about the music on this intro is how well its timed with the visuals, where at exact rhythmic points in the song we get a shift to the next character. And despite how bizarre the song is, its also super catchy.

The animation was tough to score. On the one hand, much of what we see are pictures of characters who are still aside from their laughter in front of often static backgrounds (although those backgrounds are impressively detailed). On the other hand, there are some fantastic visual effects at play in this intro, most notably the way people and traffic speed by during the segment where the characters stand laughing in the middle of the street. Also, the ghostly image I mentioned earlier for each of the characters is an extremely effective technique that, at least to me, gives these otherwise normal looking characters a haunting and disturbing quality even apart from the bizarre laughter. All in all, the animation strikes me as excellent and is a big part of what makes this such a memorable intro.

But the hardest factor of all to score was Story. As a general rule, I tend to look down on intros that tell us nothing about the characters. But theres an exception to every rule. Although this intro never gives us so much as a hint of a single characters personality and barely alludes to the plot, theres a surprising amount of story here. In fact, if you stop to analyze it, you can go pretty far down the rabbit hole trying to derive the meaning of this intro.

Without spoiling anything about this series, my take on the intro, viewed in isolation, is these are characters who have completely lost touch with the world around them. They are oblivious to it, laughing away as the world moves on around them and even as the world burns. But theres much more than that. Theres also the hint, particularly with the first character standing on the edge of a tall building, that these are characters who despite their incessant laughter are not filled with joy, but just the opposite.

And there are subtle connections between some of the characters. For instance, after it starts to rain in the first scene, the rain continues into the second scene with the two children, as if to suggest the woman on the building has an impact on the children. Likewise, after a massive wave of water washes over the children, the next character appears underwater. Its more difficult to find connections of that type in the scenes that follow, but I suspect they are there.

I could probably write a lengthy essay just discussing this intro, but Ive got to wrap this up. Quite simply, this is one of the most brilliant intros in existence.