I am very intrigued by Attack on Titan's final season opening so much. It piqued my interest so well it's what made me want to watch the show in the first place. The artistic direction it went for beautifully contrasted with the previous openings of the show (which are all great by the way, although some are better than others.) I'm going to sound pretentious but I'm going to go ahead and talk about the final season's opening some more. Here is a video of the opening by AnimeTV.
We've already seen the opening a dozen times so I won't strictly go over each scene chronologically since I'm assuming everyone's got the hang of the sequences of the opening already. I'll just single out the juicy parts.
First of all, the entire opening is 90% death. More specifically it's 90% colorful explosions, but those explosions imply countless deaths in each and every one of them. I think it's fitting the animators chose explosions to represent death, which is something that's painfully common in the anime. Explosions erase numerous lives in an instant; it's cold and impersonal, dehumanizing life as if it's nothing; that's what war is all about. Then there's a shot of a murder of crows falling from the sky, To me this shows that not even the birds can escape the overwhelming power of death in the air. This message of the opening is relentless, as if the number of lives lost isn't enough already.
The music up until this point is phenomenal. It's cheery but at the same time haunting as it complements the twisted display of fireworks that's happening on-screen.
And then not long after, we get the scene with the army of soldiers marching as one with their stern faces. We hear some low voices chanting mixed in with the music, which gets louder from this point onwards. For me, this showed the fearful might of the military. Its aesthetic in full display with the soldiers and the airship flying in the sky.
For a brief moment, we see some shattering statues. If you look closely they are titans, Paradis Island soldiers and Marleyan soldiers. Their shattering symbolizes their deaths. And then we get a shot of a bunch of titans falling from the sky, which symbolizes yet again, death. Seeing a bunch of titans falling from the sky is essentially a death sentence. And then the carnage continues with some more explosions.
The next and final scenes shows us a puddle as the music eerily screams "WAR!" And then we see an open hand catching the rain as the music screams again, this time, "MY ... WAR!" The camera zooms out to reveal that the hand is actually a statue's hand, among a pile of rubble from statues. The message of this scene is clear: the rubble represents a mountain of corpses. The music hammers it on us one last time "MY ... WAR!!" as if the show is hungry for more with its unhealthy obsession for war.
Then finally, for a few short seconds, the music chants "Monster!" repeatedly as the opening finishes by closing up on the side profile of a statue of Eren's titan. If you've watched far enough in the season then you know it's true. Eren has become a monster. In the opening, the way it ends with Eren, to me, also shows that all of the chaos we've seen with the explosions, are because of his evil doings.
Overall, the opening is dark and gritty without being edgy, and I like that it was able to find that balance. The opening is essentially about death and war yet it doesn't show a single drop of blood. Seeing this opening feels like the anime has finally shown its true colors, or at least, it's as if this is what the author has intended for us to see all along after three seasons worth of openings of high-flying fantasy: cold harsh imagery based on reality.
