Ballroom e Youkoso (Welcome to the Ballroom) (2017)
This is an anime adaptation of the manga of the same name. Since it seems students are asked what career they aim for when they finish middle school, the main character, Tatara, is at a point where he does no know what he wants to do. He then gets introduced the dancing.
The art style of this is quite distinct. Anatomy and faces are exaggerated which works well for how expressive dancing is. Sometimes the faces are a bit too much and its a little scary looking when they look intense. This mainly happens to the guys' faces. So far none of the female characters had scary intense faces. Even though dance does seem more of an art and entertainment form, there are competitions so this series is more of a sports anime. The episodes will mainly focus on Tatara learning about the dancing competition than doing it for fun. And like most sports anime main characters, Tatara will have some sort of natural talent. He has top dancers around him so he'll be learning from one of the best though it is also frustrating since the skill level difference is big.
The animation has been pretty decent so far. With the art style that it has, I can only imagine how much work it would acquire to keep the quality consistent. They do try to keep the dancing scenes at a natural pace most of the time, but in order to make them easier to animate they do limit the shots to be around the feet area or the torso up. There are also a number of face shots during dancing too mainly during the inner monologues. The few times it is full body is a still frame when they pause. Though this is all just from what I can recall and I haven't kept a record of the kind of shots they do during the dancing scenes. While I may sound a bit nitpicky on the dancing scenes, I wouldn't want them to be like Yuri on Ice where the animation quality falls quite a bit at the competition because they animated the scenes full body. Hopefully with this show, they will put the effort into the more important dances and keep these practice dances to simpler shots of feet and faces.
So now that I've seen nearly 10 episodes of this anime, it has gotten better. And as I hope they did do a better job at more important scenes like an important dance in a competition. How they handled those episodes definitely made up for the rest of the other episodes. It even made me feel emotional watching them dance.
Overall, this isn't a bad anime. I'm not into dancing at all and the characters I don't even like that much. But the characters have their own depth which is good. The story just has been wondering how things will play out so I do end up watching the next episode. Plus it is a rare sports anime that isn't on one specific gender so it is refreshing to me to see a co-ed sports anime.
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