WANDANCE

DESCRIPTION

CAST

MANGA DramaWonDance

REVIEWS

• 

  marioink508

  62/100
  The Anime Killed What Made Wandance Special

  

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  This review contains LIGHT SPOILERS for Wandance.

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  This is a review of the Wandance anime and a comparison to its source material for the season.

  Another example of a great series ruined by studio adaptations delegating work to lazier producers. I absolutely love MADHOUSE as a major studio, and whenever I see a series under their control, I know I’m going to get a great series — but that’s not the case here unfortunately. And that has been the case more and more for recent MADHOUSE titles.

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  Synopsis & Story - 7.3/10
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  Wandance is a beautiful coming-of-age story about dance, full of passion and attention to detail — but the anime adaptation feels like a wasted opportunity. The core material elevates the emotional impact in ways the anime more often than not fails to reproduce consistently.

  The show’s premise focuses on a newcomers journey into the world of dancing — specifically street dancing, although this season is more focused on group choreography. It develops two lovable leads, Wanda and Kabo, with a beautiful subtle romance subplot. But, where the anime struggles is not the source’s heart, but with the execution on the emotion. Inconsistent direction and adaptation decisions make some of the manga’s best features render null in the show.
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  Music - 3.8/10
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  One of the details that made me fall in love with Wandance was the music, the manga music. (It makes sense I promise) — The track insertions in the manga invited readers to experience each dance with the music direction the author had in mind, some songs were more mainstream, wildly known, while other niche, genre specific. This choice created a personal, interactive reading experience I haven’t encountered before.

  And while I can fully understand the adaptation not having the freedom to license such tracks, the replacement soundtrack largely felt generic and unvaried. While there are exceptions, most songs live in the same sound space and rarely capture the manga’s soulful diversity.

  It’s an unfortunate situation, knowing anime limitations. The manga does an incredible job at achieving a visual style that matches the music direction, clearly expressing the author’s passion.
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  Episode 4 'Choreography Routine'

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  Pacing & Details
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  Unfortunately the anime lacks in the pacing department too. While the manga nails its quiet, purposeful use of empty space, the anime fails to do so more often than not. Sometimes those moments can be found, yet the inconsistency — likely from trimming less relevant manga context or the varying directional focus — break the rhythm. Because of the pacing swinging from episode to episode, some emotionally charged moments land, while others feel rushed.

  The manga’s short technique annotations also give important context for dance movements and make sequences feel more informative and impactful. It’s not as relevant as the music, yet the anime drops most of that explanatory layer, which leaves scenes feeling lighter in meaning and less passionate.

  These annotations initially made me feel the authors love for his medium and his attempt to get people interested in it.
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  Episode 9 'The Style Wall'

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  Characters - 8.1/10
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  Characters on the other hand, are improved by the adaptation in certain areas. Kabo’s stutter and speech patterns are handled naturally and remain faithful to the source, preserving his personality and development.

  Wanda as well; her character design receives the most attention. Her expressions and body language are much more impressive; she shines visually and emotionally in many scenes. They took the cuteness factor and 100x it.

  These faithful character touches prove the adaptation can get things right whenever it wants to, unfortunately that isn’t always the case.
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  Episode 6 'Contest'

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  Animation - 4.4/10
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  There was a lot of bad reception around the CGI animation Cyclone Graphics gave us — and I do agree… to some extent.

  The decision to use CGI for dance sequences is completely understandable and sometimes it works very well. When the production choses to go all in, choreography can match the energy of the manga. But overall, the CGI is uneven. Many dance scenes feel jarring; lifeless faces, awkward 3D to 2D transitions, and awful cloth physics frequently pull you out of the moment. Yet there are sequences, especially around Iori, that are excellent. His house dance style is always perfectly represented, the previous issues still stand, but the overall quality the CGI achieves is much more impressive — which only makes the surrounding inconsistency more noticeable…

  Flowing movement trails and stylistic touches also appear in some dance sequences but they are not reliantly applied, keeping in theme with the adaptation’s inconsistent direction.

  Backgrounds on the other hand, rendered in 3D often look natural, blending in well with the 2D characters. Yet background characters once again fall in the inconsistent category; they switch between CG and 2D quite a lot. And while 2D is understandable to be flat in background, the CGI is generally used as a means to add life to crowds, yet here that is not the case; the CG characters are poorly implemented, static figures with bland idle poses, making the crowd feel lifeless. I fail to see how adding some idle animation would’ve been a hard execution… This is a clear example of the lazy animation the series has, in what are details that could’ve improved drastically the atmospheric experience.
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  Kai Bandz - I Ain’t Stressin was the track playing in the manga for this section — insane pull.

  Episode 11 'Self-Awareness'

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  Closing Notes
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  When it commits, the adaptation can be good; example of that can be the Iori dance battles, character portrayals like Kabo and Wanda, the romance subplots which are well adapted, and even the rare extra scenes. Those moments show that the anime could’ve been a faithful adaptation of the manga.

  Ultimately, Wandance feels like an incredible manga in the wrong hands — a story full of passion and detail that the anime only rarely achieves. The adaptation’s inconsistencies in music choice, pacing, and CGI make it a frustrating for anyone who liked the unique experience the manga offered.

  I heavily recommend the Wandance manga over this adaptation, it offers such an incredible visual style with a story to match your expectations.
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  Enjoyment Level - 7.4/10
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  Favorite Character - Iori Itsukushima
  Favorite Episode - Episode 8 ‘Dance Battle’
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  Link to My Episodic Notes for the Series

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• 

  TheAnimeBingeWatcher

  45/100
  The bizarre animation swallows every other aspect about it whole.

  As a critic, I try to take the entirety of a show into account when I'm watching it. Most anime have good and bad elements, and I can appreciate the bright spots in a show I overall dislike as well as complain about the flaws in something I mostly adore. But sometimes, one single element is so unusual, interesting, jarring, or otherwise attention-grabbing, that it comes to define my entire opinion of a show. It doesn't matter what other qualities it might have; that one aspect of it just makes too much of an impression for anything else to register, for better or worse. Such is the case with Wandance, an anime about modern dance with such a bizarre approach to its dancing animation that it becomes the sole factor in determining its quality. Sure, the characters, plot, themes and so on exist, technically, but they don't really matter. The strange, baffling experience of this show's animation drowns out everything else about it, leaving me with only one question: how, exactly, did things end up like this?

  But okay, let's at least give the story a cursory glance or two. Our protagonist, Kabo, lives with a stutter that puts him out of step with his classmates and peers. It's not that his disability is a source of misery- by the time we meet him, he's clearly gotten comfortable living with it- but between a speech impediment and the usual social pressures of high school, he feels incapable of expressing himself the way he wants to. That is, until he stumbles across his Hikari Wanda, a wunderkind dance prodigy who's basically the textbook definition of a free spirit. She doesn't have an ounce of shame in her body: she lives exactly how she wants, heart on her sleeve, and expresses herself with full sincerity in words and dance alike. In her, Kabo sees everything he wants to be, so he throws away his fear of being cringe and joins her in the school's dance club- only the second boy to do so. Thus begins his journey to overcome shame, social expectations, and everything else that holds him back from expressing his true feelings, one fumbled two-step at a time.

  It's a damn good setup for a character-driven sports anime, and it's kind of infuriating how many parts of this could be good. Kabo's character is grounded so well in his awkward adolescence, and it's clear the author put a lot of thought into how he navigates the world with his stutter and the various challenges it poses. The show overall has a lot to say about what it's like to exist outside of society's invisible "normal," how isolating it can be in ways most of us take for granted. And using dance as a medium of expression for Kabo and the rest of the cast to take back ownership of their voices and self-expression, on their own terms, gives the story a lot more weight than the usual sports anime goals of winning competitions for their own sake. Plus, while Wanda herself is more than a little Manic Pixie-ish, her autistic stimming IS pretty freaking adorable, and the rapport she builds with Kabo makes them both more likable characters. I could absolutely see myself loving Wandance for all these qualities... if I could actually focus on them.

  But unfortunately, none of those aspects have any staying power in my brain. Not when they're being overwhelmed by the sheer weirdness of this show's dancing animation.

  Now, I'm not an animation expert of any sort. I can't describe exactly what techniques Wandance's animators used or what they should've done instead, so don't expect an extensive technical breakdown here. The obvious culprit to point to would be the CG models used for all the dancing sequences, and yes, they are janky as fuck. The characters' hair and clothes are so loose and flowing that they're constantly clipping into their bodies, and the models themselves are almost comically under-detailed; nothing has any texture to speak of, so the overall effect is like watching a plastic mannequin bounce and gyrate around. Worse still is how inexpressive their faces are; at times, they almost look painted out with how little their eyes and mouths move. And to be fair, I understand why going CG would be easier for the production team. As we learned with Yuri on Ice, 2D-animating a full cours of intricate, expressive body movements is a nightmare scenario best avoided by all but the bravest teams. But CG modeling in anime has come such a long way in recent years; just look at how damn expressive and lively the latest Love Live entries are. There's no excuse for Wandance's models being this half-baked.

  If I'm honest, though, the CG itself isn't the biggest issue here. The real problem is the complete lack of cohesion between the show's 2D and CG elements. Yes, the visual difference itself is painful, but on top of that, the show's editing feels like it's going out of its way to make that disconnect as jarring possible. There are multiple moments where it'll switch to 2D in the middle of a dance for a particularly slick move before switching back to the CG models, and there's literally no continuity of movement between the shots at all. Just look at Kabo and Wanda's big moment in episode 6 (or was it 7?) to see what I mean. We've got the CG dancers doing their thing, then it cuts to 2D for Kabo and Wanda's move, we get this big shot of Kabo being pulled to his feet... and then it cuts right back to their CG models dancing uninterrupted as if they'd been going on in the background the whole time their 2D selves were on screen. Where's the follow-up? The connective tissue? The motion that takes us from 2D Kabo standing up to CG Kabo dancing in rhythm again? It feels like they straight-up forgot to put the shot in there.

  And that's indicative of just how poorly integrated Wandance's two halves are all throughout its run. Continuity errors like that episode 6 moment are a frequent occurrence. The hand-drawn stuff is so stiff and barely animated that the constant camera motion and 60FPS movement of the dancing sequences feels all the more jarring. Hell, sometimes the two sides straight-up disagree; there's a character named Usen who's portrayed as big and stocky like a football player, but for some reason his dancing model is super lanky with almost none of the muscle he's normally portrayed with. There is absolutely no effort to make the show's 2D and CG elements feel like part of the same universe; they might as well be separate planes of existence. Which only gets worse on the rare occasion we see both elements on screen at the same time, at which point it starts to feel like a Smiling Friends gag where the complete disconnect of animation styles is part of the joke.

  Now, to be balanced, there are moments where the CG does work. Especially toward the end of the series, we start getting long sequences just watching the characters dance, and the intricacies of their various styles really start to pop in a way only this kind of mocap-assisted animation could capture. I also kinda dig all the kooky expressionist flare the sequences get: trails of light follow their flailing limbs, colored glows transform the dance space itself into a liminal void of feeling. If the show had leaned more into that kind of abstraction, I think it would be easier to accept the animation's awkwardness as part of this hyper-charged emotional state dancing puts its characters in. But as is, it's too close to reality for its flaws to register as anything but immersion-breaking. I can't get invested in Kabo's journey through dance when he spends so much of that journey as a lifeless model who doesn't even register as the same person. I want to see my protagonist sweating bullets under the stage lights, what's this overly smooth Ken doll doing in his place?

  In the end, Wandance is a perfect example of how "bad animation" is more than just an aesthetic complaint. Animation is the primary tool this medium uses to convey meaning, and if that tool is busted, its ability to tell its story is equally fractured. This show's bizarre approach to its visual storytelling robs all its good points of their staying power, to the point you can barely remember anything it tries to communicate. So if you're at all interested in what Wandance has to offer, go straight to the manga and forget this adaptation exists. Whatever greatness may exist in this story, you've got no chance of appreciating it here.

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• 

  kadarakt

  80/100
  The animation is flawed but not as bad as it is made out to be, and the show is great regardless.

  I first found this show from discussion online about people discussing how bad the 3D animation was. After watching it for myself, I can confidently say for the first half especially it was genuinely terrible. Even the 2D animation is average at best and looks very crude. Not to mention how sometimes they used 2D and 3D animation at the same time, or quickly switched between them, which made both look even worse, especially since the 3D is smooth 60 fps while the 2D is stuck with the traditional 20~. It is baffling to have 3D animation this bad after Girls Band Cry last year, which was almost purely 3D and imo looks way better than 90% of 2D anime, and Medalist at the start of this year, which similarly to this show used 2D for it's normal scenes and 3D for it's performances, but pulled it off perfectly and didn't end up feeling out of place at all, utilizing 3D to deliver the performances with minimal embellishments. They could have went pure 2D like Dance Dance Danseur or Ballroom e Youkoso, both of which relied on more dramatized and embellished shots to sell you the narrative. But that was not what those who made Wandance wanted to go for, they wanted to portray all of the details as they are like Medalist, which is understandable. But in that case you really have to do the 3D justice, and they clearly didn't for most of the scenes.

  It looks the worst when the focus is on female characters, as their longer hair flies everywhere like jellyfish, and their faces are usually modeled pretty badly. The most egregious example is the female lead, who looks like a blow up sex doll, and that really pulls you out of the show when other characters are fawning over how well she dances. On's model is better but it's still not great. But when the focus is on male characters (except Usen whose face and head also looks really weird), it looks a lot better, even good at times. Their shorter hair causes jello shenanigans to be limited to their clothes, which wasn't that bad, and their faces look much more natural and well modeled. Watching Kabo and Iori dance didn't bother me at all, dare I say sometimes it could even look good and I saw the vision they had. I thought it might be about choreography at first but that wasn't really the case. Even though the popping style On used against Iori in their dance battle in episode 8 is something I love to watch in real life, it still looked iffy because of her model and hair. Meanwhile I don't care about the house style Iori used yet it looked much better.

  It wasn't all bad though. The animation; 2D, 3D, and their combination, gets a lot better towards the end of the season, starting from episode 8. Part of this is because the focus shifts more on to the male characters' performances. But also due to the usage of different visual effects and more abstract styles to support the 3D animation, not that dissimilar to the pure 2D shows I talked about prior, which really helped during the dance battles in the final episodes. After those episodes, I can confidently say 3D didn't just start looking alright, but it was the correct approach to take, just implemented terribly at first. By the end my biggest issue with the show was not the animation, but how the season ended at an extremely hype point. I just need 1 more episode, please...

  I think a topic which is important but not nearly as talked about as the dances is the music, which was hit or miss, and similar to the animation, got better in the second half. I'm not a huge fan of hip hop but sometimes it really felt like they chose some of the worst stuff they could, it was almost like elevator or lobby music, especially the song they play in the competition which is played so many times in the first half. However the songs in the dance battle between Iori and On, and especially in the dance battle competition, showcased a wide array of music, and better helped me understand the different vibes and genres in hip hop.

  As for the rest of the show, I won't talk about it nearly as much as I did the animation because that's what I wanted to primarily talk about. I thought it was pretty good for an anime in this genre, which automatically makes it great and above most anime. Characters feel alive, they have interesting motives and opinions on the subject matter, interesting dynamics between each other, and the competitive atmosphere is as always pretty fun. However you do not feel the characters practice and prepare themselves for the competitions as much as other shows with similar vibes, for example Kono Oto Tomare. Overall it was very enjoyable. Kabo is a great main character, and I found him to be a lot more likeable than most other main characters in shows like these, with only his obsession with Wanda being off putting. Speaking of which, I found her to be a very meh character. Partly due to her bad dances as I talked about prior, but I also never really liked her as a character, as I felt like she didn't have a very strong bond with dancing or music like the other characters, despite her assertions otherwise. Iori is a pretty chill dude and his personality allowed him to be a good contrast and a good guide to Kabo. On is also a dependable teacher and her dynamic with Iori was interesting. Kabe wasn't shown a lot but in the little time he did get I ended up really liking him as a character. He is kind of an asshole but you can understand his mentality, one of those characters who you love on a screen but would hate to deal with in person lol.

  Whether or not the animation will be enough to ruin the show for you is going to be dependent on your own tastes. But in my opinion, disregarding the entire show for sometimes having bad animation is throwing out the baby with the bathwater. The core of the show; the characters, the narrative, and the general message are well written. If you like these kinds of shows centered around competition, and bad animation isn't a dealbreaker, I would definitely recommend.

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