Ballroom e Youkoso

Tatara Fujita is a shy middle schooler who has no particular plan for the future. He has gotten through life by avoiding any kind of confrontation and blending in with the crowd. But blending in isn't enough to get out of trouble, as some bullies harass him for money. Luckily, he is saved by a man named Kaname Sengoku.

Kaname invites Tatara to his dance studio. Although he would normally never set foot in such a place, Tatara is captivated by Sengoku's commanding presence. Granted an opportunity to dance with fellow classmate Shizuku Hanaoka—who often practices at the studio—Tatara realizes there's something about the idea of being put in the limelight and dancing where people will see him that keeps him coming back. With an earnest, passionate drive to improve, Tatara begins his journey into the world of competitive dance.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Hiyama, Chinatsu Main

Akasaki, Chinatsu Japanese

Fujita, Tatara Main

Tsuchiya, Shinba Japanese

Hyoudou, Kiyoharu Main

Okamoto, Nobuhiko Japanese

Hanaoka, Shizuku Main

Sakura, Ayane Japanese

Akagi, Mako Supporting

Morohoshi, Sumire Japanese

Sengoku, Kaname Supporting

Morikawa, Toshiyuki Japanese

Hongou, Chizuru Supporting

Kotobuki, Minako Japanese

Kugimiya, Masami Supporting

Sakurai, Takahiro Japanese

Akagi, Gaju Supporting

Tomita, Kentarou Japanese

Hyoudou, Marisa Supporting

Kaida, Yuuko Japanese

Kananiwa, Kozue Producer

Maeda, Toshihiro Producer

Maruyama, Hiroo Producer

Morishita, Katsuji Producer

Reviews

Mar 4, 2025

TheGoat1111

Recommended

here is a totally unbiased, spoiler free review that is not based after several re-watches.
.
TRY WATCHING BALLROOM E YOUKOSO! I truly believe that anyone can come to enjoy this anime, regardless of your knowledge or interest in dance. I speak from experience since I watched this 6 years ago in highschool when I was just an arrogant, self-centered loser. I thought dance was for perverts and the like, but I couldn't have been more wrong in my life and I'll forever regret holding such hateful opinions on something. Dance is beautiful, never judged anything so harshly again since I experienced this anime. It's an absolute ... joy to watch through this, even if you are really on the fence about this, you'll figure out if you'll like it or not after a few episodes o/

Reviewer’s Rating: 10

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Mar 22, 2022

ExTr3Me_Cobra

Mixed Feelings

Story: 7 - Good

Welcome To The Ballroom portayed the cut-throat nature of competitive dance accurately, while also making something I never cared about, actually interesting to watch. This anime also was surprisingly written like a battle shounen. Main character starts off really bad at something. Main character has a special ability no one else has (For Tatara, he was a natural at dancing, and was a very, very fast learner). The main character has training arcs, battle arcs, and tournament arcs, with character development mixed in between it all. Battle shounen writing is actually unexpectedly fitting for competitive ballroom dancing.
... The ending was very predictable, even since episode 1. But it was still an enjoyable ending, mostly due to the great writing of the main character and his emotional journey to get to that predictable ending.
Unfortunately, this anime was very repetitive, which is the downfall of a lot of sports anime. In battle shounen, you can do a lot to spice it up because most of the time it is fantasy based. But in most sports anime, you are limited and need to get super creative. Unfortunately, not enough happened to spice things up or change the formula here.

Art: 5 - Average

The animation style was weird, but I did get used to it within 6 episodes. Also, for a show about dancing, there wasn't actually much dancing. A lot of still shots, and a ton of copy & paste twirls. There was a ton of potential for some genuinely beautiful or sexy animation, but they obviously did not have a lot of budget. Also, often we hear the audience comment on things that happen in the dances, but we don't actually see those things most of the time because they didn't animate it, or it just looks the same as the rest of the dance.
Character design was average, or at least it didn't stand out, which isn't that big of a deal honestly. Some characters' designs did look more pleasing than others, especially the two main girls. Also, dresses and suits thankfully had effort put into designing them, and actually looked professional and pretty, respectively.
There definitely were a handful of beautifully animated scenes, but nowhere near enough to make up for 24 episodes of average, dull, or copy and paste animations. Don't even get me started on still frame conversation, repeated frames, or cut frames to save animation costs, making movement choppy at times.
So much potential for this anime depended on animation quality, and I was let down unfortunately.

Sound: 6 - Fine

Potentially could of gotten around an 8, but I was really let down by the music. The music itself was okay, perhaps it needed more variety, but my only real complaint with the music was that it wasn't loud enough. Music would start up for a dance, and very quickly fade to almost nothing as we got an endless barrage of character narration over it. This goes hand in hand with wanting more dancing, I also wanted more music with it.

Character: 7 - Good

This anime about dancing, something I never would of cared to watch, was made watchable and interesting solely because of the great writing of the main character. Tatara is a cookie cutter shonen protagonist. You could of put him as the main character of any shonen out there, and it would hardly change the story at all. What makes his trope acceptable is good writing. You can actually see growth in Tatara, both as a dancer, and as a person as the anime progressed. You can sympathize with him, and relate at times. You even get so attached to him that you want to cheer him on too, like you were a part of the audience.
None of the other characters were written this well, however, some weren't just cookie cutter tropes either. Some almost felt like real people with their own thoughts and emotions. Those are hard characters to write, so it's excusable that they weren't written wonderfully. Bonus points for trying to write unique characters.
There definitely were some throw away characters, and a fair share of poorly written and unlikable ones as well. Especially Chinatsu, the redhead tsundere.
I see the potential with being paired with a tsundere. It was a great idea. A fiery tsundere could translate to a really good, powerful, or sexy performance. What's really important though, is a tsundere character is only as good as their dere development. Her tsun was one of physical violence, which is never a plus in my opinion, and is not forgivable no matter how good their dere transformation is. And when she finally did reveal her blushy, sweet dere side, she reverted right back to tsun the next breathe. Nothing in between, and no lasting character development.
A couple last notes about character, I kept mixing up the names Chizuru with Chinatsu. I'm sure if I was Japanese it wouldn't of been so bad, but generally, you want all your characters to have distinct names. No points deducted for this though, this ones on me.
Also, Mako was absolutely wonderful anytime she was on screen, and it's a huge shame she wasn't written in as a love interest for the main character like the horrible Chinatsu was.

Enjoyment: 7 - Good

Overall enjoyment I would rate a 7. I wasn't glued to the anime like a 9, and I didn't dread watching it or put it off like a 5.
The comedy in this anime was actually well received. Most comedy in anime is a miss for me, but I actually enjoyed most of it here. Sometimes it was badly timed and cut through a serious scene, but overall the comedy was great.
Animation quality, sound, characters, etc are all factored into my enjoyment. As well as a few major gripes I had while watching. The first of these gripes is the topic of synchronization. This was emphasized as something unachievable, said by one of the most skilled dancers in the whole anime. That there is always a lag due to reaction times after feeling your partners intentions. If you are making up your dance with your partner as you go, without words, then sure. But if you are performing a routine like ballroom dancers should be, and were shown to be doing, that's a whole entirely other story. How do you think musicians play synchronously with each other? They practice a set, and they follow the TIME SIGNITURE and TEMPO of the song. Dancing is not all that different from playing music. Dance performers on stage do this all the time in perfect sync. They practice a routine, and follow the song. The whole "our natural tempos aren't matching" is absurd. You do not make the tempo, the song you are dancing to SETS the tempo. Why they didn't listen to music while practicing also made zero sense. That's literally most of their problem. You don't have to make up an imaginary tempo and try to match your partners imaginary tempo if you simply play the song and follow it's tempo together.
Gripe number two. Most advice given to the main character was very oddly specific to exactly what was going on through his head. Almost like every character could read his mind. And there was literally never a moment where someone didn't have advice for him, no matter how niche the problem was.
Another huge gripe I had with the anime was it's huge contradictions. The first 12 episodes our main character is praised as an amazing lead, able to perform someone else's routine at a high level, simply by watching it performed once. Even goes on to rank highly in events he was nowhere qualified for, thanks to his great natural lead skills. Then episode 13 on, he is told he is a terrible lead because he wasn't 100% in control of any of his previous dances, that his followers influenced his movements, and that judges grade depending on the leads control.
This is already confusing and jarring. Now to top it off, we spend the next 10 episodes trying to make him a better lead, because now all of a sudden he isn't good at leading. Only to take ANOTHER 360, and have his partner start influencing his leading like it had in the first 12 episodes, and it works. We were just told it's bad to be influenced by your follower's movements, spend 11 long episodes to fix it, then go back to his follower influencing his movements, and it working out no problem.

Overall: 6.4 - Fine

Overall, I would recommend this anime to someone who wants to expand the range of anime they watch, someone who is tired of watching tons of extremely similar anime, and someone who wants to see and experience something fresh. I'm on the fence if I would recommend this to any anime newcomers though, for fear it would turn them off from anime.
Honestly, there was no need for 24 episodes. They could of fit everything nicely into 12 episodes, cut several side characters, and gotten the exact same points across. Being shorter would potentially solve several other problems too. Twice the budget for halving the episode count, meaning better animation, and the story repetition problem wouldn't exist either. It wouldn't of been a faithful adaptation of the original manga, but it would of made for a better anime overall.

Reviewer’s Rating: 6

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Dec 16, 2017

313_Archer

Not Recommended

I couldn't wait to start watching Ballroom e Youkoso, but it really missed the mark. While it has a lot of problem, I'll focus on two big ones: failure as a sports anime and a boring lead.

I love sports anime. The drama. The tears. The tension. I love Ping Pong the Animation, Haikyuu!!, and the Yuri on ICE!!!. But Ballroom fails at a fundamental level when it comes to being a "sports anime".

First, almost none of dancing is actually animated, which is pretty surprising considering Production I.G. also brought us Haikyuu!!. Sure it's difficult to animate characters in motion, but YOI dedicated a ... lot of screen-time to skating routines (maybe even too much). When I started a ballroom dancing anime, I expected more than a few seconds of footwork every episode. Instead I got a bunch of stills with long-necked characters bearing frankly creepy smiles and long-winded narrations about why a character is dancing well or not. Later we also see weird metaphors that meant the anime lowered its budget or author went on a existential bender. Some of these ended up looking so silly that I laughed so hard I cried.

Without clearly defined rules (like get the ball over the net) and with no visuals to help you out, the audience must rely wholly on narration to build tension, and it's pretty boring. There wasn't a single moment where I was holding my breath, waiting to see if our character would win. Even Kuroko No Basket (which I wasn't a huge fan of) built a lot of tension in games, as all sports anime should. The lack of rules and dancing animation sucked away the tension. Therefore Ballroom, as a sports anime, fails.

But wait! Some sport anime, like Ballroom, are character focused, so the tension comes from the characters, right? Sure. I love Ping Pong The Animation. During the show's final match you don't even care who wins because the tension is invested in character's growth. Yuri on ICE!!! and Free! are also character-focused sport anime, but both build more tension than Ballroom.

Why?

The characters are more developed and more interesting than Ballroom's cast. Fujita Tatara is about as interesting as a piece of wet toast. He whines about not being a good enough dancer for 24 episodes (basically the typical shounen plea of "I need to get stronger). Tatara is on trend with "nicer shounen leads", but he falls flat when compared to, say, Hinata from Haikyuu!! or Midoriya from Boku no Hero Academia. It would've been less irritating if he another conflict he could've overcome.

While the side characters have potential, they get stuck talking to Tatara, which makes for lack lust conversations. Instead of seeing two characters with tension or conflict duke it out, both characters talk to Tatara about their problems, which results in disappointing resolutions to character conflicts.

On top of all of this, there are some unnecessary fan service scenes and narrative issues that make this anime subpar. It can't hurt to watch if you like sports anime, but you're not missing anything special if you don't. Despite front-loading the first episodes with fan service, the first dvd didn't sell well, which doesn't surprise me.

The last episodes made it terribly difficult to root for what I liked to call the "limp noodle and wild mare pairing" over the other pairings, who all proved more interesting and complex.

The ending was so cheesy and predictable it could've made a Disney character puke. But with little to no dancing animation, it was hard to judge the caliber of the dancers. This just proves the anime, at a fundamental level, failed.

If you like dull leads, predictable plots, a cluster of shounen tropes, and long-winded dialogues about how good/bad someone is dancing, go for it. Otherwise, you aren't missing anything.

Reviewer’s Rating: 4

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	Poll: Ballroom e Youkoso Episode 24 Discussion ( 1 2 3 4 ) Stark700 - Dec 16, 2017	174 replies	by AoButa16 »» Feb 25, 7:07 AM
	Poll: Ballroom e Youkoso Episode 12 Discussion ( 1 2 3 ) Stark700 - Sep 23, 2017	116 replies	by AoButa16 »» Feb 23, 2:39 AM
	Poll: Ballroom e Youkoso Episode 7 Discussion ( 1 2 ) Stark700 - Aug 20, 2017	80 replies	by AoButa16 »» Feb 22, 11:25 PM
	Poll: Ballroom e Youkoso Episode 20 Discussion ( 1 2 ) Stark700 - Nov 18, 2017	52 replies	by Uneducated_Weeb »» Jul 31, 2024 8:59 AM
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