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.
Mar 22, 2022
Ballroom e Youkoso
(Anime)
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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. ... 
Feb 7, 2021
6/10, it was fine. Had it's ups and downs, likable characters and unlikable characters; funny moments, decent action, decent depth. Too many questions unanswered though, and it felt like the story was told in the wrong order sometimes and jumped around a ton. Main character's monster form's appearance grew on me, but honestly for a while it bugged me how unique and kinda dumb it looked compared to literally everyone else's monster forms.
Everyone's crazy as hell and their personalities are essentially bipolar, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it made the characters hard to believe for me, as they would sometimes do things seemingly ... |
