Season aired: Fall 2025
Number of episodes: 13
Watched on: Hulu
Translated by: Daisy Savage
Genres: Sports, Drama
Thoughts: I wanted to like Wandance so badly, and I genuinely thought I would love it. Pitched to me as Medalist but street dancing, and animated by Studio Madhouse, it seemed set to not only be as good as Medalist but perhaps do even better, thanks to a more famously consistent studio in terms of production quality.
Wandance is a story about Kaboku, a tall high school boy with a stutter who, up to this point in life, had gone with the flow as the best way to fit in and avoid humiliating himself. Everyone expected him to play basketball because of his height, so he did. In reality, he was always drawn to dance – how unashamed dancers are to stumble, how they can communicate without words, and how he couldn’t stop remembering the one time he danced and felt horrible seeing how bad he was. He takes a leap of faith, however, when he meets Wanda, a girl dancing to her own reflection in the window of the school, and decides to enroll himself in the school’s dance club.
Kaboku
It’s almost ironic that where Medalist shined is exactly where Wandance faltered. Back when Medalist was first announced, fans were aggrieved over the fact that Studio Engi, an infamous studio contrary to the famous Studio Madhouse, would be animating such a beloved show. Yet, the anime stunned with its brilliant use of CGI, choreography, and direction when it came to the ice skating performances. Wandance fails in all matters, which is the worst and most tragic part of this show.
This is a show about movement. Panels from Wandance are genuinely beautiful, but ultimately, they are still. The best adaptation element of translating this story from manga to animation is seeing the actual movements of the dance – something that just can’t be shown in still images. It wasn’t like the production team wasn’t aware of it either. Wandance hired a choreographer with a history of helping choreograph for professionals, and I have no doubt also hired professionals to dance in mocap, but the CGI was horrendous to the point of being laughable.
I spent many minutes trying to decipher what exactly went wrong, and it took several episodes of rumination to identify one of the biggest issues: Wandance’s characters’ faces are quite literally frozen. There’s no light in their eyes, their mouths look like lines drawn on dolls, and nothing on their faces gives any indication of the emotions they’re feeling as they dance. Once I had concluded that was the crucial mistake, I started watching the dance scenes, and there were many, while ignoring their faces. Yet, something still felt off.
Faces
It wasn’t just the non-animated faces. It was the direction as a whole. Almost all the dances are shot at still, singular angles. At no point does the “camera” guide our eyes to feel the sensation of their dancing, and at certain times, it almost felt like one of those tutorials for dancing games that we played as kids. This also hurts the anime for viewers who don’t have as much knowledge about street dancing. While others have been able to distinguish the different dance styles and even go so far as to agree on how the dances were choreographed, when the shots and direction are so still, the dance styles also feel equally flat. I can’t actually tell what the differences even are when my eyes aren’t trained to notice them, and without that guidance, it sometimes feels like watching two people just flailing their arms to the beat of the music.
It becomes especially egregious when the anime intercuts the 3D CGI dancing with some genuinely stunning animated scenes. I find myself wishing they could’ve just found a way to make it all 2D instead, which is the ironic part. Stills of the mountains, flowers, of Kabuto looking to the side against the backdrop of a rising sun, of Kabuto and Wanda holding onto each other as they dance are beautiful to look at. However, they are far too few and far between, especially since the real star of the show should be the dance sequences.
Gorgeous still shots
It sucks to dedicate so much of the review to just critiquing the dance sequences, but the truth is that it takes up so much of the anime that it ultimately broke the series. Yes, there’s a cute love story between Kabuto and Wanda. Yes, it’s awesome to have a main character who genuinely struggles with a stutter. Yes, the theme of how dance can speak to people without words ties in perfectly with Kabuto’s character arc. But none of that matters when it leads up to dance sequences with nothing to show.
One cool element is how the anime used music. Rather than original scores, they licensed music from professional artists and even showcased the title of the songs alongside the artist’s name. Clearly, thought had been put into the kind of music they wanted to pair with the characters and dance sequences, and while the latter didn’t shine, it certainly helped define the former.
I also enjoyed Koki Uchiyama’s performance as Kabuto, especially since he had the job of stuttering. I imagine it’s actually quite hard to purposefully do if you don’t struggle with it, so while there are certain points where I can’t realistically say I “bought” the stutter, I’m also just not knowledgeable enough to properly judge its authenticity. All I can do is properly give credit to the voice actor for incorporating it into his voice acting.
I suppose the one other good news to come with a disappointing anime was that it aired on Hulu in the US. With Hulu’s notoriously poorly formatted subs, at least you don’t have to suffer through it by skipping the anime.
Rating
Plot: 5 (Multiplier 3)
Characters: 5 (Multiplier 3)
Art/Animation: 5 (Multiplier 2)
Voice acting: 6
Soundtrack: 8
FINAL SCORE: 54
