Great music! Oh and the episode was good too I guess
What They Say:
Haneru is a kid who’s always been into dancing and dreams of becoming a famous dancer like his idol Jey-El. One day while he’s practicing his moves at his usual spot he finds out it’s the same place where a girl named Kanon also practices and she’s secretly a famous dancer known as Rhythm who’s well known on the internet. After being impressed by her moves and finding out she’s been watching his, he decides to form a dance team with her.
The Review:
Content (warning as portions of this review may contain spoilers): After a bit of transition with last week’s episode, the show is back into the swing of things and maintaining it’s high degree of fun. Though while the previous episodes were a bit more balanced on where the fun in the material lies, this week’s mostly lies in the music. Of course that’s not a bad thing though since the series has always had a pretty great soundtrack and the actual story is mostly where it needs to be.
With the next goal in mind, the group needs to pick the center for a new routine. Since the center tends to decide how the flow of things will go, everyone has their own fantasies of what kind of style they’ll use if they end up being the center (amusingly Kumo’s fantasy reveals he wants to be a ladies man, which is a really funny, if odd break from how stoic he normally seems). Of course as he’s the main character there’s no real question that Haneru is going to end up being the center, so he ends up as the focus for most of the episode as he trains.
Haneru’s never been quite as interesting as the other crew members since he’s pretty straightforward as far as kid’s show protagonists go so having him being the focus doesn’t quite deliver on the usual fun the show brings. He’s not hard to root for though so you kind of want to see him succeed even when it’s abundantly clear he will. The episode also brings another encounter with one of the rival characters from before who finally gives his name as Yuji. Since he’s hit on a couple of female characters up to this point he’s of course interested in Kanon which could prove to be either interesting or annoying later on, but he does claim to be a lot more serious about dancing than Haneru and that of course inspires Haneru to push himself further with his training. The rest of said training is thankfully covered in a montage and one set to a pretty awesome track from the show so it makes it all a bit more fun to sit through, and things seem to cap off with Haneru being picked as the center.
The real highlight of the episode however, comes immediately after that where they show off their new dance routine in a music video of sorts. The CG for the dancing works a bit better here than in some of the other musical numbers but the music here is what really makes the scene work. It ends up using some actual hip hop which fits the aesthetic of the show perfectly but feels like something completely so out of the blue for an anime, and a kid’s anime at that, that it can almost leave you in awe . That said it manages to make the dancing scene for this week stand out a lot more, and so much more in fact that it easily negates some of the slower parts of the episode as it’s hard to keep from dancing along a bit and getting caught up in how over the top it is.
In Summary: Most of this week’s episode isn’t quite on the same level of fun as the show usually provides but it’s nice to see Haneru improve a bit, and the music video bit at the end makes the whole thing worth it. Hopefully next week’s episode goes back to the usual balance, but if the show has a musical number every time things slow down a bit, it’s a pretty fair trade.
Grade: B+