I’m in the coolest dancer’s high.
What They Say:
Tatara steps onto the dance floor for the first time as a stand-in for Hyodo, who is nowhere to be found. Seeing Tatara and Shizuku on the floor galvanizes Hyodo into dancing the next number, in spite of Sengokuâ€TMs efforts to stop him. While keeping his gaze on Tatara, Hyodo dances the tango with a new and intense passion…
Brother & sister duo Gaju and Mako Akagi appear at Ogasawara Dance Studio. Hyodo has been prohibited from competing, and Gaju takes the opportunity to ask Shizuku to partner with him. Shizuku agrees, and they start practicing together, leaving Tatara to pair up with Mako…
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
This week’s double feature shakes up the established pairings in a major way. We already saw Tatara dance with Shizuku, his crush but Hyodo’s loyal partner, without Hyodo’s prior knowledge, and that seemed bad enough. But despite Hyodo’s unsurprising rage at such a transgression and Sengoku’s ever-hypocritical claims that a partnership is as sacred as marriage after forcing Tatara to come between those two in the first place, these things apparently don’t stay the same for long. The real issue that begins this all, though, is that Hyodo has pushed himself past the point of being able to tolerate the pain of his injury which, combined with the disqualification from Tatara’s substitution, takes him out of the game that he was so strongly leading, allowing the competition to crawl out from the woodwork and try to make themselves known. For someone who only came into this world so recently, Tatara has already contributed to some major negative developments, but the more important half of the cast or so all share in the responsibility in some way or another. If any, Tatara inspired Hyodo like few have. It just wasn’t the best time for that.
One of the factors that has kept this show from being as great as it should be is that the director is new to handling full series direction and hasn’t been giving it the energy it needs to live up to its potential. For Hyodo’s final dance (for the time being, anyway), this was of the utmost importance, so thankfully there was a little more put into conveying how intense the dance was. It has enough shounen sports commentary that you hardly need to see what’s actually happening, but it’s always disappointing when characters describe something as being so exciting and the result is lazily thrown together. Some of the transitions between cuts are still quite awkward, but it seems that the series has adopted these characteristics stylistically, whether that’s for better or worse.
When we see Hyodo after that, he comes across as a far more sympathetic character, beaten down from the throne he worked hard for so early in his career and scared of what will be left for him when he’s able to return. That he implicitly puts Shizuku in Tatara’s hands after everything that just transpired between the three of them speaks volumes to the alternative, which rears itself immediately. Gaju and Mako are actually siblings, so hopefully the series doesn’t try to go too far into the connection most dancing pairs seem to have, but Gaju is happy to put his sister down and throw her away to steal Shizuku away. It’s hard to fully fault Shizuku for wanting to make a statement against Hyodo’s selfishness, but Gaju has yet to show much worth as a person. Perhaps the more important effect of this, though, is that Tatara gets his first proper partner, and we start to learn more of how special he apparently is. Sengoku is still a bit of a bastard with the positions he puts people in, but at least we learn that his intentions are good.
In Summary:
A great deal of progress is made between these two episodes, even though a good deal of the first one is simply spent on Hyodo dancing away with great passion. It’s a relatively strong sequence for a show that hasn’t been hitting as hard as it could with those, but the more important pieces come from the aftermath and the chain effect that has, resulting in Tatara dancing with his brand-new partner who we just met by the end of it. It seems like a few too many of the main characters in this show end up having displays of poor character or at least very bad judgment, but there are always moments of promise to keep each character worth caring about.
Grade: B
Streamed By: Anime Strike
Review Equipment:
Roku 3, Sceptre X425BV-FHD 42″ Class LCD HDTV.
