People have been slagging off Wandance for its supposedly bad CG animated dance sequences, but I don’t see it myself. Maybe I’m used to seeing slightly dodgy CG animation being used in idol or magical girls shows, but doesn’t this, part of the dance battle in episode 8, look perfectly fine?
What you need to understand is what Wandance is trying to do here. If you go in expecting idol show like performances, you will be disappointed. This is not a style of dancing we see a lot of in anime, street dancing, hip-hop style, raw, improvised rather than carefully choreographed as in a Love Live or IdolM@ster. The dance scenes are not animated to make them look cool or dramatic, they’re animated to showcase the moves the dancers make, to allow you to understand what they’re doing and how it relates to the music they dance to.
This why it doesn’t matter that the faces look plasticky or the background spectators a bit wonky: you’re not supposed to look at them, you should look at the dance moves, at the way the dancers use their arms or legs instead. Throughout the series each dance scene goes for clarity over impact, to make sure you understand what’s happening. Which is why you can easily understand how both Iori in the clip above and On-chan in the clip below take the same part of the song to dance to yet dance so very differently from each other
The way the animation is created is by motion capturing actual professional dancers, with each of the main cast having their own real life counterpart. It’s honestly impressive how dedicated Wandance is to keeping the dancing as real as possible. For how well it does, check out this reddit thread from a professional dancer. For me, this sort of fidelity easily trumps the occassional goofy CG face. And for a taste of what the real dancers can do when not limiting themselves to high school amateur level, check out them dancing to the opening.
Wandance is one of those series where each episode feels like it’s only five minutes long: no sooner are you invested in this week episode then the ending theme plays already. It fits in well with the trend of somewhat more realistic high school sports and romance series.The protagonist Kabo is a big long dude who has always gone along with whatever his friends did, partially because he stutters. (This must be the only anime that has a Scatman Jones clip in its first episode). Wanda, the girl that inspires him to dance is slightly less well defined than him, but not a manic pixie girl either and the supporting cast, so far mainly Iori and On-chan as featured above is great too.
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