Forum - View topicEP. REVIEW: Welcome to the Ballroom
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CrowLia
 Posts: 5504 Location: Mexico |
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Because I felt they were struggling to pad the episode to completion, what with thousands of audience pans, at least two repetitions of Gaju's flashback and three of the "Make me bloom" scene, and even a flashback of the audience reaction that had happened literally a minute ago, plus the usual insane amount of still frames, I once again decided to time the actually animated dance in this episode. It clocked at one minute twenty five seconds. I didn't count scenes where the frame was still and the only movement was the clothing ruffles, but after rewatching the 13 minute dance sequence, I don't think it would've made a huge difference: barely 10% of the actual dance is animated, in what is supposed to be the most momentous dance we've seen yet. For comparison, Hyodo's tango lasted 4 minutes of which 50 seconds were animated dancing, a little under 25%.The centerpiece with Mako spinning surrounded with flowers sure looks beautiful, but the reward feels insufficient after so many episodes of build up.
Also, are we ever going to see Sengoku's famous Quickstep variation? Or are we just supposed to assume it was awesome without ever seeing it like most of the dancing in this series? The last minute change to the waltz seems kind of random and pointless (I guess it was supposed to show Tatara's improv skills or something?) At least Mako got some development and people acknowledging her dancing skills, even if it was all because Tatara allowed her to do it and people ended talking more about Tatara than Mako even while claiming he was "invisible", it's at least an improvement over the complete invisibilization of both Mako and Shizuku in previous episodes. This might be one of the best episodes of the show so far, but that's faint praise at this point, especially when it didn't really succeed in making the dancing interesting. And seriously what was up with the music? The lack of care given to that particular area is pretty egregious when the music is such an important part of dancing |
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Gina Szanboti
Posts: 11340 |
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Exactly what I was thinking during those scenes. You can't just throw out terminology without ever having shown or said what it means.
Given the judges dilemma (we're supposed to judge them on the leader and their unity) it sounded like those are the rules of the sport - is that true? That the only thing that matters is how good the leader looks and how unobtrusively his partner follows along? That's a pretty lopsided scoring system if so. It also makes the very concept of "frame and flower" entirely out of place in such a system. "Horse and buggy" would be the better metaphor for it. |
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CrowLia
Posts: 5504 Location: Mexico |
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^Agreed. It's only made worse because half the time the dancing terms are thrown around when we're looking at the audience or there is a still frame, so we don't even get to see what that move with a complicated name is supposed to be.
To bring in yet another comparison woth YoI, although that show also throws a lot of technical terms around without much explanation, a lot of times we are actually seeing the movements so at least we can sort of parse what they're about. I can't help think of episode 7, when Yuuri first attempts the quad flip and the way they made the audience aware of how important it was without giving any particular explanation about the jump's characteristics was by focusing on how it was Victor's signature jump. So while the viewer may not know the visual differences between a flip and a salchow, it's still a hugely impactful moment because it develops the character relationships. Ballroom however only randomly shows us Tatara copying Hyodo's moves, but that isn't really about his relationship with Hyodo but simply because it's made into a feature that Tatara copies other dancers' moves to fill in for what he lacks in experience and it is also pointed out that those copies don't really look good because Tatara is a beginner. And because he does it a lot it doesn't really have the same impact. I would also definitely be interested in knowing if it's true for actual competitions that the judges score based only on "leading" and "pair unity" because it seems to clash with the whole frame and flower thing |
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Z-Raid
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You know, of all the episodes to spend a bit more time and money on animating an actual dance scene for, you think this would be one of them considering this is supposed to be a big moment for Mako's development (and the series in general). Seeing close ups of Mako's face and her ruffly dress isn't really selling me that this whole frame and flower thing is really well done. The audience sure are telling me it's really good and Mako is doing great, but still images don't really have that effect on me. I appreciate that, as a whole, the animation is consistent and the characters are "on model" (horrible noodle anatomy aside), but I'd be totally ok if the next couple of episodes look like crap if it means having an animated 2-3 minute long dance scene in one episode without 30 sec. long reaction cutaways interspersed in it.
As a manga reader, I will admit that there are flaws in the source material and that not all problems in the anime are anime-original. However, I do think that the problems are exemplified more in the anime, and problems that I found somewhat tolerable in the manga (like this whole leader>partner dynamic) become a whole lot more irritiating in the anime, especially considering that for a media with movement and sound there's not a lot of animated dance scenes. I do like the bit at the end of the dance with all the flower petals and Mako. That was pretty nice and I do appreciate the development Mako has gone through. |
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Sheriru
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"...the show's central problems; it doesn't actually show us a complete minute of dancing..."
THAT is absolute the main point. It ruins the whole Show. Its even worse than Nodame Cantabile Season 1. Hyodos Tango was beautiful, so many dancing shots. Intense. Colorful. Actual Movements. But everything that followed is something that repeats or showing them spinning for half a Second. And no, not because Tatara lacks moves. What the heck happened to this Anime? The Manga Images had more Dynamic and they're printed pictures! Im so disappointed. Does it lack panty shots and yucky moe for them to have been more motivated to animate it properly? |
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Mojave
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Except that's not how judging works in ballroom dance. You don't judge them primarily on the "leader." Don't get me wrong, if the male partner is doing such a terrible job of leading that it's blatantly noticeable, then judges will mark them down for it. However, if he's doing even an average job and his partner is really good, the judges probably won't even give it a second thought. The scoring system presented in the episode is not what judging in ballroom dance actually is. "Frame and flower" is somewhat closer to how the dynamic is actually judged, but oftentimes that dynamic is also quite fluid and if the male partner does nothing but act as a sturdy frame the whole time, the couple won't look particularly good. Imagine a picture frame that constantly changes, occasionally just framing a beautiful painting (but never just being a plain, ordinary wooden frame), but also sometimes becoming an elaborate, ornate frame that's more beautiful and captivating than the painting it contains for a few seconds, before changing back to a style more suitable to emphasizing the painting it contains. That's pretty much a better analogy of how male partners in ballroom dance are supposed to approach their role. So once again, maybe 10% of the stuff this episode presented was accurate and really brought me back to my competition days, while the other 90% was just made-up stuff that has no relation to reality whatsoever. I'm not sure how much longer I can continue watching this series, it's breaking my heart as a ballroom dancer to see them capture little glimpses of reality that bring out the magic of ballroom dance and then drown those bits of magic under waves of meaningless shonen tropes and just pull stuff out of thin air that has nothing to do with the reality of ballroom dance. Sure, many sports anime take liberties with accuracy for dramatic purposes, but Welcome to the Ballroom just flat out made up fake rules this episode, something that I have never seen in another sports anime. Imagine if a basketball anime stated that making a basket from beyond the halfcourt line doubled the amount of points its worth, and had an episode where a major plot point was a player trying to make that shot in order to get double points for their team. That level of absurdity is what Welcome to the Ballroom just did this episode, and at this point I'm now positive the writers are banking on the audience's lack of knowledge of ballroom dance to just make stuff up about ballroom dance, lies that would get any other sports anime almost immediately pulled off the air. I want so badly for this show to help audiences experience what made me fall in love with ballroom dance, but it's clear the writers aren't willing to put even the bare minimum of effort into doing it properly, so I'm not sure how much longer I can stand this farce. Last edited by Mojave on Wed Sep 06, 2017 11:11 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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yuna49
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Maybe it's a reflection of its shounen origins, but I've found Ballroom especially annoying for its patriarchal presentation of gender roles. The girls have little agency, depending as Mako did for their partners to "make them bloom." The female characters are treated like property for the males to fight over. What little I've read about competitive ballroom dancing stresses the partnership aspects of the sport. This whole "frame and flower" business makes it appear the women are just there to be ornamental and not athletes in their own right. The whole presentation seems about fifty years out-of-date.
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Thorfinn
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Everyone outside ANN loves Ballroom, it's just a clown fiesta here. Thank God Japanese creators don't care about westerners and their moral standards. I also see a lot of people complaining about the animation when this is one of the best looking anime of the season. It's funny how everyone wants this to be the best animated anime ever because it's about dancing, when in reality, every anime has the same amount of stills and what not and for the most part most anime don't have the same consistency as this. Also, just because YOI had some 1 minute skating sequences, which looked mostly sloppy and were recycled a thousand times, it does not mean Ballroom has to do the same because it is not the same thing, you're like little babies crying because it isn't doing exactly the same things as YOI. While everyone here is bashing the show for the dumbest reasons, the rest of the anime fandom will continue to love and appreciate how good Ballroom truly is. Shame on ANN for pushing this as a bad show when it let's all kinds of garbage pass and calls it OK, but what else would you expect from ANN and their atrocious reviews across the website. Also, if every character in this was of the opposite gender, I bet no one would complain, stay classy guys.
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CrowLia
Posts: 5504 Location: Mexico |
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YOI didn't have "some" one-minute skating sequences, it had over 20 different ones and most of them had more than 2 minutes of continuous animated skating. Ballroom has had 9 episodes of which at least five have been set at a competition and none of them has had over 1:30 minutes of moving dancing, how far do you want to reach? Episode nine had a 13 minute long dance scene and of that only 1:25 minutes were animated dancing interspersed with recycled flashbacks and technobabble audience pans that told you nothing. Here's a review from a blog I follow, the writer is a fan of the manga and has been pretty positive about the anime so far, and yet...
It's also quite telling that actual ballroom dancers keep picking apart all the mounting inconsistencies within the show and how it purposefully bent the rules to undermine the female characters
This is one of the most absurd counterarguments to the "evil feminist" analysis because it doesn't make the smallest amount of sense. See, the point is, if the characters were the opposite gender none of the mysoginistic things would ever take place. For instance, if it had been Hyodo who decided to change partners, Sengoku wouldn't have called him a skank (heck, he barely admitted "Gaju is wrong" in regards to his approach to partners, but never used a derogatory word for him. If Mako were a boy there wouldn't have been 1/4 of an episode devoted to making fun of him for being flat-chested. If Mako and Shizuku were boys there would be no issues about their dance skills being undermined because they would be the leaders and it would be their skills that would get praised for making their partners shine (though, if Tatara or Hyodo were girls they'd probably be equally neglected and ignored and called skanks) |
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Gina Szanboti
Posts: 11340 |
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I think it's been shown that that's not true. People (not me - I haven't mentioned it once) bring up YOI because, opinions of its animation quality aside, at least it was moving and not just stills with speed lines. Viewers will complain about that regardless of the anime (e.g., see the latter episodes of Seraph of the End).
Virtually no animation, unlikable characters, complete misrepresentation of ballroom culture and rules, no explanations of named moves (more tell than show in general), music inappropriate to the action, and reducing female characters to accessories and/or uninvolved bystanders, aren't "the dumbest of reasons." These criticisms get to the basic fundamentals of making an entertaining series. Ballroom has failed on all counts for those leveling such criticisms, but it's fine if you don't share that opinion - no one here is calling you dumb for enjoying it. Trivial reasons would be "I hate this series because I don't like Sengoku's hair," or "because the girls' dresses are ugly," or "Tatara is a self-insert who's too OP," but if those things are make-or-break for a viewer, then they are. :¯\_(ツ)_/¯: What would you say are valid and non-trivial reasons for disliking a show?
Way to end with a strawman argument. Classy indeed. |
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TasteyCookie
 Posts: 421 |
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The Amazon Stalker ratings just BEGS to differ. 362pts. 860. 2017/11/29. 82 2017/07/09 6 Ballroom e Youkoso That's 860 estimated for disc sales, putting it in the bottom 40% of estimates for the Summer season. It also doesn't even show up in Japanese polls of what they are still watching this season and shows they are excited to watch each week. So I think your blanket statement of everyone loving Ballroom, especially in Japan, is highly false. The show just isn't clicking for many people. There's nothing wrong with liking a show that others don't like (I know it's surprising to hear that.) But trying to paint a picture that Ballroom is just the most beloved anime of summer 2017 is just plain lying. |
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Thorfinn
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It's OK, you can continue to bash Ballroom here all you want, since no one will actually care about you in the larger picture. Also, great to see someone bring up Stalker bluray sales numbers when the overall sales and interest in disc purchasing in Japan is at an all time low and everything sells very poorly, the manga for example sells over 100k per volume whenever it comes out, so at leas that's doing fine and I wouldn't be shocked if Amazon paid a huge amount of money to get the streaming license for it plus I was referring to the Western community, on other forums everyone is absolutely adoring everything about this anime and they'll start loving it even more since it gets even better later on( and I actually said the Japanese Creators, not viewers). Also interesting to see claims that it has virtually no animation, when I said, pretty much all anime is the same, you're nitpicking because it's about dancing, ballroom is actually above most anime because it has very consistent on model character shots, even if they're stills. Even Haikyu for example is filled with static and still shots, but I guess the fact that it's about volley and not dancing makes things different. It's unrealistic to have non stop animation even if this is about dancing, which is incredibly difficult to animate, by the way, name 5 anime from this year which were better looking and more consistent than Ballroom. Again, you're just upset because it's not doing things exactly like YOI, they are not the same thing, stop trying to justify that Ballroom must have over 1 minute dance sequences, especially since this is based off a manga and most dance sequences are short in the manga as well, YOI was an anime original and could afford to do whatever it wanted, just because YOI did things that way it does not mean Ballroom has to do the same, because that's what seems right to you in your head. In a quote posted from a blog post, that Ballroom might've been in better hands if another studio would've had it, literally no other studio could've done a better job at such a complicated subject matter for animation, maybe Bones, but they never do sports anime. Examples of anime with actual GOD tier animation throughout: Space Dandy, One Punch Man and Redline, where the consistency never goes away and these were truly special projects. Again, thank GOD Japanese people do not care about western standards and all that crap. All the characters are some of the most likable I've seen, maybe you just get triggered too easily, but hey, opinions, right? People bring up YOI because of it's great story and characters, not animation, well at least until the second half had very lackluster production values and started to recycle the same stuff and have off model characters all the time, and no I'm not saying it has bad animation, just pointing out some things. Sadly, everyone thought that Ballroom would be super similar to YOI because of the similarity in the sports and I saw the comparisons being made in the earliest stages of the anime's announcement. I also saw a complaint how the dance moves they do aren't all named and explained, maybe because it would interrupt the flow or maybe because it is not obligatory to do so, just because you want them to name and explain the dance moves does not make the experience worse, get real. I'm no expert on dancing rules and the way the industry works and quite frankly I don't care, but maybe things are done differently in Japan, have you ever thought about that, have you asked Japanese dancers about it, maybe the mentality is different or maybe this is from the perspective of the author and how she interprets ballroom dancing. I think if the female author of this manga saw some of the complaints here regarding her way of doing the story and characters, she'd straight up laugh out loud at you guys.
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yuna49
Posts: 3804 |
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Might I introduce you to that useful tool of English writing, the paragraph?
I believe it was Gina who said the dancing sequences in Bahamut Virgin Soul were better than the ones in Ballroom. I heartily agree. |
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lossthief
ANN Reviewer
 Posts: 1388 |
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I think it's worth stating that many people's issues with Ballroom's use of stills and pans over full-motion isn't just "Yuri on Ice did it so now everyone needs to." For me, at least, it's because this specific case does a bad job of properly communication action and movement to the audience.
Haikyu and other sports anime can get away with audience cuts and static shots because they don't center on a sport defined by constant motion. And if they cut away or don't show every single serve or volley or point scored, it's understood that those just aren't important moments within the narrative of the game. But competitive Dance is a sport measured by judges, and so communicating to the audience why one pair is better or worse than another becomes a lot more important for setting up tension within the story. And the thing is, I'm sure there is a way to get that across without needing lengthy segments of full-motion animation. The manga did, as did the short-lived Straighten Up! ballroom dancing manga that ran in Jump. But something in the anime's delivery - be it the editing, the framing, or some other bit of adaptation sickness - is not pulling it off. When I see a shot of Tatara and Mako posing, then a swift cut to the audience, then a cut back to a different pose, I don't have a sense of how these movements do (or don't) connect to eachother or why or why not they're impressive. And that's pretty critical for this kind of sports series. Most people who are criticizing the show aren't sitting here with stopwatches and notes keeping track of keyframes and smears to check against some arbitrary quota that decides if it's good or bad. They just don't think that the show is doing a good job at getting across what it wants to. |
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Mojave
Posts: 178 |
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Allow me to reiterate as a ballroom dancer, the latest episode flat out made up a fake rule! This isn't a difference between Japanese ballroom dance and American ballroom dance. The dance they're doing (the waltz), belongs to a category of ballroom known as International Standard. The judging criteria for it in competition is universally uniform. I personally have been judged on the waltz by a judge flown over directly from Russia, that's how uniform the judging criteria for it is. There is no way to defend what Welcome to the Ballroom just did. It flat out lied about the rules of the sport, something that would get most sports anime cancelled immediately. There's taking some minor liberties with accuracy for the sake of drama in a sports anime, and then there's flat out making up fake rules for the sport. The former is widespread in sports anime, the latter was practically unheard of until this week. I can't overstate how egregious and unheard of this is. Of course I wanted Welcome to the Ballroom to be successful, I was hoping it would help a wider audience see part of what made me fall in love with ballroom dance. But after all the missteps it already made that gave me reason for pause, it just crossed an uncrossable line. That's inexcusable. I'm not so sure that I want the anime to be successful anymore, since that would be rewarding such egregious behavior. It's like the writers aren't even trying and are just relying on the fact that almost all of their audience knows nothing about ballroom dance. There's no reason to celebrate that, the universal reaction to that should be condemnation. |
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