Not done an anime review for a while, this is Hanayamata.
Naru is an average girl who dreams of one day escaping mundane life and doing something exciting and dazzling but lacks the confidence to really go through with it, that is until a chance meeting with a mysterious American girl named Hana outside a Japanese Dance Festival inspires her to participate in the world of Yosakoi a mix of traditional Japanese dancing with modern day music and styles. Along with her other friends they hope to compete on the stage and dazzle everyone with their dancing.
The plotline seems to follow the pattern of Love Live, energetic girl creates an outlandish club and brings in members who are initially reluctant to join but do anyway, there are constant sceptics about why the club exists or if they can even succeed with suggestions they shutdown, they are aiming for a major festival to participate in, plenty of moments of stage fright, teenage angst, anxiety about a past event, girl working herself too hard and becoming sick and finally one of the members has to leave for another country. Seriously if you’ve seen Love Live this is just more of the same, only the characters are way more mean spirited and drop the drama bomb every single episode which causes it to try and salvage it’s pride by the end as it’s wasted it’s screen time having the characters fight and make up all the time and not enough time for actual Yosakoi dancing and even when you get to the end, the payoff wasn’t worth the trouble as the final dance is pretty much shown in the opening theme, the back stories are rushed and were never given enough time to absorb what we learn about the cast nor do I understand why certain characters have to be a bitch all the time, some of the things that were being spoken really broke the feel of the anime which should’ve been more relaxing, cheerful and colourful but dropping drama bombs all the time has made this anime a bad teen sitcom in animated form.
Dub was fine if a little grating, sub would suit this series better.
Final Verdict: I paid for bright and colourful Yosakoi dancing and the trailer promised me that but all I got was a lousy teen sitcom with too many drama bombs and too much like Love Live which most viewers know I despise.
