Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.
You blink, and two months are gone.
The only thing I’ve written on this site between the start of this season and the last was a stray review of the relatively obscure early-10s anime film Aura. And so it is the case that, with only that piece bridging this season and the last, the Summer 2026 anime season arrives on our doorstep. It actually did several days ago, in fact. The World is Dancing itself premiered yesterday (one of those weird situations where the premiere on streaming is ahead of the TV broadcast, Dancing will be a Thursday show for most of the season), and a few more scattered offerings debuted as far back as a week ago. Still, for me at least, this particular show is the spearhead of what promises to be the best anime season in a number of years. (I feel like I say things like this all the time, to the point where it’s perhaps blunted the impact of me saying them. So I do want to be clear that I think this is shaping up to be the best anime season of the 2020s so far period. We find ourselves in rare times.) The World is Dancing is a period piece, set in 14th-century Japan, following the life of the boy who would, in the future, become the founder of what we now know as Noh Theatre.
That’s two layers deep for our general concept. Nothing crazy, certainly, but enough that a more casual audience might struggle to connect to it a bit. But don’t worry, if your question is something along the lines of “what do people get out of this sort of thing, anyway?”, someone else is right there next to you, asking the same question. And that someone is our main character, Oniyasha [Hanamori Yumiri].
Oniyasha is the son of Kan’ami [Konishi Katsuyuki], the taciturn and stern head of the Kanze peformance troupe. What the Kanze perform is a sort of traditional dance theater called sarugaku (recall, Noh doesn’t exist yet), and much is made of Kan’ami’s attempts to advance the artform and make sure that the place of both his troupe and the style they perform in remains secure in the world. Unfortunately, being quite serious about all of this comes at the cost of a strained relationship with his own son. Oniyasha and Kan’ami do not see eye to eye as we begin our story, and Oniyasha spends much of the performance that opens the main part of the episode spacing out and wondering about the skeletal structure of birds and horses. (Creatures born to fly and run, respectively. Humans, he thinks, are surely not born to dance.) This leads to a bit of chaotic slapstick; in the midst of the performance Oniyasha’s zoning out leads to a chain reaction of fumbling that results in a knife stuck in the flank of a nearby horse. (To his credit, Kan’ami rushes in to save his son from said horse’s understandable wrath.) Oniyasha spends much of the time afterward feeling low, his father is quite upset with him and actually, at one point, chucks a turtle at him (objectively a horrible thing to do, but kind of so ridiculous—down to the turtle popping out of its shell to greet Oniyasha—that it’s hard to take seriously).
Oniyasha spends much of the remainder of the episode in this daze, conversing with acquaintances and friends at various points about what dancing means, and what it’s for. He gets different answers, a boy of roughly his own age that works for his father tells him that when his father dances, the world changes, but Oniyasha can’t really wrap his head around this just yet. (Don’t worry, he’ll understand very well before the end of the episode.) In this early part of the episode I would describe him as almost…Bocchi the Rock-ian? Obviously their starting motivations are quite different, but Oniyasha has that “going through it girl” energy about him, despite being a boy. And there’s a snappy comedy to his head-in-the-clouds mentality throughout much of the episode. (Another obvious comparison, more by design, is Tokiyuki of The Elusive Samurai, another anime that takes place in the 14th century, one that is set to return later this month, in fact.)
The true hook of the episode comes at its end, however, and with it, a swerve into the more serious and contemplative half of this show. After leaving a conversation with his friend Kogane [Uchida Maaya], Oniyasha is lost in thought once again, and soon becomes lost in fact, as well. Not knowing where he is, he asks a farmer—a man with white hair, suspiciously important-looking, all things considered—for directions. The man points him off, and he soon finds himself hearing strange, raspy singing from a cabin in the woods. In it, there is a woman dancing. Dancing in a way he has never seen.
The actual animation of the episode here wobbles out into decoherence (the beginnings of this sequence in particular bring to mind Takopi’s Original Sin‘s use of similar, to very different ends, last year), to take us with Oniyasha as he’s swept away by this surreal and intense display of art. I have spoken often about the convention of the “passion ignited sequence,” the moment in an anime about an artform or sport or the like where we the audience can see the protagonist become enraptured by it. This is a particularly extreme example, as Oniyasha is not just taken with this mysterious woman’s dancing, he’s overwhelmed by it. And he honestly seems more than a little frightened. (The animation, it must be said, really helps sell this, almost more resembling a sequence of paintings than frames in the usual sense. Kuroyanagi Toshimasa‘s team at Cypic really know what they’re doing.) Running out into the night, away from the mysterious woman and her shack, he’s found his answer. If he can capture this, this particular kind of expression, that is what dancing can mean, to him and—as the closing narration hints—soon to many others, as well. Just like that, the seasons change.
The first episode closes with the unusual move of playing what will normally be this anime’s OP and ED sequences back to back. This has a particularly meaningful connotation here; one of the things we see in the “OP” is Oniyasha, dancing as the woman danced, seemingly in the thick of one of the more restrained and formal performances of the type his father’s troupe puts on. Perhaps this is his way forward, perhaps not. In either case, it makes The World is Dancing‘s premiere a very strong first episode in a season that is sure to have many, many more of those. We could hardly ask for a better opening act.
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