The Summer 2026 Anime Preview Guide

The World Is Dancing

In 1374, amid the turmoil of the Northern and Southern Courts' long-running conflict, a boy named Oniyasha was born into a family of sarugaku theater performers. He spends his days in a kind of quiet gloom, wondering why people dance. Then, one day, he witnesses a dance that he feels to be "good"—and everything begins to change. This is the story of the beautiful young boy who would one day shape the art of Noh and be remembered as Zeami.

The World Is Dancing is based on the manga series by Kazuto Mihara. The anime series is streaming on HIDIVE on Mondays.

Every so often, we get a show that could really benefit from footnotes. The World Is Dancing is one such, although viewers who remember The Heike Story will have a leg up on everyone else. That's in part because Noh actor and playwright Zeami, the protagonist of this show, took a lot of his inspiration from Heike Monogatari, but also because this is set in 1374, which is not exactly one of anime's more common time periods. In any event, a shirabiyoshi is a male-presenting female performer, dengaku is a style of theater based on folk traditions, and sarugaku is a sort of vaudeville-esque style of theater. These are very basic definitions, but they may help contextualize elements of the episode.

Even without that knowledge, however, this is a fascinating debut. Yes, to a degree that's down to the Muromachi-era setting, but it's really the way it's presented that makes it special. The underlying story, thus far, is relatively common: Oniyasha (later Zeami) feels out of place in his father's sarugaku troupe. He doesn't connect with the dance style and believes he's a disappointment to his father, something none of his dad's actions can assuage. He spends most of his time trying to avoid practice and his father, playing with a village boy by the river and making his own observations of the world. But one day on his way home, he ends up near a decrepit hut, inside which is a shirabiyoshi lost in her wild dance. It's like nothing he's ever seen before, and we can guess that it's the formative moment in his life.

The animation for this scene is nothing short of spectacular. While the rest of the art and animation is excellent, this scene is liquid, like a frenzied orgy of movement barely contained by the screen. It writhes and swims across our vision, like dance in its most abstract, powerful form. Martha Graham wishes she could capture this feel, and it's not just a revelation for Oniyasha; it's one for anyone watching the episode. The closest I can relate it to is the moment I saw modern dance (the Martha Graham company, actually) after only seeing classical ballet. It's simply breathtaking.

Its power is doubled by the fact that everything else we've seen in the episode is relatively staid. Dance is sober and almost plodding. Derelict villages ringed with skulls define the landscape; every detail of sandals and straw horseshoes (basically sandals for horses) gives a view of what everyday life entails. The shirabyoshi's dance is the first free thing Oniyasha has ever seen.

This is, hands down, a show to keep an eye on. It's a shoo-in for historical fiction lovers or Noh enthusiasts, but don't let the subject matter keep you away. It's a bit of a slow start, but once it gets going, it will take your breath away.

In a poem included in her novel Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo, Ntozake Shange says that “dancing is the union of spirits laid to rest among splinterin shells n fins of adoration in the heat of comets n volcanoes[.]” I've never quite found another writer who sums up how all-consuming dancing can be, but I feel like The World Is Dancing's second episode comes close. Between the shirabiyoshi's final dance and Oniyasha's impassioned, anguished dance at the episode's close, the need to express feelings with your body, to throw yourself through space in the heat of Shange's comets and volcanoes, is beautifully expressed. Dance isn't always pretty; it isn't always gracious and elegant. But dance can be necessary, the only way to pour out your feelings when words fail you.

I love the way that Oniyasha doesn't instinctively understand this. He has no basis for comparison – his life has been cushy, and his issues with his father are nothing compared to what the shirabiyoshi has been through. She's dying of (presumably) tuberculosis, she missed the chance to perform for the emperor, and she's been reduced to sex work in order to stay fed. Her dance is personal, an outpouring of grief and anger. To a degree, Oniyasha knows this, because he's furious when he finds that his father has paid her for her troubles, or at least for putting up with his son. But he doesn't understand. He just thinks that her dance has been lost because she's no longer miserable without realizing that her misery belongs to her alone, and she has the right to spend her final days in comfort.

I don't think it's necessarily polished storytelling to use her death as the final piece of Oniyasha's puzzle. It smacks of fridging, killing a woman in order to further a man's (boy's) story. Was it a reality at the time? Absolutely. But this is historical fiction; it needn't be beholden to all historical truths. I don't like that her pain was turned to fodder.

Still, Oniyasha's quiet grief when he gifts her a last dance is exquisite. He truly is laying her to rest among shell shards with adoration. He may not fully understand, but he's learning, and what he (and perhaps the audience) is being taught is that dance is as personal as bodies. Oniyasha going around and asking people to dance for him was like asking them to strip in public. Their dance and their bodies only belong to them, and he has to find his own by learning his body and what it tells him.

Shange ends her poem with the lines “dancing is how i love/how i share carin[.]” The shirabiyoshi could only express her self-love through her dance. Now it is up to Oniyasha to learn to do the same.

The World Is Dancing is another series that has come completely out of nowhere and really impressed me. This is a period piece set in the 14th-century Muromachi era of Japan, and our hero is a well-meaning young lad named Oniyasha, who runs a sarugaku theatre troupe and tries to live up to his father's expectations. From the very opening of this premiere, it is clear that we're experiencing a lush and vibrant production from Studio Cypic with plenty of personality etched into every frame; it reminds me a lot of the exemplary work that CloverWorks has put out with its adaptation of The Elusive Samurai.

I'm always down for anime like Akane-banashi that explore the specific culture and craftsmanship of a uniquely Japanese art form, and The World Is Dancing has the bonus of presenting Oniyasha's exploration of sarugaku through the lens of the Muromachi era. The bones of the story are familiar to anyone who has seen a show or film about a kid with family ties to show business. Usually, the protagonist has an outsized passion for the art or feels completely out of place within the traditions of the family work, and Oniyasha falls into the latter camp. The boy wants to please his old man and help the troupe succeed, but he doesn't feel a connection to the work they do onstage that would allow him to truly excel. To Oniyasha, dance feels too removed from the lives of everyday people to be meaningful and vital.

His attitude changes when he stumbles upon the isolated forest hut of a mysterious shirabyoushi, a kind of specialized female dancer who performed in men's attire. This entire sequence is just absolutely incredible, a dark and moody glimpse into a stranger performing entirely for themselves, evoking the expressionistic and aggressive linework of surreal dreamscapes like what we saw in Dan Da Dan's landmark episode about the history of the Acrobatic Silky spirit. I was already having an amazing time with the premiere, but this scene alone elevates the show into the tier of anime that I absolutely have to see more of.

The premiere concludes with a montage that previews the greatness to which Oniyasha will rise as he incorporates this newfound appreciation for human expression into his work, revealing the anime to be a fictionalized account of the life of the real-world playwright Zeami Motokiyo. By blending pastoral historical fiction with gorgeously rendered anime phantasmagoria, The World Is Dancing has made a hell of a first impression. Given that it is streaming on HIDIVE, I worry it will fly under the radar compared to other shows on more popular streaming services, but I am telling you this one episode is worth the price of a subscription alone. Here's to hoping that future episodes of The World Is Dancing can live up to the excellent standards set by its premiere.

The World Is Dancing kicked off the summer with an absolutely stunning first episode, so the question going into this next chapter was whether or not the show could maintain such vibrant storytelling and expressionistic animation beyond a one-off showcase. It's one thing to create an exemplary little short film about a self-conscious and uncertain young dancer who surreptitiously witnesses an impromptu performance that changes his perspective on the art form. Now, The World Is Dancing must prove that it has the foundations for a compelling long-form story that will carry us through the season.

This week, Oniyasha is joined by his buddy Kogane on the quest to discover more forms of inspired, organic performance, just like what our hero witnessed in the shirabyoshi's shack on that fateful night. While the instinct to look for the spark of creation in the unexpected movements of everyday folks is still a good one, Oniyasha obviously cannot force the lightning- strike of the muse's influence whenever he wants. He gets the broad concept of “Life=Inspiration,” but he's not thinking clearly enough about how “Life” is the end result of a person's unique experiences. Their triumphs and their tribulations. Their secrets and their lies. Their dreams and their crushing disappointments. While there might be some naturally expressive talents like the shirabyoshi who will just spontaneously burst into a performance that bleeds all of those lived experiences out onto the stage, that connection between audience and performer is a delicate and rare one that must be coaxed and nurtured rather than hunted for.

So, understandably, Oniyasha drags his crew back to the Shirabyoshi's hut to see if he can ever experience that raw, unarticulable feeling of “good” again. As anyone with a bit more life experience than this young dork would expect, even a gracious staging of some of her dancing fails to make the same startling impression as the private moment Oniyasha spied upon. What does happen, though, is that Oniyasha and his friends' repeated visits to the Shirabyoshi helps him see her more as a human being and understand what has inspired and influenced her work on both a conscious and unconscious level. This is a complicated woman who has clearly lived a hard life wrought with bitter disappointments and painful sickness. This is lovingly illustrated with dreamline vignettes that give us glimpses into the Shirabyoshi's interior world, such as when she drops a single tear of crimson blood upon a blossoming white lily, transforming it into a proxy for the red spider lily that symbolizes death.

All of this leads us to a heartwrenching climax that surpasses even what that amazing first episode accomplished, a mesmerizing journey into cathartic despair that covered me in goosebumps and chilled me to my bones. The only conclusion I can draw after this is, yes, The World Is Dancing really is that good. You can bet I will be shouting the praises of this series from the rooftops for anyone and everyone to hear. This show is required viewing.

So, with The World Is Dancing, airing the season after Akane-banashi, are we just going to get one new gorgeously animated and stylishly directed anime based on traditional Japanese art forms every season? If so, I am very okay with that, as The World Is Dancing caught me completely off guard with its absolutely striking animation and visual creativity that I'm more used to seeing in theatrical animation than in weekly serialized works.

Based on the life of the 14th-century actor and playwright Zeami Motokiyo, this is set to follow the life of one of the most influential figures in Japanese dance and theater, and the first episode explores how Zeami, currently known as Oniyasha in this episode, came to fall in love with the crafts. Most of this episode establishes Japan at the time of Oniyasha's childhood and his personal circumstances: a war-torn nation rife with starvation and limited economic opportunities, with Oniyasha as the son of the head of a performance troupe. Like any child forced to learn their parent's trade rather than come to love it on their own, though, Oniyasha hates dance and cannot see the value it brings to those who attend his father's performances. This changes when Oniyasha witnesses more raw, expressionistic dancing while returning home one night and becomes obsessed with discovering new ways to express emotion with the human body.

While the pacing of the first episode of The World Is Dancing is a little slow, it looked good enough to hold my attention for its entire run. Even outside the fluid, more abstract scene where Oniyasha discovers the breath of creative expression in dance, this episode is filled with sequences of contorting bodies and sweeping camera movements that draw more attention to them. In an age when “hype animation” is often conflated with “excessive layers of After Effects,” the way The World Is Dancing captures the beauty within the movement of the human form feels like a breath of fresh air. I don't know if I connect with this subject matter enough to keep coming back to this show week after week. Still, the visuals are captivating enough that I'm almost certainly going to be thinking about this premiere for a long time to come.

The World Is Dancing is way too good to languish in obscurity on HIDIVE (as many great anime do every season), and I cannot recommend this anime enough to people who appreciate animation or the myriad of art forms and artistic crafts expressed through the human body.

I need sakuga enjoyers to watch The World Is Dancing! Especially in an age where most people's frame of reference for “good animation” is action sequences with a distracting number of after effects layered onto barely legible and barely lit fight scenes, the bright and expressive movement in this anime continues to be a breath of fresh air. I'm thrilled that the visuals of The World Is Dancing haven't fallen off at all since the premiere, and the show remains an affecting interpretation of Zeami Motokiyo's legend.

Having finally found his enthusiasm for dance in the premiere, Oniyasha is now obsessed with movement, form, and studying the craft of expression through the body. He's studying how different creatures move and what the shape of their bodies allows them to do well. Similarly, he requests other people dance for him to find movement as personal and impactful as the yokai/shirabyoshi's that sparked his passion.

In this opening act and into the second, where Oniyasha and company befriend the shirabyoshi, I was struck by how good The World Is Dancing is at visual storytelling. Even without anything dramatic happening on screen, this anime masterfully blocks shots and incorporates the physicality of characters to expedite storytelling. While Ishiya explains to Kogane that he can't dance or sit long enough to join a choir in a performance because of his bum leg, Ishiya raises his wrapped leg and shakes it to both embellish his point and offer a more immediate and visually involved explanation. While this character trait was established vocally by Ishiya in the previous episode, so few anime opt for this kind of more succinct and visually involved explanation, and instead just have characters repeat this kind of information endlessly.

This is even more evident in the third act, where The World Is Dancing fully embraces that it's a work of historical mythmaking and gets really dark. Outraged that money from his father took away the pain that was informing the shirabyoshi's dancing, Oniyasha steals the money he gave her and then, literally, throws it in his father's face. Finally succumbing to her illness, the shirabyoshi passes away before Oniyasha is able to apologize. While this does technically fall into the sexist trope of a woman suffering for a male main character's personal development, with how much The World Is Dancing conflates emotional understanding with emotional expression in dance, I understand why the show would inflict this kind of cruel suffering onto its characters.

The World Is Dancing is rapidly becoming the dark horse of the summer season, and episode two makes me believe it will only reach greater heights as the season goes on.