The opening animation for Noh-themed anime The World is Dancing has been released on the SHOCHIKU anime YouTube channel. The show began airing on July 2.
Shuhei Fuchimoto (The World is Dancing assistant director, Umamusume: Pretty Derby – Beginning of a New Era co-unit director) storyboarded and unit directed the opening, which features the series’ regular aesthetic along with a large amount of stylized visuals and animation, as well as credits rendered in the writing of calligrapher Satoshi Nemoto.
The opening song is “shusho” by Macaroni Empitsu.
The World is Dancing is an adaptation of the manga by Kazuto Mihara that is directed by Toshimasa Kuroyanagi (Backflip!! and The Great Passage, Umamusume: Pretty Derby – Beginning of a New Era co-unit director) at CyPic. The synopsis reads:
In 1374, amid the turmoil of the Northern and Southern Courts’ long running conflict, a boy named Oniyasha is born into a family of sarugaku theater performers. He spends his days in a kind of quiet gloom, haunted by a simple but persistent question: Why do 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 manga began serialization in Kodansha’s seinen magazine Morning in March 2021 and released its sixth and final volume in November 2022. Kodansha USA has it in English.
HIDIVE is streaming the anime.
Series production credits
• Director: Toshimasa Kuroyanagi
• Character designer: Keigo Sasaki (Umamusume: Cinderella Gray co-character designer, The Millionaire Detective Balance: Unlimited)
• Series composer and scriptwriter: Sawako Kawamitsu (Tonari no Stella live-action movie scriptwriter)
• Assistant director: Shuhei Fuchimoto
• Sub-character designer: Iori Hisatake
• Background art director: Hiromasa Ogura (Backflip!! The Movie)
• Background art director: Kazuhiro Inoue (Spice and Wolf: Merchant Meets the Wise Wolf)
• Color designer: Naoko Sato
• Color designer: Kumiko Naruke (ChaO)
• Compositing director: Yutaro Kikuchi (Sasaki and Peeps)
• Sound director: Yukio Nagasaki (Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War)
• Music composer: Daisuke Shinoda (Sword Art Online Alternative: Gun Gale Online Season 2 co-composer)
• Nohgaku supervisor: Kohei Kawaguchi
• Choreographer: Kaiji Moriyama
• Choreographer: Mimiko Kawamura
• Historical supervisor: Katsuyuki Shimizu
• Animation producer: Kan Mizoguchi (Umamusume: Pretty Derby Road to the Top, Umamusume: Pretty Derby – Beginning of a New Era)
• Animation production: CyPic
Cast
• Yumiri Hanamori as Oniyasha
• Simba Tsuchiya as Ishiya
• Maaya Uchida as Kogane
• Romi Park as Zojiro
• Katsuyuki Konishi as Kan’ami
• Haruki Ishiya as Junigoro
Source: Press release
