It’s no secret that anime, and media in general, tend to struggle with originality with most new entries coming out seeming to be a rehashing of the same old tropes. “Hulla Fulla Dance” stood out to me because it tells the story of a girl who’s passionate about hula dancing and it also deals with the aftereffects of the 2011 earthquake, a premise I have literally never seen before in anime or any storytelling genre for that matter. The plot of the film follows Hiwa, a recent high school graduate, who taking after the inspiration of her late sister aspires to be a professional huladancer at a Hawaiian-themed resort. The issue is Hiwa, who is overly ditzy and clumsy, and seems so error prone, doesn’t have the confidence or skill to pull off hula dancing. Can Hiwa and the fellow novice hula dancers learn their craft and inspire the audience?
I think the movie does well in certain aspects; the films performances show I believe that the creators did their research on the hula dance tradition, from the dance movements to the Hawaiian music and language that accompanies it. I also appreciated the character designs, the artists did a good job of giving the characters distinct designs, even minor supporting ones. It is also noteworthy that Hiwa and the other characters often appear in different attire and clothes from scene to scene, which is significantly harder to animate from a production standpoint. The creators should be applauded for never falling back on cheap fanservice during its runtime, something which probably would have been all too easy to do in a film that’s essentially about Polynesian belly dancing. I also think that the anime has strong themes about overcoming adversity and doing what you love, and I also must give the creators credit with taking the risk of making an anime about hula dancing, something that wasn’t done before.
However, my criticisms of the film will be significantly longer. The animation is okay for the most part, but it’s obvious that the producers were relying on CGI and rotoscoping for the dance sequences. It starts off okay-ish but only becomes more and more apparent later in the movie, especially for the final two dances where the characters’ normal hand drawn designs and their CGI designs look rather different.
Something else that I wish was done better in “Hulla Fulla Dance” were the characters. For anyone whose seen idol and/or CGDCT anime, you’ll instantly recognize how cliché most of them are, you have the clumsy protagonist Hiwa, the plumb and cheerful Ranko, the foreign girl with noticeably bigger chest Ohana, the overly serious obvious Kanna, and the shy Shion. To their credit they all develop a little bit during the movie’s runtime, but they're mostly stagnant. There are several scenes that were supposed to be emotional with the characters being sad but it was rendered unintentionally funny due to the melodrama. Also, I must say that the voice of Ohana was utterly unbearable, even the characters in the movie found it annoying.
Lastly, and by far the biggest problem “Hulla Fulla Dance” has, is its pacing. Various elements and characters are brought in only to be dropped, then in the finale of the movie those same things are shoehorned back in. At the beginning of the film Hiwa thinks her plush toy is talking to her, this is then brought up against around the half-hour mark and then left completely forgotten until it’s randomly brought up in this giant plot twist in the finale. There’s one scene where Ohana stops being her cheerful self and starts crying that she misses her family, but after the subsequent scene it's never brought up again. There’s this one relationship Hiwa has with a male co-worker that seems to be building towards something only for him to say “I actually knew your sister, and I’m leaving the company” witch it largely left to that.
Several times in the anime it builds up to a performance that Hiwa and her friends are dancing in, only for the film to skip forward and then we see characters talking and having flash backs to the very event we skipped over. About halfway through Hiwa and her old high school friends go to this concert, where they then sit through a full 3-minute j-pop song of this fake idol group preforming. In the grand performance at the hula competition near the end of the anime, led by Kanna & Hiwa the characters put on a hula dance set to the exact same song, which we then have to hear in full for another 3 minutes. It doesn’t help that the overly autotuned j-pop and hula dancing mix like oil & water, especially since throughout the rest of the film they only dance the hula to traditional Hawaiian music.
In conclusion, while “Hulla Fulla Dance” has a unique premise and several standout features, it is dragged down by the aforementioned issues, especially the pacing. At the time of this writing (December 2024) this anime has an abysmal MAL score of 6.30, and while I think it’s a bit harsh there’s no denying that this isn’t an all-time classic. Despite its unique premise, this is in essence an idol/CGDCT anime, and while the cast of characters have their moments, overall they’re not very unique or endearing. It’s overall a decent but not great film, would rate somewhere between a 5 to 6 out of 10.
Mixed Feelings
I'm not particularly a fan of dancing or performing arts anime, but this was decently enjoyable. It was a pretty simple story about the protagonists chasing their dream and overcoming some hardships that get in the way. You could probably replace "hula dancing" with anything else and the story wouldn't be very different, beyond the aesthetic of the film. Nevertheless, a movie about a group of girls becoming professional hula dancers was unique enough to keep my interest. Overall the characters were alright, but I do think the story could have done a better job fleshing out their motivations. That would have helped me root forthem and care about them achieving their goals more. For instance, the MC's main reason for wanting to be a hula dancer was because her sister was one, but it would have been better if the movie also explored why it was personally something she wanted to do for herself. If her goal were more personal it'd help me feel more invested in her achieving it, and more dismayed by her setbacks. The other girls in her dance group could have also had their motives explored more.
The visuals were nice and colorful, they complemented the Hawaiian theme of the setting well. I also liked the hula dancing itself, it was pleasant. A couple of the dance scenes did use some CGI, but it wasn't very bad. The hula music they used in most of the dance scenes was good, but the music in the their dance scene at the hula competition wasn't really hula at all. It was just generic idol music, which felt out of place.
