The students are united by an interest in the ballroom dancing lessons, which builds over a 10-week period and culminates in a competition to find the school that has produced the best dancers in the city.

[3] The documentary premiered at the 2005 Slamdance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, where Paramount Classics and Nickelodeon Movies acquired distribution rights outside Australia and New Zealand for $2 million.

[4] As of February 7, 2012, it had earned over $8.1 million, making it the sixteenth-highest-grossing documentary film in the United States (in nominal dollars, from 1982 to the present).

The website's consensus reads: "This heartwarming documentary will win audiences over, as the sheer charm of precocious, enthusiastic children learning to dance resonates from the screen.

"[6] Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 71 out of 100, based on 32 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.