Tag: anime

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: TURKEY! TIME TO STRIKE

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.

There is a real, delicate art to the bait-and-switch premiere. You basically have to sell the audience on two different premises, and you have to sell them on the second one hard enough that they don’t mind that you’re not really doing the first (or at least aren’t doing it the way they thought you would). Also, if you’re really committed to the bit, most or all of your pre-release marketing is going to be about the first premise. So you’re trying to catch fish with the wrong type of worm, essentially, and making it that much harder on yourself in the process.

Accordingly, anime that take this kind of swing are a bit rare. The most recent example I can think of is last year’s Bang Bravern, and its two conceits are closely enough related that I can’t imagine too many people were majorly disappointed when it turned out to be a super robot show instead of a gritty real robot show.

Turkey! Time to Strike was presented in its early marketing materials as a simple show about bowling. This is a valid niche within the “girls doing stuff” supergenre of anime, for sure, and it comes to us from Bakken Record, a studio whose main prior credit of note is Ippon! Again, also a show about a girls’ sport club—judo in the case of that series—so this seemed like a perfectly logical next step. No one had any real reason to believe this was anything but a straightforward drama (or comedy, or maybe both) about a girls’ bowling league.

In its opening minutes, that’s exactly what it is. We open on our heroines flubbing the opening match of a tournament, as our lead Otonashi Mai [Hishikawa Hana] gets a snake-eye split on her final ball and washes her team out of the match. Tensions run high afterward, with the serious and competitive Godai Rina [Ichinose Kana] accusing her of throwing the match deliberately. Rina has quite a lot to say to her other teammates, too, pointing the finger at Mitaka Nozomi [Tenma Yuuki] for doing her makeup and not taking the game seriously while it went on, Ichinose Sayuri [Iwata Haruki] for constantly throwing gutter balls because she tenses up so bad, and the nerdy Nikaidou Nanase [Itou Ayasa] she simply calls a benchwarmer.

As this argument drags on, it comes out that Nozomi and Sayuri only joined in the first place because Mai asked them to, and Nanase only joined because she thought the experience might “help her in the future” in some way. Upset with all of this, Rina quits the club. Mai reassures the others that she’ll talk to Rina at school the following day, since she doesn’t want the club to be disbanded for lack of membership. There’s some nice camera work here where Mai takes her ramune—this entire dispute started in the first place because the club bought a round of “celebratory” sodas despite losing—and drinks from it, the marble inside rolling around like a bowling ball as the camera fixes on it. So far, so sports drama.

On their way home, the remains of the bowling club spot a construction site where a pit is being dug. They remark that there was a secondhand book shop there just two days prior, and one of the girls muses that it takes only an instant to lose something. For whatever reason, this really gets to Mai, and she decides she has to reconcile with Rina right now. Thus invigorated, she and the rest of the bowling club make their way to the alley again to try to patch things up with her. Rina’s not terribly impressed by Mai’s pleas, but she offers a simple ultimatum: if Mai can beat her in a bowling match, she’ll at least think about coming back.

Thus, we get a nice setpiece of the two going head to head, one on one, the bowling balls thundering down the lane as a downpour breaks out outside. It’s honestly pretty solid, and you can see the kind of show that Turkey could easily have decided to be on display here. This sort of thing, the idea that the best way to understand someone, to get through to them, is to take them on in your shared field of competition, is very common in sports anime and fiction about athletics in general. It’s good stuff, and Turkey sells it well.

On the last frame, Mai throws a split again, and Rina storms off, assuming she’s doing this on purpose and that Rina’s being mocked. But Mai won’t give up, and she throws her second ball right as a bolt of lightning strikes a mysterious artefact dug up from the construction site outside. At that very moment, Turkey stops being a sports anime, and becomes something else entirely.

And that’s the end of the episode!

Seriously!

What utter goofball shit! What chutzpah! Why would you make a show like this?! Turkey, whose English-market subtitle Time to Strike suddenly makes a lot more sense, opens itself up to both barrels here. If you’re here for the sports drama stuff, the ending is going to throw you for a complete loop. If you heard about the twist beforehand and wanted the show to get to that, you have to get through a whole episode of teenagers arguing about fucking bowling first. So on the surface, this seems like a terrible idea. And yet, to me at least, this speaks to an unshakeable confidence in this story. That doesn’t necessarily mean that Turkey is going to turn out to be some kind of masterpiece, or even be particularly good overall, but come on! How can you not love that?

Even so, I do think the show has a good command of its own strengths. There’s a strong web of character dynamics underpinning this episode that works equally well for both the “sports drama” premise and the “stranded in the past” premise, and I think that’s going to be the secret sauce that ties the whole thing together. Even if it doesn’t, when you pivot from a bowling club to time travel in your first episode, I can only wonder what the hell else you have in store. Thus, Turkey is a representation of probably my single favorite thing about anime, its endless capacity for surprise. None of us know where this is going, but the second trailer for the series, released after the premiere dropped, provides a hint.

Where we’re going, we don’t need lanes to bowl.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: CITY THE ANIMATION

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.

Do you believe in the power of astrology? Most people these days do not, but some still find meaning in the old magic. There’s no scientific proof that it can actually tell you anything about anything, of course, but that’s just it, isn’t it? Of course there wouldn’t be scientific proof of a mystical art. But find yourself cursed with miserable luck some sunny Sunday morning and you may just wonder, well, my sign is Capricorn, and the newspaper said Capricorns have it rough today. Could that be why? If so, is there anything I can do to turn it around? Don a miniskirt, perhaps? Thus experiencing a mix of dizzy skirt-go-spinny sugar rush endorphins and sheer embarrassment because skirts aren’t normally your thing and your whole family knows it? That’s just one example, of course, but it’s the example most pertinent to CITY THE ANIMATION, Kyoto Animation‘s latest project and their second team-up overall with Nichijou mangaka Arawi Keiichi. (Director Ishidate Taichi was the assistant director on Nichijou, which feels equally pertinent.) It’s the premise, more or less, of the first segment, and a good primer for what CITY is all about.

Here’s what it’s not; Nichijou Season 2. Possibly one of the most longed-for hypothetical second seasons of all time, Nichijou‘s TV anime was never renewed after its original 26-episode run. For whatever combination of reasons, they just never went back to that same well, and anyone coming in with the expectation that CITY is going to somehow be “the same as” Nichijou, one of the greatest comedy anime of all time, is going to be a bit thrown. CITY is definitely playing in the same playground, but it’s using different toys, and the games it’s playing are slightly simpler. Rather than following a fairly small core cast, the focus of an episode of CITY seems that it will change from segment to segment, rotating between a vast array of characters that live in the titular metropolis, showcasing both how their lives intersect and also their individual peculiarities.

Two high school girls with no afterschool club to call home talk hypothetical superpowers, a woman in a bucket hat shows us her collection of stim objects and invents a god of her own making, only to start giving it offerings. A part-timer works at a noodle shop where she has to cover up an embarrassing incident. Wouldn’t you know it? The Capricorn in the miniskirt is the owner’s son. Pinning gags to the corkboard like this kills them, so I’m loathe to go into the peculiarities of how each and every one of CITY‘s little jokes pays off, but almost all of them hit, which is an impressive bullseye ratio for any comedy anime, much less one that fires this many arrows in a given episode. Much of the comedy is antics-driven and thus rather physical (and it will sometimes drop out dialogue entirely to emphasize the visual element), but there’s some verbal comedy in there as well. It’s a nice mix overall. I’d say my single favorite joke from this first episode comes from the noodle shop segment, where the owner, one chef Makabe Tsurubishi [Kawahara Yoshihisa], frets about how to cover up his ridiculous mistake of dropping a plate of crispy noodles into a customer’s handbag. His employee, part-timer Nagumo Midori [Komatsu Mikako]—possibly the closest thing CITY has to a main character so far, and indeed she’s on the key visual—wonders why he can’t just apologize and explain the situation. Chef Makabe is emphatic in his refusal: the customer might get mad and yell at him.

It really is that serious.

We should talk about the show’s actual look, too. CITY closely resembles no other anime of 2025, with popping, bright, bold colors, thick character outlines, and an overall feel as reminiscent of a pop-up book as any other anime. You can definitely draw a visual line from Nichijou to this series, but CITY‘s a rare one in the contemporary landscape.

And really, that rarity is part of what makes this one of the easiest slam dunks of the year in terms of premieres. I can’t really find a single fault with this show. Sure, it’s again worth reiterating it’s not literally Nichijou Season 2, but you’re not going to find any better embodiment of that show’s spirit in 2025 than this. Our ordinary lives remain a series of miracles, it’s true. Really, really goofy ones.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: NECRONOMICO AND THE COSMIC HORROR SHOW

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.

“Humans are often fooled by hope, but can also be fooled by the idea that there is none.”

-Osamu Dazai, Pandora’s Box, as quoted at the beginning of this episode.

Because you clicked on this article, I imagine you want to read about Necronomico and The Cosmic Horror Show. Unfortunately, this is one of those cases where we have to bitch about the subtitle situation first. Yeah, again.

When Necronomico first went live on Crunchyroll servers, people discovered pretty quickly that the subtitles were absolutely awful. This was not a case like the above-belinked Nokotan where MTL involvement was merely suspected. (And in fact, Nokotan‘s case turned out to be a much more human example of bad subs.) No, this was so blatant that the German sub track still had “ChatGPT said:” accidentally left in one line.

To hear Crunchyroll tell it, this was a misunderstanding. They released a vague statement about the MTL subs violating their agreement with the vendor, and the subtitles have since been replaced by properly-done ones from CR’s usual in-house team, who really ought to be paid better for the sort of bullshit they have to put up with. Nonetheless, public outrage actually accomplished something here, and as such, it is now possible to take the show on its own merits.

This is a good thing, because while I wouldn’t call Necronomico’s first episode premiere of the year or anything, it’s at least entertainingly weird. And as I’ve said many times, if you can’t swing “good,” “weird” is at least a good second option. “Weird” will get people looking your way. “Weird” gets your foot in the door.

What we have here is a janky possible trainwreck-in-the-making, an exposition-frontloaded whatchamacallit that scans as a cross between a death game anime and ReBOOT. It is a loud, gaudy, and sometimes outright obnoxious show, but being brash to the point of being overbearing can be its own kind of virtue. Take a listen, for example, to Sugiyama Riho hollering into the mic—finally in a protagonist role where she can do what she does best for the first time since Wave, Listen To Me!—as she voices hotheaded livestreamer Kurono “Necronomico” Miko. Take a look at the hyper-saturated neon color palette. Fret over the size of the bloated cast. Bask in the shameless “ME!ME!ME!”-core character design of main antagonist Cthulu [Iwami Manaka]. It’s all quite a lot!

We open on Miko, our heroine, getting fired from her day job. Her boss tries to comfort her that now she can focus on her other job, streaming, full-time, but there’s no denying that this is bad news. Not just for the usual reasons—she has an apartment she has to make rent on, and a pet lizard she has to feed, not to mention herself—but also because a friend of hers is laid up in the hospital, and she’s worried that said friend will get hung out to dry. That friend, Mayu [also Iwami Manaka, but don’t worry, I’m sure that’s a coincidence], is in a coma. That’s been going around among streamers lately as it turns out, a well-placed bit of background exposition informs us that livestreamers have been randomly falling into comas and no one is quite sure why. Still, that’s hardly the thing on Miko’s mind as she tries to brainstorm how to get some cash together.

Desperate and out of options, Miko has little choice but to answer when she gets a very spammy-looking email, promising her a decent chunk of change if she attends an event for influencers that seems to involve some kind of video game. We’re introduced to a few other characters, such as Kagurazaka Kanna [Hazumi Nana, making her debut], who has something of a one-sided rivalry with Miko following an incident at another event some time prior, a truly annoying eSports guy named Eita [Kawashima Reiji], a fellow named Sano Seishirou [Tamaru Atsushi] who runs an educational channel about math, and so on, and so forth. Because of the ReBOOT comparison at the top of this piece, you can probably guess where this is going. Yes, our cast is coerced into playing the “beta” of a VR game, except, of course, the VR is some Sword Art Online deep dive bullshit where it directly interferes with your brain, which is, naturally, kept from our characters until they’re already actually in the game.

The game, in a bit of a twist from what you might expect from this sort of thing, is not some RPG or indeed really anything of the sort. Instead, “Super Rumbleland” is basically Fall Guys with some pretty basic linear platforming challenges mixed in. What really sells this though is that the show actually completely changes art style when inside the game. Meaning that for a good half of its first episode, Necronomico actually looks like this!

In fact, in one of the show’s funniest and best visual touches, the in-game avatars are sometimes even given Gundam-style cockpit cut-ins to show who’s talking.

Perhaps inevitably, this change for the even-goofier visually is where the story starts to acquire overt stakes. After having the gist of the game (“just get to the end”, essentially) explained to them by living tutorial NPC / displaced toku villain Tick Tock Man [Yasumoto Hiroki], our heroes make their way through the course. Tick Tock, or rather his “bosses,” get bored of the methodical approach deployed by some of the players, namely Eita, and introduce an ad hoc time limit mid-game. Our big action setpiece here in the first episode is thus the characters trying to scramble to the finish line while the world around them is enveloped in black fog and falling apart. All the while, a big ol’ sinister eyeball spies on them from below the course.

Miko, Kanna, and a few of the others make it out of the course, albeit only barely, where they are promptly ejected into a crowd of jeering and cheering space monsters. These are the titular cosmic horrors, and everything our heroes have done up to this point in the episode has been for their entertainment. Honestly, it’s a lot to take in, but I like these guys, especially the one who’s a giant chicken.

The episode ends with a crucial piece of context clicking into place; Miko actually recognizes Cthulu (not named here, but identified as such on character sheets), because she happens to look a lot like Mayu. Cthulu explains that, yeah, that’s on purpose, because the entire point of this whole arrangement is for the elder gods to leave the streamers that enter their game comatose, so they can “borrow” their forms to communicate with the rest of humanity. What exactly that entails long-term is a revelation the show is saving for later, as is why they want to talk to humans in the first place. Still, it’s a good hook, as is Miko’s raging defiance when presented with all this. She’s seething mad at Cthulu particularly, and it’s pretty clear from the brief flashback shots we get that Miko and Mayu were very close. I am choosing to believe romantically so, as it adds an overtone to Miko’s burning anger at Cthulu that I think is just delightful.

The ED ends with Miko flipping the bird to her newfound “audience”, as good a signoff as any anime’s premiere has ever had.

Taken on the whole, I’d say this is one of the season’s better premieres thus far. If there are complaints to be had, they’re about pacing, more than anything. And to be honest, complaining about the pacing in an anime often feels like complaining about the mixing on an album. It’s a real thing, it can definitely be bad, and it’s a valid point to criticize. But unless it completely ruins the experience I find it hard to devote too much space to. Yeah, there’s a ton of crammed-in exposition here and it’s a little awkward. It is what it is. Visually, the show looks pretty good. It’s a bit up and down in terms of consistency, but good sequences well outnumber the less impressive ones, and because the show seems like it’s going to be switching art styles once an episode, any shortcomings with its 2D animation are less of a big deal than they might otherwise be.

As for what, if anything, Necronomico is trying to say. Well, it doesn’t exactly seem to take a sterling view of the streamers making up its cast. So perhaps there’s something to be said in there about the over-commercialization of our lives, this black work of selling parts of our lived experience as packaged product for an audience—a mass of beings just as scary as the Elder Gods, perhaps—to gorge themselves on. Then again, maybe not. It’s early days, and there are many directions Necronomico could choose to take its freewheeling death game setup in. Mainly, I just hope the entire controversy with the subtitles doesn’t just sink this show’s chances of finding an overseas audience entirely, because this series is odd enough to warrant interest. Remember; the horror show is cosmic, but the #content is iconic. Or something like that.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch UMA MUSUME – CINDERELLA GRAY Episode 13 – “Japan’s Best”

Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime.

For the Cinderella Gray column, new installments will be posted either on the Sunday each episode airs, or as soon as possible over the succeeding week. Expect spoilers!

Back at the very beginning of this series, when we had only just met her, Oguri Cap was presented to us as “someone we could root for from the bottom of [our] hearts.” Those were the words of Kitahara Jou, her original trainer, who saw something in her. A spark, a fire. That rare, ineffable, and hard-to-qualify thing known as star power. There is just something about Oguri that makes people like her. This isn’t even restricted to Oguri Cap the anime character. Even the real, historical horse was so popular that cheering crowds chanting his name were known to pop up when he made an appearance. Regardless of the time, place, or even the medium, people love Oguri Cap. We want to see them succeed.

Essentially, this is us. (I’m Norn Ace.)

And succeed she has! When the only major defeat you’ve suffered so far was not at the hands of a fellow racer but bureaucracy, you know your career’s in a good place. Cinderella Gray has spent this entire season building that goodwill, contrasting her thunderous victories with her good-natured and straightforward personality, making us cheer for Oguri no matter where she runs or whom she runs against. That is still true here, in the final episode of what is already becoming retroactively known as Cinderella Gray Part 1. Make no mistake, her main rival in this race, Tamamo Cross, is also a great character. Enough so that she basically carried last week’s episode on her own, as Oguri was largely kept out of the spotlight there. But this is Oguri’s show. Oguri is who we’re here for. And this finale boils the series down to its barest essentials; a stable of powerful rivals, a race, a mountain to be conquered. There is nothing remotely complicated about the narrative here, all Oguri has to do is run.

And yet, even running is not really a simple thing. The episode opens with some recapping of last week, this time from Oguri’s perspective—the way she waxes poetic about how Tamamo is so obviously different from the rest is really something, the girl has it bad—before getting into the real meat of the race, the final stretch of the course. This, both the show and Oguri herself make note of, is basically where the real race begins. The Tokyo racecourse that hosts the Tenno Sho ends with an absolutely brutal incline, making all of the “climbing the peak” metaphors deployed throughout this season stunningly literal as it speeds to a close. (I would not be surprised if the incline was, from a writing perspective, where all those metaphors came from.) As Tamamo passes front-runner Lord Royal, the race boils down to Tamamo herself and Oguri, two ash-haired racetrack demons who are, by all evidence, equally matched.

And then Tamamo gets a leg cramp. For a minute, it seems like Oguri’s last race of the season will play out as a victory with an asterisk; outside conditions throwing her dominance into question. What actually happens is much more stark, a much cleaner break, than something that cheap.

Tamamo Cross grits her teeth. She remembers her childhood; an old man with a strong accent teaching her the fundamentals of running as the sun sets next to a river. That old man, the same we met a few episodes ago as he lay in a hospital bed, clearly doing very badly, is who she thinks of as she steels herself. Suddenly, she is somewhere else. All sound fades away, and she is a streak of lightning across the racecourse.

Rarified, transformative states of this nature are a rare thing. Depicting them in fiction is really, really hard. Symboli Rudolf, who’d know a thing or two about this subject, just refers to it as “the Zone.” I can think of no better term myself, so I’ll defer to her, here. This is not the first time such a thing has been depicted in Uma Musume—a good chunk of the visual spectacle of the New Era movie, for example, comes from scenes like this—but it’s the first time Oguri Cap has stared down its barrel. For the first time in the series, she is on the receiving end of the same kind of buzzer-beater blowout performance she’s dealt to so many other racers. Tamamo Cross takes the gold in Part 1’s final race. Oguri Cap has lost.

Musaka, who can spot Oguri hitting her limit the second it happens, remarks that no matter how many times one endures it, defeat never feels less bitter. Norn Ace, watching back in Kasamatsu and probably Oguri Cap’s biggest fan, tries to talk herself out of feeling disappointed but is clearly crushed. Belno echoes many fan sentiments with saying that Oguri’s victory seemed predetermined. Nonetheless, the fact of the matter is that no one truly knows how a race like this—any competition like this—is going to go until it happens. (And remember, while Oguri Cap is who we’ve been following, for Tamamo Cross this is a major victory. Not only does she become the first racer to ever win both Tenno Sho races consecutively, the victory clearly means a lot to her trainer, who’s shown weeping with joy from his hospital bed.)

Perhaps the person with the most perspective on the whole issue, though, is Oguri Cap herself. Is she disappointed? Absolutely. We see her tear up after Tamamo crosses the finish line, and she attempts to reckon just why she lost. But she recovers almost instantly, brimming with motivation now that she’s found someone who can actually match her. Tamamo and Oguri talk after the race, swearing to run against each other again, officially declaring each other as their rivals with a whole lot of blushing that gives the scene as much gay subtext as anything from this franchise has ever had. It’s a wonderful bow on the episode.

So Oguri’s defeat here is not really a sad thing. For the first time, she has a rival who is not just at but above her level, and the episode ends with her as her same old cheerful self getting ready to train. There’s a new mountain to climb, and while we’ll have to wait ’til Fall to see just how Oguri plans to summit that particular peak, it seems inconceivable that she won’t. Cry if you must, but don’t dig a grave. To paraphrase Uma Musume‘s resident trickster Gold Ship, a loss is not the same as dying. Oguri Cap will be back.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: TAKOPI’S ORIGINAL SIN

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.

Content Warning: This article contains discussion of suicide, child abuse, bullying, and other heavy topics. Please use your discretion before reading.

I’m open to the idea that this is a real “these three points make a line” sort of statement, but in my experience, it seems to me that when a show premieres before the bulk of its season, it’s usually lightweight and lighthearted. Something like Fluffy Paradise, or what have you. Why that is, I couldn’t tell you, but maybe there’s a sentiment that if you’re going to put yourself out there ahead of the pack, it doesn’t make sense to demand too much from viewers. That’s a guess, but it’s the best one I’ve got.

In any case, Takopi’s Original Sin—an ONA adaptation, slated for six episodes, of Taizen 5‘s Jump+ manga—does not follow this pattern. At all. In fact, before I say anything else, let me hit you with the same exact warnings that the show itself does.

Those two content warnings, one from the anime’s production committee and the other, as far as I can tell, inserted by distributors, are not a joke. Takopi is in the running for the heaviest anime I’ve ever covered on this site, and I’m saying that as a statement of fact, not some kind of tasteless “you won’t believe how dark this show is!” clickbait sort of thing. So please, if reading about anything described abvove is distressing to you, or if watching it is distressing, please exercise your judgment. Take care of yourself, alright?

Beyond that, it’s actually the visual element of this show I’d like to discuss first. (Coming to us from director Iino Shinya, previously best known for the Dr. Stone adaptation, and his team at Studio ENISHIYA. As far as I can tell, this is their first work that’s not a music video or something of that nature.) Despite this being an anime blog, I usually save notes on production polish and such for the last few paragraphs, mostly because the ins and outs of how an anime actually gets made are not my specialty, and there are only so many ways for a comparative layman to say something looks good. Takopi is different: its human character designs have a distinctive feel, I’d almost say a weathered appearance, that sets them apart from the norm. They’re not “realistic” per se, but they’re expressive and feel like stories unto themselves, most notably with Kuze Shizuka [Ueda Reina], a fourth-grader and one of our leads; rail-thin, with a stringy mop of black hair, dressed in a battered white t-shirt, and a face that conveys an exhaustion beyond her years. Deliberately cutting against all of that is our non-human lead, Takopi himself [Mamiya Kurumi]. Takopi is a round alien, essentially a pink sphere with some stumpy legs, a mouth, eyes, and two tentacles. He looks like something out of a children’s storybook, and he thinks like one too, most scenes that depict something he imagines do so in this painted, storybook style, and it adds an incredible amount of depth to the show.

As for the alien himself, Takopi comes from The Happy Planet. His mission? To spread joy far and wide across the galaxy.

To that end, he has a bag full of gadgets—Happy Gadgets—that can do just about anything; a wrist band that lets you fly, an instant camera / time machine, a talking moai-like head that gives advice, an infinitely-long ribbon that can make any two people who are fighting resolve their differences. You know, the basic stuff. Takopi is, textually speaking, a literal extraterrestrial. But from the moment he’s introduced to Shizuka’s life, it’s clear that he’s also meant to come off as rather childlike. He’s immensely naïve about how the world works, and his gizmos do little to solve Shizuka’s problems. Still, Shizuka, at least initially, seems to be grateful to have someone to talk to at the very least. Over the course of a few days, she feeds Takopi bread and the little alien offers her various widgets to improve her life. It should be pointed out that she declines to use any of them, other than allowing Takopi to take a picture with the aforementioned camera, for the stated reason that even something like being able to fly through the sky “wouldn’t change anything.”

One gets a sense of what she means when we’re first introduced to Kirarazaka Marina [Kohara Konomi]. Marina, a classmate of Shizuka’s and, it quickly becomes clear to us if not Takopi, her bully. From the very moment she’s introduced, Marina is so awful to Shizuka that it’s almost impressive. One of her first lines is her and an underling talking about how they’ve broken Shizuka’s writing board, about which Marina sneers that she can use her “welfare money” to buy another. Further details like insults scribbled on Shizuka’s bookbag and simply how insistent she is about hiding from Marina paint Shizuka’s school life as a living hell even before we get to actually see it in the episode’s second half.

There’s a sense of suffocation here, and the environment reflects it; a relatively small town where everyone knows everyone else but doesn’t necessarily like them. Shizuka’s home life paints an equally-bleak picture; her only real companion is her dog Chappy, a giant ball of fur and affection that truly seems to be the one light in her life. Her mother, an “escort”, doesn’t really seem to ever be home, and an innocent question about Takopi regarding where her father is is met with “I don’t have a dad.”

Even so. All of this is contrasted with Shizuka’s moments with Takopi, which she does seem to genuinely appreciate. After seeing Shizuka’s home for the first time, Takopi tries to cheer her up by offering to take her to his home planet. He’s rebuffed, but Shizuka, Takopi, and Chappy end that night by walking together under the star-woven night sky. Shizuka smiles, Takopi is overjoyed.

If Takopi’s Original Sin is ever “misleading” in any way—and I really don’t think it is, this is not a show that’s coy about what kind of story it’s trying to tell, but for the sake of argument—it’s probably here. For a few seconds, it seems like things are looking up.

And then tomorrow comes.

Shizuka, badly beaten and clutching an empty dog leash—did Chappy run away? What happened? We aren’t told—meets up with Takopi again. For neither the first nor the last time, Takopi tragically doesn’t really understand what he’s looking at, interpreting her bloody mouth and black eye as “decoration.” Shizuka can only mumble out that she had a “fight” with her “friend,” at which point Takopi likens the way Shizuka’s face has changed to how he blushes when he gets embarrassed. (Moments of this nature, where Takopi just fundamentally misunderstands something about how humanity works, are excellent in how thoroughly they can sink your heart in just a few lines of his cheery delivery, and they’re scattered all up and down the episode.)

He latches on to the “fight with a friend” description, though. Offering Shizuka a “Reconciliation Ribbon” that can make any two people reconcile so long as they each tie it around their fingers. For me at least, this is around where the feelings of unease cultivated by the opening minutes of the episode blossomed into full-blown dread.

Takopi somewhat reluctantly lets Shizuka borrow the ribbon, despite the rules of his mission (as dictated in a flashback by a large, white specimen of his species) saying that the gadgets should never be used without direct supervision. Time passes, and Takopi gets worried.

He eventually makes his way back to Shizuka’s home, only to find it empty. Empty except for the Ribbon, fashioned into a makeshift noose, and except for Shizuka, having hung herself. The scene is harrowing, an explosion of pure, black dread. (I think one can make the case that Takopi’s lending the Ribbon to Shizuka is the titular “original sin,” though given that we’re only one-sixth of the way through this story, I’m sure other interpretations will make themselves known.)

Understandably, the little pink alien panics. He wonders how this happened, blaming himself and lamenting that death is the one constant across the vast universe. He can’t bring back the dead, but there is one thing he can do with his extraordinary gadgetry. The camera’s hidden function as a time machine is revealed here, allowing Takopi to travel back to the moment the photo was taken. (This seems to require him to have the photo on-hand, and it’s said outright that the camera can only store one picture at a time. Both of these facts seem like they’ll eventually be relevant.)

Thus, the second part of this episode revolves around Takopi trying his damnedest to avert Shizuka’s tragic fate, to find a world where she lives. To do this, he feels the need to learn more about her. Traveling back to the past, he accompanies her to school, trying to solve various minor problems he incorrectly pegs as the source of her pain (forgetting her homework, being unable to finish her school lunch, etc.), and one of the episode’s most visually interesting moments consists of a montage juxtaposing these problems and Takopi’s stopgap solutions to them, splitting the video down the middle and showing both at the same time.

But what Takopi still doesn’t entirely get until the episode’s final act is that all of these things are symptoms of a bigger problem that Shizuka is dealing with. Namely, Marina. Everything else that happens to her in school is a direct result of Marina’s bullying; she didn’t forget her homework, Marina stole it. She might be able to actually finish her lunch were it not for Marina and her fellow bullies mocking Shizuka to her face while she’s trying to eat. And so on and so forth.

Takopi, heartbreakingly, doesn’t really understand this either. He assumes that Marina and Shizuka are former friends who’ve had some kind of falling out, and that if he can just get them to talk, things will be fine. The problems with this approach are left unsaid, but are obvious. What if someone just fucking hates you for no obvious reason? What if someone is abusing you because they themselves are abused and you’re just an outlet for their anger? What if someone is mad at some other specific person and you’re just a proxy for their rage? Takopi can’t consider these angles, and when he naively tries to use another of his gizmos (a palette that lets him take the appearance of anyone he wants) to take Shizuka’s place when Marina wants to “talk to her,” it predictably goes very poorly.

I have to confess, as awful and stomach-churning as Shizuka’s suicide was, this was actually the scene that made me pause the episode and necessitated me taking some time to collect myself before resuming. Marina just absolutely beats Takopi-as-Shizuka black and blue, ranting at him about how “she” is the daughter of a “parasite” who’s preying on her father, and concludes her assault by jamming a mechanical pencil in Takopi-Shizuka’s eye. The narrative revelation—that Shizuka’s mother is sleeping with Marina’s father, and this is one of the sources of Marina’s anger—is crammed into the margins by the visceral pummeling she’s giving Takopi-Shizuka, a clouding of cause-and-effect that is all too reflective of how these things can play out in real life. Marina, a child herself, is of course wholly unable to strike back against a grown woman who she thinks is ruining her family. Shizuka, comparatively defenseless, is an easy target.

Takopi simply has no frame of reference for any of this; nothing of this nature happens on his planet, and this single beating is enough to traumatize him. The next time loop around, he can’t make himself move to go help Shizuka, even as he knows exactly what’s happening to her. The best he can eventually think to do is to run and grab a teacher while still disguised as Shizuka. Even this doesn’t really work long term, it just gets Marina off of her for the time being.

The episode’s closing minutes see Takopi pledge to stay with Shizuka, even though he feels like a failure for not being able to truly protect her. They also follow Marina, further contextualizing her anger as the result of her mother, who is sitting at their dining room table and seething over her husband spending so much time with another woman. The episode ends on two distinct epilogues. Shizuka goes home and falls asleep in her living room with Takopi and Chappy, the closest to being happy we’ve yet seen her. Marina, on the other hand, exits the episode as her mother creepily puts her hand on her face, all about the scene implying that Marina is about to be the target of abuse herself, for nowhere near the first time. She begins crying, headlight-yellow eyes darting away from her mother and, full of fear and resentment, burning holes in the camera.

This show is….a difficult one to discuss productively, for lack of a better term. To be honest, I have felt a touch out of my depth writing this, most anime—including most anime I deeply love—has some escapist element that can make even quite dark storylines go down more easily. There’s a little of that here, and Takopi’s presence provides a dose of pitch-black humor when he’s not just making things worse with his childlike naiveite, but, like I said at the top, this is one of the bleakest things I’ve ever written about on this site. Still, I do hope I’ve made it clear that none of this is a problem. The series is outstanding at what it’s setting out to do, and I think if you can weather the storm Takopi’s Original Sin is putting down, you’ll find easily one of the year’s best premieres. I would not at all be surprised, if it keeps up the quality—and I imagine it will—to find Takopi making a lot of year-end best-of lists come December or so. This story may be dark, but it’s one worth telling.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch UMA MUSUME – CINDERELLA GRAY Episode 11 – “The Star of Kasamatsu”

Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime.

For the Cinderella Gray column, new installments will be posted either on the Sunday each episode airs, or as soon as possible over the succeeding week. Expect spoilers!

I took last week off, because of some stuff going on in my private life. So let’s get up to speed real quick. To keep the administrative note as brief as possible, I’m putting up both this recap for episode 11—last week’s episode—and episode 12’s recap tonight. When the recap for episode 12 goes up, I’ll edit a link in here. Eventually, I’ll go back and edit this note out entirely. Probably. Hopefully. If I remember to.

When we last left off two Sundays ago, Oguri Cap was at the starting gate for a qualifying race, the Mainichi Okan. This race gates Oguri Cap’s access to the Tenno Sho, so it is very important that Oguri wins it, and thus, it takes up the first half of episode 11. As is often the case, Cap is set against some of her generation’s best talent as an obstacle, the main standout here being European racetrack vet Sirius Symboli [Fairouz Ai?1]. (Sirius also does a funny little dance for the crowd and accidentally smacks one of her opponents in the face in the process. It’s so out of left field that I imagine it has to be based on something that actually happened.) But really, the fact of the matter is that the whole track wants her dead. This, Cinderella Gray is keen to point out, is the consequence of standing out so much. If you’re a big gray monster, people will want to slay you.

This race also gets somewhat into the “aura” phenomenon so commonly seen throughout the franchise. Yaeno Muteki, who plays a supporting role in this episode from the stands, notes that Oguri Cap’s talent is not just exceptional but abnormal. That “abnormality” is directly linked to two other horsegirls Yaeno is familiar with; Tamamo Cross and Dicta Striker, both of whom get extremely cool cutaways to show off the auras. (Cross gets her blue lightning, which we’ve seen a few times before, and Striker gets a yellow, hazy flame.) In the context of the show’s world, these visual effects don’t “really exist”, but as stylistic flourishes, they’re second to none, and it’s interesting for the series to directly draw attention to them in this manner, spelling out what’s been implied for the longest time; that they’re visual markers of those whose talent borders on the preternatural.

It is of course important to note that despite the not-insignificant skill of the competition here, neither Tamamo Cross nor Dicta Striker are running in the Mainichi Okan. Despite the other horse girls actively attempting to box her out of every conceivable path forward, Oguri manages a from-behind slingshot victory on the far outside of the track, not just lapping everyone handily but also running farther than any of them. Doing this marks her sixth graded win in a row, a tie for the all-time record.

About Tamamo Cross. It’s easy to forget, given how the series has steadily been getting she and Oguri Cap in position to be proper rivals basically since her introduction, that the two horse girls have not actually met yet. Or at least, they don’t meet until episode 11.

The second half of episode 11 is all setup, slowly driving these two girls together as we build up to the climax of this first season; the Fall Tenno Sho, a proper G1 race. Finally, Oguri Cap can run in the big leagues. Fittingly, the occasion is marked with another check-in with the Kasamatsu half of the cast. Kitahara makes his first appearance in quite a while, traveling to Tokyo to bring Cap presents from her friends back home. These are mostly the sort of amusing kitsch you’d expect to get from friends you haven’t seen in a while. Dig the collectable coin that Fujimasa March gives Oguri, stamped with the image of the mountain that they spoke on which lit Cap’s competitive fire in the first place, take note also of Norn Ace’s hilariously over the top gift of a custom dance workout DVD, and of Jo’s little good luck doll thing, which is supposed to look like Oguri Cap but resembles her so little that the good-natured horse girl initially mistook it for a caterpillar. (Oguri Cap being Oguri Cap, she is over the moon to have gifts from her friends either way.)

Tamamo Cross, on the other hand, is going through her own trials and tribulations. Before episode 10, we never really got any kind of prolonged look at Cross’s side of things, so this is relatively new territory for the series. We still don’t get a ton in terms of simple volume; we learn that Tamamo, apparently normally a light eater, has been eating a lot more than usual lately, perhaps implying that she’s really pouring things on for the Fall Tenno Sho. Much more important is that we learn that someone important to her, an older guy she simply calls “old man,” is laid up in the hospital, on life support, and evidently not doing well. This particular kind of medical drama isn’t anything new to Uma Musume as a series, but it’s a little unusual to see the sick one being a human (presumably a trainer? A former trainer? We don’t yet know). It adds an interesting wrinkle to Cross’s characterization. Whatever her relation to this man, it’s clear that he is at least some part of her motivation for running.

Thus, Oguri, with the support of her friends, and Tamamo, for the sake of this man, finally meet. A G1 race necessitates a press conference, something we’ve commonly seen in other Uma Musume seasons but not yet this one, and it also signals a temporary change in character design. This is the episode where Oguri receives her racing silks2 for the first time, and it’s given appropriate gravitas. The press conference sees her introduced to the flashing camera lights of the G1 world. This is Oguri Cap finally entering the level she should be competing in. She seizes the moment with a short but motivated comment about how she’s aiming to be not just the best in Japan, but in the world. The peak, as we hear once again.

This, of course, prompts someone in the crowd to dryly remark that this is an especially ambitious thing to say, given that “the peak” is standing right next to her.

Even without Cinderella Gray directly drawing attention to it beforehand, even if it were completely silent (Cap is not unaware of Tamamo Cross’s presence here, and as you can probably tell from that third screenshot, is in fact excited), the intent is clear. Oguri Cap may have finally met her match.

1: None of my usual sources were helpful in tracking down her voice actress, but MyAnimeList at least claims it’s Fairouz Ai, and Symboli certainly sounds like Fairouz Ai, doing one of her classic “tough girl” voices. Without any evidence to the contrary, I’m taking their word for it.

2: The sub track just renders this as “racewear,” which I find a little underwhelming

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch UMA MUSUME – CINDERELLA GRAY Episode 10 – “The Peak”

Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime.

For the Cinderella Gray column, new installments will be posted either on the Sunday each episode airs, or as soon as possible over the succeeding week. Expect spoilers!

Following last week’s big fakeout, we have a more transitional and low-key turn for Cinderella Gray this week. Honestly, this is a good thing. If we were to have another big important race here, it would risk making the show repetitive (a trap its predecessor, the third season of no-subtitle Uma Musume, sometimes fell into). When we open, we find Oguri Cap in a funk, saddened that she was disqualified from what she was directly told were the “best” and most important races, she feels aimless and demotivated despite sticking religiously to her training.

There are a few factors that get her out of that malaise. One is the relatively brief race that is in this episode, and Oguri’s not actually in this one, not even in anyone’s mind. Instead, Roppei takes her to watch the Takarazuka Kinen. A plot point in some prior seasons, the Takarazuka’s lineup is determined by fan vote. The favorite is a one-off character, one Akitsu Teio. But the one who actually wins is Tamamo Cross.

Cross, the streak of blue lightning first introduced to us way, way back near the start of the season, has nonetheless been largely a background presence up until this point. She and Oguri still have not directly spoken, and seeing Cross win in person is the first time Oguri Cap seems truly aware of just what she’s up against. Despite its brevity, her from-behind win here is truly spectacular, and very much reminiscent of Oguri’s own victories.

This isn’t the only thing that puts some zip back in Oguri’s step. She also gets a phone call from her former rival Fujimasa March, making her first appearance of any real length in the series since her departure from it in episode six. Unsurprisingly, March has kept racing. What’s maybe a little moreso is that March is actually the one calling Oguri for reassurance. March is lost and without motivation too. We learn here that her dream of winning the Tokai Derby didn’t come true; she failed to even make the podium, coming in fourth, and as she calls Cap she’s on the verge of quitting entirely.

Of course, our protagonist, with her head of silver and heart of gold, is not having that from her first rival, someone who clearly still means a lot to her. In convincing March to continue racing, Oguri does the same to herself. The specific situations are fairly different of course—Oguri, if anything, is having too much success, whereas March’s anxiety is caused by her finally hitting a wall—but the emotional connection between the two makes it all make sense. Both will continue racing, even with their first dreams out of reach, March whips up a cute metaphor about moving on to the next mountain, and for a show—a whole series, really—that’s in part about staying determined in the face of whatever life throws at you, it absolutely works. (There’s also a cute sequence of cameos by Norn Ace and friends, and it’s good to know that they’re all still getting on well.)

We also get a rare sequence from Tamamo Cross’s camp. Her trainer thinks Tamamo will probably be competing with Oguri for the first time in the coming Fall Tenno Sho, a G1 race (reinforced when, later in the episode, we learn Oguri is going to be running an important qualifying race for the fall G1s). Just as important to the scene, though, arguably, is that somebody clearly really wanted to draw Tamamo Cross working out. Live your truth, buddy.

My understanding is that this workout sequence is in the manga, but is not nearly as involved. I can only reiterate what I’ve already said.

The remainder of the episode is fairly lighthearted. Roppei puts Oguri and Belno on “summer vacation,” giving them a break after Oguri’s constant racing and training since arriving at Tracen. Oguri being Oguri, when given free reign to explore Tokyo, she mostly does so as a foodie, spending much of the episode’s second half on a date with Belno, in a blissful heaven of hamburgers, tornado fries, crepes, rolled ice cream, and so on. She’s in disguise during this whole outing, though her modest disguise of “a hat and some glasses” doesn’t really work, perhaps given the relative scarcity of silver-haired horse girls in Tokyo, and Oguri and Belno attract a decently-sized crowd regardless, to which Oguri Cap reacts this way.

I didn’t edit that. That’s really what she says, or at least it’s really how the subs translate it.

The crowd alerts Sensuke that Oguri is nearby, and the two have their first face to face conversation here, where he lets slip who all Oguri is going to be facing in her upcoming qualifying race. (It’s loosely implied by the framing that he shouldn’t really be sharing this information, but Sensuke is nothing if not unscrupulous.) The episode ends with that race just about to start, and as usual, we won’t know the results until next week. Still, with Oguri’s inner competitive fire newly set alight, it’s hard to imagine her losing. We’ll see how things go, won’t we?

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch: UMA MUSUME – CINDERELLA GRAY Episode 9 – “The Japanese Derby”

Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime.

For the Cinderella Gray column, new installments will be posted either on the Sunday each episode airs, or as soon as possible over the succeeding week. Expect spoilers!

In real life, I can only imagine that whatever led to the actual Oguri Cap being allowed to compete in G1 races was some mixture of backroom politicking, the very real fan support behind the horse (as reflected in this show’s petition, based on a real one), and money changing hands. On its own, that’s not terribly compelling stuff, and similar bending of the rules is common throughout the entirety of sport, across the globe, up and down all levels of competition.

What makes Cinderella Gray interesting is its ability to translate minutiae of that nature into compelling art. You don’t need to know a damn thing about the actual horse to root for Oguri Cap as she appears in the show, you just need to be fired up, incensed that they won’t let her compete at the highest level possible because of irritating technicalities, rendered in the sharp and sickly-relatable language of stupid paperwork. Cindy Gray needs you to sympathize with three characters, in fact. One of whom is of course Oguri Cap herself. The other two, the sports tabloid reporter Sensuke and Symboli Rudolf’s right hand horse girl Maruzensky, are the kind of characters who’d have minor, barely-touched-upon roles in an anime that cared less about getting this stuff right. Their roles are arguably still minor in scope, but certainly not in impact. The former’s petition, and the latters personal connection to Oguri’s story—she too, we learn in the opening minutes of this episode, was disbarred from the Classics for the exact same reason—is enough to nudge the Emperor’s position.

On its own, that’s pretty remarkable. Symboli Rudolf sticks her neck out for Oguri Cap to quite an extent over the course of this episode, which is a huge 180 from her initial opinion on this whole situation. (Remember that back in episode 7, Rudolf was actively angry that Oguri just assumed the rules would be changed for her sake. Yet here she is, only two episodes later, actively advocating that same exact change of rules. It’s quite amazing what some perspective can accomplish.) Unfortunately, Symboli Rudolf, despite her prestigious position, does not actually make these rules. I think what Cinderella Gray has cottoned onto is that what it really needed to cap off this arc was a villain, even if only a short-term one, someone to sell that this big change is a big change.

Of course, the obvious thing about this sport is that if there’s ever a “bad guy,” it’s never going to be any of the horses.

Thus, Rudolf’s main obstacle in her change of heart is the URA Chairman, a blonde, bespectacled woman who puts in her one and if I had to guess, only appearance in this episode, Gendo Posing all the while. Taken in absolute terms, the scene isn’t much. Rudolf simply explains her position, the board takes it under advisement, and, in suitably dramatic fashion, it is eventually revealed that they acquiesced. Rudolf’s little speech is the real centerpiece of this scene; she actively denies that any of the obvious qualities is what makes a racer a star. It’s not strength, pedigree, or even race record, it’s how the crowd can pin their hopes and dreams on her. This is what Oguri Cap means to people, and implicitly, Rudolf sees herself in Oguri for this reason.

Fittingly, when Oguri Cap is introduced at the Japanese Derby, finally revealing that yes, she was allowed entry, to run alongside the storied competition we’ve gotten to know over the past few episodes (Yaeno Muteki, Dicta Striker, Mejiro Arden….), she’s introduced as “The Cinderella of Kasamatsu.” She’s there to carry her hometown’s dreams on her back, win or lose.

And she does win. Stomping past Sakura Chiyono O, who’s given a lovingly-rendered “power up” sequence in the fashion of many previous champions, past Dicta Striker who unfortunately hurts herself on the track, and so on. Oguri Cap storms the finish line, conquering all in her path and winning the Japan Derby by an astounding seven lengths. Insane, right? A shocking but—given her previous record—unsurprising capstone on an illustrious career.

Unfortunately, I’m lying to you. None of this ever happened.

No, you read that right. And if you’ve already seen the episode and were reading up to this point quite confused, well, now you know why. That did not happen. Neither Oguri Cap the character nor her real life counterpart were allowed to run in the Japanese Derby. The winner of that race was the aforementioned Sakura Chiyono O. This is a happy and straightforward triumph. For her, anyway.

It’s a testament to how well Cinderella Gray, and Uma Musume in general, is put together that I could easily imagine this being a genuinely triumphant moment if Chiyono O was our main character. In fact, she pulls double duty as a supporting character in both this series and the Star Blossom manga, so maybe we will see something like that someday.

In what I can only describe as one of the meanest gut punches of its type I’ve seen in years, the entire second two-thirds of this episode are revealed to be the daydream of Symboli Rudolf. There’s some subtle foreshadowing of this; note that Oguri Cap does not have G1-style racing silks unlike the competition. Note also that while lost deep in thought, Symboli Rudolf repeats the series-favorite chestnut that the Japanese Derby victory tends to go not to the strongest or fastest racer but to the luckiest. Oguri Cap is many things, but I’m not sure I’d say ‘lucky’ is one of them.

The irony of course is that to anyone who knows their real-life horse racing, or indeed anyone who’s just read the manga, this wasn’t a twist at all. But, well, as an anime-only it definitely caught me off guard. What I did not lie about is that part of what makes Cinderella Gray so interesting is its ability to transmute this kind of thing into compelling art. In a less ambitious narrative, there’d be no story at this point. Oguri didn’t win The Biggest Thing Possible, so what story is there left to tell? (Never mind that by its very nature Uma Musume largely avoids the spectre of international horse racing; the few times Uma Musume characters have gone abroad in past seasons they’ve mostly been completely stomped, and it makes for some pretty depressing character exits.)

Cinderella Gray‘s answer can be found both before and after this episode’s credits, bookending the OP and ED. Tamamo Cross, who we were introduced to quite a while ago at this point, reappears for the first time since Oguri’s transfer to Tracen, also effortlessly laying flat her opponents in a race before the opening credits, crackling with blue lightning like an equine Sonic the Hedgehog. This, the series tells us, is Oguri Cap’s real challenge. It does so directly, placing Oguri Cap’s hypothetical win in a dream-version of the Japanese Derby in context as the end of the “National Debut Arc,” and promising a “White Lightning Arc” beginning from episode 10. The named arcs, I must assume, are just in case anyone needs further proof that Cinderella Gray is essentially a battle shonen anime.

As for Oguri’s disbarment from the classics, I can imagine a certain kind of person being bummed. Oguri herself seems pretty let down, as the race she actually does win—the G2 New Zealand Trophy—she conquers so easily that she seems like she’s dissociating the entire time.

She picks herself back up again shortly thereafter, and it seems like Tamamo Cross will once again give her a much-needed peak to summit. But even setting that aside, there is a silver lining. Fitting, given Oguri’s ashen hair.

Symboli Rudolf was not able to convince the URA to change their policies on such short notice, but they do take her concerns under advisement, and it’s implied that this, combined with the public outcry paves the way for other racers in the future. Making a vanishingly brief cameo here is fan favorite—honestly, to just lay my biases on the table, my own personal favorite Uma Musume character, period—T. M. Opera O, The Overlord at Century’s End [normally voiced by Tokui Sora, though she doesn’t speak in her appearance here]. If we assume that the Uma Musume universe at least vaguely maps in some fashion to real-world timelines, Opera’s career won’t begin for quite a while, so this is clearly a flash-forward to sometime around the Road to the Top OVAs. Said largely without words here is that Oguri Cap’s career, and the outcry over her not being able to compete in G1s, eventually led to the changes that would allow Opera, and other racers like her, to be such an explosive presence years down the line.

It’s a consolation prize at best, and I imagine it’s a bit lost on anyone who’s not already tapped in to Uma Musume‘s broader lore. What saves it for me at least is that it ties neatly into the idea of Oguri Cap being someone people can pin their hopes and dreams on. Not being able to run at all is Oguri Cap’s first big defeat, but by setting the gears in motion to change the URA’s rules, she elevates a whole generation of racers well beyond her own career. The episode points this out directly; Rudolf’s final musing this week is that in spite of everything, Oguri Cap did trample all the existing rules and regulations, exactly like she said she would. That’s Oguri Cap for you, even when she’s down, she’s still an inspiration.

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All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch: UMA MUSUME – CINDERELLA GRAY Episode 8 – “The Right Stuff”

Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime.

For the Cinderella Gray column, new installments will be posted either on the Sunday each episode airs, or as soon as possible over the succeeding week. Expect spoilers!

We begin this week’s episode with a blowout. Last week’s episode went out of its way to at least suggest that Black Ale was a credible threat to Oguri Cap. But true as that might be in theory, in practice, Ale runs in this race how she’d run in any other, and she ends up paying for it. Oguri Cap finds an opening in the pack of runners in the middle placements and shoots through them like a silver bullet. Or perhaps we should say around them, since her big play here is to take advantage of the sheer width of the track to come from the outside, seizing the front position from Black Ale relatively late but without much trouble.

All that happens before the OP drops, mind you. And it’s enough to get the attention of the blonde journalist we met very briefly last week. That guy, Fuji Sensuke [Takahashi Daisuke], turns out to be a surprisingly important part of this week’s plot. But before we talk about what he’s up to, we should talk about the two other races that happen in this episode. Both are important, and while we only really see one of them in any detail, they’re both important as setup pieces for where this story appears to be going overall. In general, I would actually say this is one of the series’ weaker episodes so far, given the somewhat muddled pacing. But it’s to the show’s immense credit that even with that in mind, it’s still wildly entertaining.

The episode’s second and most elaborated-upon race pits Oguri Cap against Yaeno Muteki [Hinohara Ayumi]. I have to admit to feeling a little bad for Yaeno, who carries herself with a seriousness that would not be out of place in a much older martial arts series or the like (and this is a comparison Cinderella Gray draws directly, when we meet her trainer late in the episode, he’s an old-school martial arts anime sensei type, looks like a retired samurai, and carries a wooden sword around with him). She attempts to directly challenge Oguri in the Tracen Academy cafeteria, only to get ignored because Cap is too busy being awed at the variety (and sheer quantity) of food available.

On the racetrack, Muteki is a more credible threat, deliberately hemming Oguri Cap in so she can’t pass the other racers on the inside of the track. What she doesn’t see coming is Oguri’s willingness to simply run much farther by taking the outside of the track, and while Cap is evidently impressed enough to actually remember who Yaeno Muteki is after this, she does still win, putting her at an impressive 2-0 within a single episode.

In spite of all this, I would say the episode’s actual main drama comes from somewhere else. In between all the racetrack action, we sometimes cut over to Symboli Rudolf and Maruzensky (voiced by mononymous seiyuu Lynn, she’s Rudolf’s assistant, and a horse girl from the same generation of racers). It’s worth honing in on this particular tidbit here.

Much effort has been put into reinforcing the idea that Symboli Rudolf was really something special. This makes sense given her obvious strength as an athlete, but what Maruzensky means is a bit more specific than that. What she really seems to find lacking in the modern Twinkle Series is the way that Rudolf lit up a crowd. That nebulous “superstar” quality is what Maruzensky thinks the game’s been missing. (And given the equally nebulous time scale of Uma Musume in general, we don’t have a great idea of how long ago that was, but it certainly seems like it’s been a while.) The obvious blank we’re supposed to fill in—made nearly-explicit when Maruzensky actually directly brings her up later in this scene—is that Oguri Cap is or at least could be that superstar. Were it not for the red tape getting in her way, of course.

Which brings us back to Fuji Sensuke. A reporter with the eye for sensational headlines, Sensuke gets wind of Oguri’s disbarment from the classics and runs with the story, publishing incendiary headlines and, by episode’s end, even getting a massive petition with tons of signatures in front of Symboli Rudolf. Sensuke is an evidently somewhat amoral figure, and Roppei expresses annoyance that he’s trying to make this happen when he sees the aforementioned headlines. (Does he think Oguri’s not ready? It’s hard to say.) The episode closes with a standoff between Sensuke and Rudolf—and I do have to give the guy credit for having the stones to demand she pull strings about this in person—but there’s one last foible we should touch on.

Yaeno Muteki’s loss to Oguri Cap seemed to disqualify her from the Satsuki Sho. However, one of the other racers—Dicta Striker [Hanamori Yumiri], who given her distinctive design seems like she’ll be important eventually—had to drop out, giving her an opportunity to enter in a replacement spot. The Satsuki Sho is a G1 race, and Yaeno Muteki actually wins it, although not without some serious competition. This, combined with Sensuke’s petition, certainly seems to be setting Oguri Cap and Yaeno Muteki up for a rematch. And this time, Oguri knows who she’s up against.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.