Tag: anime

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch: UMA MUSUME – CINDERELLA GRAY Episode 7 – “Tracen Academy”

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!

“Eclipse first, the rest nowhere.”

Tracen Academy is, to any Uma Musume fan who got onboard before Cinderella Gray, synonymous with the series itself. Tracen is the main setting for seasons 1-3, as well as Road To The Top and the New Era film. It is Uma Musume. So it’s unsurprising that, just past the halfway point of its first cour, Cinderella Gray is also shifting setting to the storied racing academy. I admit I only barely fall into the category of “Uma Musume fan who got into it before Cinderella Gray” myself, having started with the aforementioned Road To The Top OVA near the top of the year. Still, Tracen is an already immensely nostalgic setting for me, and it’s lovely to see it again. Also worth looking at are the contrasts between this episode and episode 1, instructive and fascinating as they are. We began this story in what is, comparatively speaking, a backwater for Uma Musume racing. (The “boonies,” as one character puts it.) We begin this second part of it here, in Japan’s racing capitol. Make sure to keep up, things don’t seem like they’re going to slow down any time soon.

It’s worth also briefly touching on the contrast between Tracen as depicted here and its own past appearances in Uma Musume anime. While always portrayed as a prestigious and sprawling school, here it somehow feels even more enormous, as though it’s been blown up to truly massive proportions. This feeling of massiveness serves to amplify the fish-out-of-water effect; Oguri Cap takes the sights and sounds of Tracen in stride (although Belno super doesn’t), but the point remains; they’re not in Kasamatsu anymore.

Their first few days also don’t go smoothly, why would they? In fact, quite a lot happens in this episode. Basically everything short of an actual race.

Firstly, there’s the school itself. As mentioned, sprawling, enormous, not what either Oguri nor Belno are used to. Helping them get adjusted is Roppei (it’s Musaka), subbing in as Oguri’s trainer while Kitahara gets his national license. The pair briefly meet, ad hoc, with Symboli Rudolf, who takes the time to explain the ostensible meaning behind their school’s motto.

We’ve already talked about “Eclipse first, the rest nowhere,” since it came up in episode four. Here, the phrase is framed as a command to aim for the ace, to never be content with second best, to stand alone at the top of the mountain. Interestingly, what I did not know at the time—and what you already know, if you clicked that link I put in the header—is that that’s not what it means. It actually refers to the dominance of a single, specific historical horse; that’s who Eclipse is, or rather was. This isn’t a criticism of course, Uma Musume has a long-standing habit of attempting to imbue artifacts of real horseracing with some additional meaning, (the example that comes to mind is Satono Diamond explicitly comparing her unbreakability to her namesake in season three) and the transmutation of “Eclipse” referring to a specific individual to meaning the verb “eclipse” is just another instance of that, and a pretty slick one. It’s also relevant to the episode on the whole. Oguri Cap being such a goofball can obscure the fact that she’s very, very good at what she does, and is about as strong-willed. She does not, and will not, settle for second place, literal or figurative, in anything.

This brings us to the topic of Oguri’s actual classroom. When Oguri attends her new homeroom for the first time, we meet an absolute smorgasbord of new faces. I assume each will be relevant in their turn as this arc goes on, but worth immediately mentioning are Yaeno Muteki [Hinohara Ayumi], who meets her as a new comrade and challenger with respect, and Black Ale [Mori Nanako], who absolutely does not do either of those things.

Black Ale is incredibly arrogant and is vocally unimpressed by Oguri. She has the race record to back that arrogance up, so one can kind of see where she’s coming from in not necessarily thinking Oguri is all that based on her wins back home. Still, she doesn’t actually have a good measure of who she’s messing with. And indeed this doesn’t really faze Oguri Cap at all, at first, and she responds to that little “sandboxes” insult with the kind of dry remark where you can tell she doesn’t even realize she’s just punked Ale in front of their entire class.

Much later, toward the end of the episode. Ale confronts Oguri Cap again, this time directly insulting Kasamatsu, its racers, and Oguri herself, and that Oguri does not stand for. As is tradition with this kind of thing, the two make a bet. When they meet in the upcoming Pegasus Stakes, if Black Ale wins, Oguri Cap will return home. If Cap wins, Ale has to watch her language. It’s true that Black Ale has probably the mouthiest lines of any Uma Musume in the anime so far, but implicitly what Oguri Cap is really saying is more along the lines of telling her to watch her mouth, a subtly different thing. Cap is a hometown hero in the making now, something she’s clearly aware of.

We need to back up, though. Because Black Ale is not the only horse girl Oguri tells off in this episode, and she is by far not the most prominent one.

To rewind a bit, it’s mentioned, not long after the classroom scene, that in order to enter the G1 classics and attempt to obtain the Triple Crown—that’s the Satsuki Sho, the Japanese Derby, and the Kikuka Sho—you have to, you know, register to do that. Kitahara seemingly never considered that Oguri Cap would want to do this immediately (or just didn’t know about all this paperwork in the first place), and as such Oguri has none of the relevant forms. If it’s possible, seeing Oguri Cap live one of my recurring nightmares that’s haunted me since middle school has made me love the character even more.

Still, it’s hard not to feel for her, here, and it says a lot about Cinderella Gray‘s range that it can capture both this extremely relatable exasperation and confusion and the fiery feelings of a competition stoked in the same episode. In fact, it draws a connection between the two. Because Oguri Cap, who really wants to win the Japanese Derby for Kitahara (since she can’t win the Tokai Derby now, but since they’re both called the Something Derby they must be basically the same, right?), gets it in her head that surely, there’s at least one person she can talk to to work out some kind of exception.

She’s wrong about this, or at least, wrong for the time being (it seems odd to me that the Triple Crown would be brought up at all if Oguri isn’t going to somehow at least attempt it eventually), but you really have to give her credit for trying, because the person she has in mind is Symboli Rudolf.

Symboli Rudolf is a fascinating character in the history of Uma Musume. Throughout the previous episodes of Cinderella Gray and, indeed, throughout most of the history of the franchise, she’s been largely a background presence. Season 2’s protagonist, Tokai Teoi, admired her deeply, and Rudolf has been present, usually as a somewhat remote voice of reason, throughout all three of the Uma Musume TV seasons. She’s a franchise-wide bedrock, and her immaculate race record backs up the often-made claim that she’s the strongest Uma Musume ever, but we know surprisingly little about her as a character.

What this episode suggests is that Symboli Rudolf’s air of authority is derived not only from her strength—although certainly that, too—but also the deadly seriousness with which she takes the sport. Oguri Cap explains her predicament, and for what is to my recollection the first time ever, we see Symboli Rudolf get angry about something.

The show is clearly very proud of this shot, because there’s a flash back to it not long later.

If anything, Rudolf is offended that Oguri Cap thinks she can waltz in and simply upend the proper order of things because she wants to. I really can only give it up for the character visuals here once again, that is a mean-looking horse right up there. In fact, her anger is overwhelming enough that Belno, also there while Oguri is asking about all this, actually falls to her knees in fear. I do get it! It’s not just Rudolf herself, it’s the gravity with which she treats this subject. There is no better illustration than this, the visual of a nameless Triple Crown winner standing atop a mountain of broken bodies, which fades into view with a grim grandiosity.

But of course, Oguri Cap is Oguri Cap. This is where we come back to that competitive mindset, typified by the motto which, remember, Rudolf herself expounded on earlier in this same episode. Oguri Cap will take these rules and traditions, and she will break them with her legs; her words, not mine. Arrogant! Arrogant, but really fucking cool! How does that even work? Is she going to just win so much that they’ll have no choice but to bump her up? I don’t know! I’m excited to find out!

One gets the sense from this single exchange that Rudolf is so used to most other people buckling in her presence that someone actively defying her is a bit of a shock. Am I reading too much into it? Maybe. But I’ve never met an anime I couldn’t over-analyze.

This article has already gotten super long, so I won’t go over every other little detail of the episode. But Oguri does meet her teammates, the other girls in Roppei’s stable; the preppy Meikun Tsukasa [Kazama Mayuko], the somber and shy Kraft Univer [Tanaka Takako], and–

[Kaiden Michiko]

It’s hard to say if these characters will be super relevant going forward or if they’ll mostly serve to help Oguri out with her training. Still, God Hannibal. What a name. I’m speechless.

In any case, the last scene of the episode cuts to the Pegasus Stakes, Oguri’s race against Black Ale. The race itself is territory for next episode, but one of the last scenes here is Oguri standing beneath the huge, open sky, drinking in the roar of the crowd, and being absolutely stoked out of her mind. It’s maybe the best possible way to tee up this particular cliffhanger; a reminder of why we love this absolute freak in the first place.

….Oh, and there’s a really cute post-credits scene where we check back in on Fujimasa March and company while they’re at what’s essentially a Denny’s. Norn gets called down bad, which I’m taking as validation of my ship, and Fujimarch ponders cutting her hair. It’s brief, but I’m very glad to see those characters even in passing.

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. 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 6 – “The Beast”

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!

Oguri Cap enters this episode devastated and conflicted. She leaves it a hometown hero. That’s how legends are born.

The previous episode of Cinderella Gray was a masterfully-crafted, coiling mechanism of tension. This episode is where that tension is released, and in that process we get to see some sides to our favorite characters that we haven’t seen before. But the true crux of the episode is the Gold Junior, an epic, psychological struggle on the racetrack. It ends with a huge, overwhelming moment of pure catharsis, one of the best of its kind in recent years. Remember; “Cap” meaning “peak.”

Getting there is another story. The episode opens with Oguri Cap furious, angrier than we’ve ever seen her, at Kitahara’s decision to transfer her to the nationals and stay behind. (Not to once again devote space on this site to my own thirsting, but there is a frightful beauty to Oguri’s angry faces, they’re very well-drawn and the fact that they’re such a stark contrast to how she normally acts really enhances the effect.) Her fury is easy to understand; she and Kitahara promised to take on the Tokai Derby together, and from her point of view he’s now breaking that promise. This is a recurring theme across the episode, the letters and spirit of these promises, and what breaking them means.

For Oguri, it makes it difficult for her to concentrate on the race, both in the training leading up to it and, eventually, for the race itself. For Kitahara, it’s the apex of his plague of self-doubt. No less a figure than once again, Symboli Rudolf, calls him out for his foolishness. Making either choice would’ve been better than trying to make none of them, and hinging the transfer on Oguri’s race results puts the horse girl in a truly unenviable situation.

The morning of the race is filled with contrast. Merch stalls sell adorable plushies of the rising local hero, and excitement is in the air from the audience at least, who clearly understand that they’re about to see Oguri build her legend up with another victory. But the track itself is bogged-down with mud after thudding, pounding rain from the previous night. Kitahara is in low spirits, and Oguri, now conflicted that her running is making others sad and without the confident support of her trainer, is in even lower ones.

Complicating things even further is the presence of Oguri’s rival up to this point, Fujimasa March. March, of course, is also furious. Word has by now spread that Oguri is going to be transferring to the nationals if she wins. Fujimasa demands to know why. They promised to race in the Tokai Derby together, and that promise is now falling apart before March’s eyes. Again, it’s easy to see why she’s upset, and moreover, why she’s hurt.

But she gets no sympathy from Cap herself. Deadened by having lost her reason to run, Oguri reminds her that all March has to do to keep her from transferring is to win. The presentation is immaculate here, with sweeping, low, buried-in-the-floor camera angles and easily the meanest face we’ve ever gotten from Oguri. The tension is palpable, and it says a lot that the slap across the face that Fujimarch opens the conversation with is not the highlight of this scene.

Nonetheless, the race waits for no one.

And indeed, the race itself is a struggle less between Oguri Cap and Fujimasa March, and more between Oguri Cap and herself. She’s out of form for much of the race, and imagines her legs bound by heavy iron chains dragging her down. For a while, it really does seem like Cap might actually lose, and it’s to the show’s credit that it keeps anyone who doesn’t have the real Oguri Cap’s racing history memorized guessing.

She’s so out of sorts that she doesn’t even make use of her trademark burst of speed, something which Fujimasa March notes with some incredulity, offended that her rival isn’t even trying. As it often does in these sorts of situations, it takes an external force to jostle Oguri Cap back into proper form.

That force is Kitahara, who, like Oguri, spends most of the race struggling with himself. His own doubts are quieter and get less direct attention (since he isn’t the protagonist, naturally), but he spends most of the Gold Junior sulking and not even actually looking at the race track. It takes Roppei, also in attendance, to snap him out of it, physically forcing him to look at Oguri Cap’s performance. Seeing his trainee obviously out of form and distraught is enough to spur Kitahara back to action, and he begins running too, fumbling through the crowd, bloodying his nose—that seems to happen to him a lot—and finally reaching a spot where he can cheer loud enough for Oguri to hear him. Just as Roppei shook Kitahara out of his stupor, Kitahara shakes Oguri out of hers by doing this.

For Oguri, his cheers, and the cheers from the others watching—Belno, the bully trio who have remained an important part of the supporting cast up to this point—are a reminder of why she’s running; to make herself happy, to make others happy.1 Regaining her confidence is enough: Oguri Cap takes the day.

In a beautiful touch, her hair comes undone as she crosses the finish line, leaving her final mark on the locals a wave of flowing, cloudy gray as she streaks into first place. The victory is immensely cathartic. The series makes a point here that Oguri Cap inspires her supporters; it’s obviously talking about Kitahara, Belno, Norn Ace, and so on, but it’s also talking about the people in the crowd, and thus, implicitly, us as well. The swell of joy is very real with this one, it’s perhaps one of the best-orchestrated victories in the whole franchise.

In the aftermath, Oguri’s stage show—which she rocks, by the way, and just generally looks great doing—becomes a platform for Kitahara to tell the crowd that, yes, the rumors are true. She’s moving on and up. The crowd is initially disappointed, but he reminds them—and anyone watching at home who might be sad to see this part of the story end—that there are higher dreams to aim for. This story isn’t over yet, and there are more mountains to climb.

The reason all of this works so well is that big dreams and stories of triumph are why we’re here in the first place. As Kitahara notes, it’s a Cinderella story! It’s right in the title! It’s also a testament to how ungodly well Cinderella Gray has been written so far that I’m genuinely going to miss every single character Oguri has to leave behind now that she’s transferring to Tracen! Norn Ace’s idea to take a commemorative picture (somehow framed as a polaroid photo despite her taking it on a smartphone, just one more drop of that trademark Uma Musume time weirdness) had me full-on crying.

I am aware I keep comparing Uma Musume to some kind of long-running battle shonen anime, which is, of course, not actually what it is. But I do have to bring that comparison out again, because this episode really does feel like the end of a long, long first season where there’s a notable changing of the guard and it’s all very bittersweet. I can only really again credit the writing for evoking that feeling over a scant six episodes (of a confirmed thirteen and a rumored 23). Perhaps the toughest departure is that of Fujimasa March, who vows to continue running despite her initial plan to quit if she lost to Oguri again. It doesn’t seem like they’ll meet again, at least not as competitors, as Oguri is going somewhere that March can’t reach. Nonetheless, their mutual respect for each other is genuinely touching, an excellent last note to their rivalry.

But we can’t dwell on who’s leaving, because two very important characters actually aren’t. Firstly, Kitahara vows to get a national trainer license—we aren’t explicitly told why he didn’t try to do this in the first place, but given some of the allusions to Kitahara’s still-murky past, we can make some educated guesses—and Belno Light, who is not just Oguri’s close friend but also her personal outfitter at this point, has quietly gotten acceptance into Tracen via its sports science program. This all ends the episode on a warm glow, bittersweet but with emphasis on the sweet. The main trio are going to Tracen, and the real race has yet to be run.

1: In this way, she isn’t actually terribly dissimilar to the protagonist of Uma Musume‘s third season, Kitasan Black. For a plethora of reasons, I think the approach works much better here.

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 5 – “What’s Best For Her”

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!

Cinderella Gray was never going to be all victory forever. No series is that, certainly not any sports anime and definitely not Uma Musume. (Even Season 2, which is the cleanest path-charting superstar story in the franchise, is defined perhaps even more by its dramatic, tragic moments as its triumphant ones.)

That said, the kind of dramatic conflict that emerges here is a bit surprising. Not unwelcome, but at the very least it isn’t something I saw coming.

First, a bit of racetrack politic: horse races in Japan (at least, in the Uma Musume universe, but I have little reason to assume this isn’t also true in real life) are separated into national and regional races. So far, Oguri Cap’s story has been at the regional level. The Tokai Derby she aims to run in against Fujimasa March, the race both she and her trainer Kitahara Jou dream of winning, is a regional race. To that end, the episode opens on Oguri competing in the Chukyo Hai, another regional race and a stop along the path to the Derby. She wins by a complete blowout, in fact. To the point that the race itself is basically an afterthought. This is all well and good, but as we learned last week, it’s not just the usual crowd of horsegirl enthusiasts watching the race, also present is Symboli Rudolf, president of Tracen Academy. Rudolf is extremely impressed by what she sees on the track, and sets about recruiting her to compete in the nationals. She talks to Kitahara first, and he is both starstruck and extremely intimidated that she wants to talk to him. Moreso when he finds out what she actually wants.

Cinderella Gray uses a fun structural trick in this episode, wherein after Kitahara’s talk with Rudolf, we actually cut to a flashback wherein a young Kitahara is first drafted into being a horsegirl trainer by his uncle Roppei. After we return to the present, Oguri is running training laps at her usual spot, and something has clearly happened to badly affect Kitahara’s mood, but we don’t yet know what.

The plain and pragmatic truth of the matter is this; Kitahara isn’t licensed to train on a national level. If Oguri Cap is recruited to compete in national races, she will have to leave Kitahara behind.

There is quite a lot of dancing around this through much of the episode’s middle third. Kitahara’s entire vibe is very off, and Oguri even picks up on it. (Not that it’s hard to tell that someone is out of sorts when they, say, forget to press the “start” button on a stopwatch when timing you. But still.) The drama here is pretty compelling, and through the earlier flashback, the series implies some prior failure on Kitahara’s part that has led to him being so hard on himself in the present day, although we don’t yet know what that might have been. Still, it takes a weeping Belno Light—the heart of the group, here—to get some sense through to him. What he wants or what Belno herself might want aren’t the important things, they have to ask Oguri what she wants directly.

Which, itself, Kitahara can’t seem to do in a straightforward way. He delivers the news firstly in a cloying, faux-bombastic tone, and then when Oguri asks if she’d be able to keep him as her trainer, starts viciously self-deprecating under a thin veneer of taking it instride. I love this entire scene, and it makes the whole episode. It really puts both Kitahara and Oguri’s personalities fully on display and shows what happens when they clash. Jou is, by this point, very much convinced that he has to take the loss and let Oguri go, and outright says at several points across the episode that he feels that he’s holding her back. His self-defeating mentality has already made this a given for him, and he doesn’t see any way out of it. Oguri, for her part, is upset, even offended that Kitahara would assume that she’d want to race anywhere where he wasn’t her trainer. Oguri is a very straightforward and direct person, and it’s clear that she’s been taking this talk of a shared dream of winning the Tokai Derby very seriously. She doesn’t say so outright, but it’s easy to imagine that even just being asked to race under a different trainer might feel like a betrayal.

And so, she storms off. Reminding Kitahara that the Tokai Derby is “our dream.” Were it that things ended there, this might seem like something of an anticlimax, but Kitahara doesn’t have the luxury of any kind of relief. He gets a phone call. Symboli Rudolf is on the other end of the line, and while she’s polite, she makes her position on the matter clear.

Thus, we come to the episode’s end, where Kitahara gives Oguri an ultimatum. In her next race, if she wins, she will be transferred to the nationals. If she loses, the two of them will aim for the Tokai Derby together.

That’s a rough hand to deal someone, and I am extremely interested in how Oguri is going to play it, especially with hints elsewhere in the episode that the national racing press are starting to catch on to the phenomenon brewing in Kasamatsu. The Gray Monster is waking up, and everyone but Oguri herself seems to be looking toward her eventual national rise to fame with great interest. Tamamo Cross, in a post-victory interview after one of her own races, makes note of her, while elsewhere mention is made that the two of them are defying a long-standing stereotype that ashen-coat horse girls can’t run. (A detail so bizarrely specific I can only imagine it’s a translation of some weird foible of actual horse racing culture.)

So ends an absolutely fantastic episode. There are tons of little details I haven’t had the space to cleanly fit in, and it’s hard to not just cram them all in here at the end. Belno blacksmithing new cleats for Oguri? The whole weird push and pull between Kitahara and his uncle Roppei, who seemed to know this entire thing with Oguri transferring to the nationals would play out how it did? Symboli Rudolf herself, who is fantastic here and whose nickname of “The Emperor” is treated almost literally given how everyone reacts to her? All told, this episode, its smaller, less-serious moments but especially its coiling tension, is the exact kind of stake-raising this show needed, and I am riveted to see where it all goes. The world is watching, Oguri Cap! What will you do?

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, Shambolic Anime Podcast

The Shambolic Anime Podcast Presents: Discussing ALIEN NINE

Today on the rarely-seen, once-in-a-while when we feel up to it Shambolic Anime podcast, my co-host Julian M. and I discuss seminal 2000s miniseries Alien Nine, and the manga it’s based on. Mind the content warning at the start of the episode, and enjoy!

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, 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 4 – “The Junior Crown”

Let’s Watch is a weekly(?) recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire(?) runtime. Expect spoilers!

I have not written a recap article for a currently-airing anime in nearly two years. It’s a surprisingly tough thing to nail down, at least if you want to write a good one. One has to capture the literal events of the episode, sure, but also nail its essence. What does the episode mean? Where is the show going from here? How does it fit into the contemporary landscape? What trends does it point to, present and future?

It’s a lot to consider, and that, combined with the inherent time pressure, is why I’ve largely dropped them from Magic Planet Anime. We’re making an exception today, because Cinderella Gray is, very plainly, the best thing airing right now. Despite—or perhaps because— of the fact that it’s “just” a very, very good sports series. There is a lot of great stuff airing right now (none of which I’m trying to knock), so that’s a big claim, but I stand by it. I haven’t really been beating the drum about the show as hard as I feel like I could be, and not everyone who reads these articles necessarily follows me on social media. Thus; this article. Hopefully the first of many, we’ll see.

It’s been a few weeks since I first wrote about Cinderella Gray, so let’s get up to speed real quick. After the first episode’s blowout, the second saw Oguri Cap take on Fujimasa March, the other extremely gifted, ash-haired horse girl at their school. That episode ends on a cliffhanger, and the third revealed that March narrowly edged Oguri Cap out of the victory in their first race together. The win wasn’t so definitive that she couldn’t attribute the victory to outside factors and, indeed, she becomes a little obsessed with trying to prove that she can beat Oguri fair and square. (This isn’t even an unreasonable thing to think; we also learned that Oguri’s old racing shoes were in absolutely terrible condition.) Episode three also saw Cap win a different race, absolutely demolishing the other racers and winning both the race itself and—I’m just gonna assume anyone reading this recap on my site is as yuri-brained as I am—the heart of gyaru horse girl / bully Norn Ace. Later, some more training led her to have a long, extremely shonen rival-y conversation with March, who directly challenged her to the Junior Crown.

This little conversation sets something inside Oguri alight. And that’s more or less where we begin this week. There’s a short sequence at the very top of the episode where Belno Light, Oguri’s gal pal and teammate, enters her own first race and loses quite badly. But I imagine we’ll be circling back around to her own story at a later date, as the vast majority of this episode is about Oguri, March, and this rivalry that’s grown between them.

It’s worth zeroing in on March’s line from the third episode; Without a peak to aim for there’s no point in climbing the mountain. We can make our little jokes, obviously—“peak” has taken on an adjectival meaning in English anime fandom over the past half decade, and it’s one that suits this series quite well—but it is really important that we don’t lose sight of this central metaphor.

When first asked about it, Oguri Cap is just grateful she can run at all. We already know from past episodes that when she was younger she could barely walk at all and it took active intervention on her mother’s part to turn her into the athlete she is today. This is great on its own of course, and it’s genuinely touching how truly grateful she seems to be that she can exert herself in the way she can, but this is a sports series. Oguri feels she has something to prove now.

There is an immense amount of appeal, in fact, just in watching Oguri do her thing, whether training or actually running. Aside from being a massively-endearing protagonist in the “strong but a bit of a doofus” mold (like dozens of classic shonen characters), there is a real joy to seeing her determination harden and sharpen now that she has a rival. At one point in this episode, she reveals that she’s been training with extremely heavy cleats on, a modern update on the whole “weighted clothing” trope from countless battle manga (which is promptly called attention to).

When the actual Junior Crown begins, Oguri’s trainer Jou takes note of her newfound motivation, self-deprecatingly quipping that he sometimes wonders why he’s there at all. This promptly gets him an earful from the episode’s new character; Jou’s uncle Musaka “Roppei” Ginjirou [Ootsuka Houchuu], also a horsegirl trainer, unexpectedly in town from Tokyo on vacation and scoping out the Junior Crown apparently on a whim.

Oguri Cap isn’t the only one training, of course. We get a look at March doing some “image training” (a minor obsession for this series, it played a fairly big role in Season 2), trying to imagine every possible scenario on the racetrack and conceiving of how to beat Oguri every single time. She claims to have thought up 100 different possibilities by the end of this scene, and given the fun visual of her dreaming up the blue and red colored ghosts of Cap and herself in the void of her own imagination, it’s easy to believe her.

There’s also an interesting contrast drawn between the relationships Oguri and March have to their trainers. Despite Jou’s self-effacing remark, it’s clear that Oguri likes and trusts him, and he has in fact contributed somewhat to developing her strengths. March’s trainer, meanwhile, gives her a presentation on the race, which she completely ignores in favor of her “concentration,” even going so far as to tell him to shut up. Whether this is something the series will continue to focus on as it goes forward is for those reading the original manga to know, but the difference is interesting, perhaps remarking on trust between trainer and athlete as just as important a component in a well-rounded competitor as anything else.

All of this leads up to the race, of course, and the Junior Crown is probably the show’s high point thus far. The race takes up a decent chunk of the episode, and we can basically break it down into two main parts, structurally-speaking. Firstly, there’s the race itself, which visually focuses on the actual motions of the racers as well as their mentalities while on the field, including a few full-on flashbacks to provide motivation, context, and color. (And toward the end we get some of the truly spectacular “auras” literally coloring the racers, a favorite technique of this series.) Secondly, there is the commentary, mostly coming from Jou and Belno who are watching in the stands, but also occasionally from Ginjirou and from an observing Tamamo Cross [Oozora Naomi], an uma musume visiting from Tokyo, who attends Tracen Academy, the prestigious racing school that is also the main setting of the three mainline Uma Musume seasons.

The race is spectacular. There’s a really great exchange between Cap and March just before the race begins, where Oguri interrupts March’s image training (which she’s still doing even as she prepares to run the actual race!), to say this.

I could write an entire separate article about the absolutely incredible character work the show has done with Oguri Cap so far. She’s goofy and silly often enough, and for just long enough, that as the audience we get sort of tricked into forgetting that she’s also basically Goku. This single line, probably the closest thing Oguri has offered so far in the series to a taunt, has more character in it than some anime’s entire casts. March, for the record, offers a shocked expression, but then a grin. This is largely a battle between the two of them, and they both know it.

Following on from the first three episodes, the racing in Cinderella Gray is a little less overtly fantastical than the approach taken in some more recent material from the series (certainly it’s quite a bit more grounded than the fantastical imagery in, say, New Era). But this isn’t a criticism, the grittier approach works really well for Cinderella Gray, and this race is probably the best demonstration of it yet. Particular attention is paid to Oguri Cap’s unique, low-to-the-ground stride, pointed out as a distinctive feature of her racing style as early as episode one.

Throughout, the race is a tug-of-war between Oguri Cap and Fujimasa March. (Spare a thought for Okan Maker, an extra who’s in the lead for a decent bit of the race but ends up left in the dust by both of them.) Accordingly we hear a lot from Fujimasa March. We even get a flashback showing how she’s been dedicated to winning her entire life, starting from when she was a child. In fact, much of the tone during the latter half of the race seems to sell the idea that March is going to inch out a win. She’s ahead of Oguri—admittedly just barely—starting after they both launch into a burst of speed at the same time. But what every single thing and person in the episode raising the flag that this is March’s race doesn’t understand is that Oguri Cap is….I mean, there’s no way to put it politely. She’s a monster.

The very last stretch of the race is spectacular, and here Cinderella Gray does lean into the more overt, battle shonen-esque stylings of some of its predecessors. That it’s only in such a short burst actually heightens its impact; just as March thinks she’s cinched the win, Oguri pulls a second burst of speed out of nowhere, treated with all the suddenness and gravitas of a warrior revealing a secret technique, and just like that, March is simply done.

Oguri Cap storms to victory, and the first arc of the series comes to a close.

After the race, March, initially in complete disbelief (and quite understandably pissed off) demands to know how she did that. Oguri speculates—as though she herself cannot entirely account for the power within her—that it was, in some way, March’s own doing. By directly challenging Oguri, she gave her something she didn’t have before. Oguri, of course, is quite grateful for all this, and we must imagine that the two will meet on the racetrack again in the future. Oguri directly offers such.

In doing this, Oguri seals the two’s relationship as rivals spurring each other to greater heights. I doubt March will be the last of these she picks up on her journey.

The episode’s denounement is fun, including the post-race concert, an oddity of the series that’s always felt a little tacked on—and at worst, reminiscent of the bottom of the barrel of the “idols but also other stuff” genre—here, in a relative rarity, it actually feels meaningful. Oguri has improved vastly as a performer since the previous episode where she listlessly danced to enka music and inspired Norn Ace to give her some dance lessons. (You know you’re living the sports yuri dream when all three of your former bullies show up to cheer you on at your race and one of them went out of her way to teach you how to dance. If we include Belno—and why not include Belno?—by my count Oguri has three different girls with their eyes on her. Four if we count Tamamo’s intrigued parting remark in this episode.)

The next decision to be made in Oguri’s journey is where she will race next. Jou wants to take her to the Chukyo Hai. Ginjirou advises him to skip it—he doesn’t directly say why—but Jou seems pretty determined, seeing it as an important stepping stone to Jou and Oguri’s mutual goal of winning the Tokai Derby. It might turn out to be a good thing that he’s so insistent, since an interesting post-credits scene reveals that another horsegirl attending that race—to observe, mind you—is Symboli Rudolf [Tadokoro Azusa], the Triple Crown winner that Uma Musume treats as the unofficial ur-horsegirl, president of Tracen Academy’s student council and looked up to by just about everyone. One of the final moments of the episode is a meaningful shot of the placard displaying Tracen’s motto, an artifact originally introduced way back in Uma Musume‘s first season. The motto itself is cryptic (and grammatically shaky) as always, but the shot imbues it with a certain power. Oguri Cap has much higher to climb. Both she, and her show, are just getting started.

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: Be Aware of MONO

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.

In 2017’s extremely metafictional club comedy anime Anime-Gataris, there is a scene where the main characters, all members of their school’s anime club, debate what makes a “classic anime.” The gag here being that they all just list off certain tropes or canned setups and scenarios rather than anything particularly deep (at one point someone ventures that if a main character vomits on screen? Well, that’s a classic anime). If I could put forward a candidate for that list, it would be this: any slice of life / comedy anime in which an older character is shown to be an absolutely terrible driver is an instant classic. Call it the Azumanga Daioh Principle.

mono, stylized in no-caps, is the latest member of that particular club, and it’s fairly meta in of itself. Consider that this is a slice of life comedy about two girls who take pictures, but one of the other characters is a mangaka who, by the end of this first episode, is writing a yonkoma about two girls who take pictures.

Her first idea for a manga, from earlier in the episode, isn’t bad either. She’s right that everyone likes comics about cats.

Unlike Anime-Gataris, that metafictionality (much lighter here than in that series) is not the point in of itself, but rather an underline that this is a show that understands its genre, and why people like and connect to that genre, very well. mono isn’t the first series like this we’ve had in a while, but it’s definitely the best in a while. To find something with a comparably great first episode you have to reach at least as far back as 2022’s Do It Yourself!!, maybe farther.

The actual plot, such as it is, is nothing terribly complicated. (Such stories rarely are.) Amamiya Satsuki [Mikawa Haruna] joins a photography club at her high school in her first year, implicitly because of a crush on her upperclassman who’s the head of the club. (That’s Satsuki at the top of this article in the banner image, looking like she’s offering you something.) Fast forward a year later, and said upperclassman has graduated, leaving Satsuki and her friend Kiriyama An [Koga Aoi] as its sole members, and Satsuki herself listless and lacking in motivation. An, who herself feels such a way about Satsuki that she describes “sitting together with her in the garden in [their] elder years” as a “dream,” is worried that the club might dissolve with just the two of them, and that Satsuki might remain a proverbial lump on a log forever.

After a motivating speech, Satsuki regains some amount of motivation, deciding to finally get a proper camera after a full year of exclusively taking photographs on her phone (most of which were of her sempai, and most of which were taken pictures of, in turn, by An). She buys a wide-angle camera off of an online auction, but oops! It doesn’t actually arrive. Thankfully, the seller actually lives in their city, making it relatively easy for Satsuki and An to track them down.

Which, if I’m the one being asked, is where the episode really takes off. I have a passing interest in photography (and a mostly-defunct phone photography blog over on tumblr), but it’s not a deep-seated passion, so it alone is not enough to sell me on a series. What puts me onto mono is its sheer joie de vivre. Every inch of it is stuffed with expressive animation and vibrant color, and it’s also just really damn funny. This is all crucial, since even if you, like me, are not super “into photography,” mono needs to convey its love of the world as a subject of art.

The camera seller turns out to be aforementioned mangaka Akiyama Haruno [Toono Hikaru]. She, and a gaggle of young kids who stop by her grandmother’s shop, where she also lives, completes the character dynamic of the series, being an older character who is decidedly not really a mentor in any way. Her spacey demeanor provides a nice contrast to the more high-energy dynamics between An and Satsuki. More importantly, she’s also a good (and literal) driver of plot, in as much as a series like this has plots. It’s she who provides Satsuki and An with that wide-angle camera, and, later, she drives them to a nearby landmark to take nightscape photos. For my money, she’s the best character, and her lackadaiscal and laid-back attitude instantly endeared her to me. That she coincidentally looks kind of like my VTuber rig certainly doesn’t hurt either. I am not biased in any way, I promise.

In any case, those nightscape photos cap off the first episode, otherwise quite zany and comedic, with a more contemplative tone. I don’t know if the “mono” in mono is “mono” as in the term mono no aware, as this would on the surface contradict the show’s comedic incliniations. But if it is, that’s a pretty solid allusion. The idea of photographs as permanent, fixed records of memories that are themselves inherently transient isn’t a new one, but I would love to see the show explore it regardless, and it provides a nice counterweight to the fast pace and upbeat tone of the rest of the series.

Brilliantly, one of the last scenes in the episode is a timelapse the girls took. The sequence lasts only a few seconds, but as the sun sets and the city lights glitter to life, the impression it leaves is forever.

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: Checking in to the APOCALYPSE HOTEL

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.

It has been entirely too long since I got weirdly, uncomfortably personal on this blog (a few months, at least), so let’s fix that.

I have been thinking about my own mortality a lot lately. I won’t go into why, but suffice to say this dwelling is neither wholly rational nor entirely unfounded. I mention my own recent fixation here to give some context for why I’m checking out Apocalypse Hotel, and why I was initially reluctant to check it out. Stories like this, stories of mankind’s extinction or departure and what we may leave behind in our wake, stories that inherently deal with loss and finality as themes, are incredibly aggravating when done poorly. I won’t name names, but there have been some unimpressive examples in recent years, and I have somewhat burned out on this genre of post-apocalyptic iyashikei as a result. (The less said about its mutant cousin, the isekai slow life genre, the better.) All this in mind, I planned to pass on Apocalypse Hotel. Surely it would not become one of the most instantly-beloved premieres of the season, right?

If that’s overselling it, it’s only just so. Within my circles at least, Apocalypse Hotel has become something of a surprise standout among the season’s premieres. Enough of one to cover it over GQuuuuuuX? I’m not sure about that, but the praise eventually got to me and I was inspired to give it a whirl. I’m glad I did, because this is a series that not only understands the fundamentals of its parent genre very well, it’s also a bit of casual leg-stretching for Cygames Pictures, who have established themselves as one of the more reliable studios around in recent years. (For reference, Apocalypse Hotel is a follow-on from last year’s Uma Musume film and Brave Bang Bravern. This year, they’re doing Cinderella Gray, also from this season, and an adaptation of acclaimed manga The Summer Hikaru Died in just a few months. Going back a bit farther, you might also know them from Princess Connect Re:Dive.)

As for the actual plot here, there honestly isn’t terribly much. We begin with a truly spine-chilling opening, in which an advertisement for the titular Ginza Hotel, then brand-new, is intercut with news reports of a deadly, plantborne virus that is rapidly rendering the Earth’s atmosphere hostile to human life. Just five years out from the COVID pandemic, this sort of imagery is still very pointed, and the uncomfortable contrast between the luxury of the hotel and the violence we see as the world becomes less and less habitable, culminating with a lucky few escaping to the stars in an “ark” (supposedly for just a few years while Earth’s ecosystem sorts itself out), is of course very intentional. It is equally so that most of the rest of the episode doesn’t directly deal with that discomfort. Instead, the series dances around it in a deliberate, careful way, only drawing attention to it directly at key moments.

Most of the episode is fairly comedic, in fact. We meet our cast of characters, a group of robots maintaining the Ginza Hotel. The most prominent of these, and the only one in the group that could conceivably pass as a human, is Yachiyo [Shirasu Saho], the “acting acting” head of reception and thus the one in charge of the hotel in a general sense. Yachiyo spends her days keeping her crew on-task as they make sure the hotel is kept clean and orderly, in preparation for humanity’s eventual return.

A return that, at this point, they have waited on for a hundred years and counting.

I don’t want to make Apocalypse Hotel seem darker than it actually is, because most of this episode genuinely is pretty upbeat. Gags like Yachiyo absolutely losing her cool because a single shampoo hat goes missing from one of the hotel’s bathrooms, or the bulky, extremely serious Doorman Robot [Touchi Hiroki] and his sheer dedication to his simple job of opening the front doors for any prospective guests, are a genuine delight.

Get Door Robo

Even the music is pretty upbeat while the crew go about their daily routine of keeping things clean and sparkling. But the undertone of massive loss is always there. Firstly from the simple fact that the thing they’re keeping so pristine is a giant hotel with nobody in it, and secondly from the more general post-apocalyptic trappings. A century is more than enough time for plants to have grown over much of the world outside the hotel, and these gorgeous wide shots instill a solid sense of longing and emptiness.

In other words, this show is quite clearly picking up the thread left by seminal works such as Yokohama Shopping Log. Being that good would be, frankly, too much to ask—Yokohama is arguably the definitive work of its genre—but that the two can even be in the same conversation is a good sign. There is one point in the episode in particular in which this influence is extremely evident, and that is when one “Driller Robot” does not report to the morning roll call at the hotel. Yachiyo goes out to find him, only to see that he’s been killed; massive metal spikes have been driven through him, and he’s completely motionless. Clearly saddened in a way she either can’t or won’t entirely express, Yachiyo solemnly places him on “indefinite leave,” and consigns him to a storeroom full of other similarly broken-down robots. An earlier gag draws attention to the fact that the Doorman no longer has any coolant in his systems, and one has to wonder how long it’ll be before he, too, joins that pile. We have already seen, via flashbacks, that Yachiyo’s crew used to be much larger.

Yachiyo’s behavior, as well, seems to indicate that she’s not as together as she’d like to put on. It’s mostly played as a joke here, but she has an angry outburst near the end of the episode, and she’s also been keeping detailed logs of operations every day since the hotel’s owner left. She tells herself that new guests will be coming soon, but it doesn’t really seem like she believes it.

Which makes the end of the episode all the more surprising. I can’t bring myself to spoil what, exactly, happens there, but I do think it points Apocalypse Hotel in an interesting direction going forward. Does all of this relate, that much, at the end of the day, to the fears I discussed opening this article? Eh, yes and no. Apocalypse Hotel is clearly a part of this cozy apocalypse genre—it’s right there in the name, after all—but it’s much more lighthearted, even whimsical, than I first assumed. Yet, that sense of loss and transience still very much does color everything about the series, and it’s difficult to say what it will end up leaning more into as it goes on. In other words, it’s hard make many long-term predictions. But, regardless of what happens on this particular after-the-end vacation, I’m planning on at least a short-term stay. Hopefully you are, too.

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: This City Knows Your Name – Remembering and Forgetting in KOWLOON GENERIC ROMANCE

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.

Look at them individually, and no part of Kowloon Generic Romance seems all that strange. Its setting, the historical Kowloon Walled City, is probably the most individually unusual factor, but still, oddball places to set a romance series are hardly a new idea. The romance itself? An ice queen and a guy who’s too pushy by half, maybe more. Nothing strange going on there, even if it really is leaning into the self-deprecating part of its title. The atmosphere? Wistful. Thoughtful. Slow. But still, nothing too out of the ordinary.

Tying these things together, and making it clear that we have something strange on our hands, is the final element. Kowloon doesn’t actually take place in the historical Walled City, you see. It takes place in an alternate past-future present of it. The year is nineteen-exty-something, and a bizarre 3D-rendered floating octahedron hovers above the city, looking for all viewers like a nepo baby whose mom played Ramiel in Neon Genesis Evangelion. A mysterious pharmaceutical company has a hand in everything. Everything too, true to life, is old, used, and hand-me-down. Reiko [Shiraishi Haruka] our protagonist, points out that new shops rarely last in Kowloon, as though the city itself rejects the march of time. That may well be true of Reiko herself, too, although if it is, she doesn’t seem to be aware of it.

Reiko has a hot-cold relationship with her coworker Kudou [Sugita Tomokazu], she knows that this is a crush, but hasn’t acted on it. I can’t personally sympathize with that because, honestly, Kudou, easily the weak link here, is an unlikable dipshit, but people who aren’t me have crushes on unlikable dipshits all the time, so, fair enough. (Sidebar: He is clearly hiding something and I’m sure the narrative will take great steps to paint him as pained and with a heart of gold. This is whatever to me, I am passingly interested at best in the Generic part of Kowloon‘s Romance.) Their rapport works as well as it needs to, which is to say, I buy that Reiko genuinely likes this guy even if I wouldn’t. More interesting is where they go, after a day of work, Kudou takes Reiko out on the town, to a variety of small bars and eateries, before eventually showing her the Goldfish Tea House, a place with an eerie, unstuck-in-time atmosphere that feels very intentional.

The bartender—an odd term for a guy in charge of a teahouse, but I can think of no other—makes a comment that Kudou, evidently an old friend of his, has brought his girlfriend along again. This flusters Reiko, who is further perplexed by Kudou’s lack of a reaction. This sticks with her even more after an incident at their workplace, where Kudou, half-asleep, pulls Reiko into an impassioned kiss. (He seems half-asleep anyway. I don’t really buy, and I don’t think we’re supposed to buy, that this was entirely accidental. While forced kisses like this are an unlikable and common element of much romance fiction, the context makes me think we’re supposed to find this strange. If not, well, there’s no accounting for taste I suppose.) All of this then comes to a head when Reiko uncovers a mysterious photo among Kudou’s belongings, which seems to depict him with….her. But the woman in the photograph is smiling and cheerful, and it’s clear that even though the two look almost identical, physically speaking, Reiko doesn’t feel a direct connection to this other woman. The episode ends there, leaving us to ponder the mystery of what, precisely, is going on here.

The mystery, and the various visual bits and pieces that float through the episode, that is. Goldfish, watermelons, cigarettes, the moon juxtaposed with Generic Terra, the aforementioned octahedron, cramped city alleys marked with numbers, including 8s, which Kudou makes a habit of brushing against, defining it as a personal quirk. Plus noisy neighbors, traditional music. The episode’s slow pace and emphasis on the visual and aural, despite not having what we might traditionally call a “strong production”, makes it clear that it intends to plant them in the minds of its viewers, this array of symbolic objects contains, somewhere within it, the key to understanding just what exactly is going on with the woman in the photograph. A drifting mix of signifiers meant to rouse our interest without answering too many questions upfront.

Kowloon Generic Romance is based on a manga, so if one wanted to, it would be trivial to spoil themselves silly. Even the anime’s Anilist recommendations tab tells a story, being populated more by the likes of Sonny Boy and Summertime Rendering than any romance anime. This all but spoils that there’s something weird going on here, something weirder than simple coincidence. The involvement of a pharmaceutical company makes my educated guess induced amnesia, but honestly, who can say?

Something I’ve learned over the past few years of doing these previews is that there are two kinds of anime whose premieres strike me less as good or bad and more as puzzling. Those where the mystery is clearly an intended hook to rope in the audience, and those where I—and sometimes others as well—are reading in a subversiveness or intrigue that’s not actually there. Shoshimin Series (despite its mundane subject matter) and Summertime Rendering are the former, Reign of the Seven Spellblades is the latter. These categories are only obvious in hindsight, so while I think Kowloon is the former, only time will tell. Still, its mystery is enough for me to stick with it for now.

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: LAZARUS is Dead on Arrival

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.

More than its genre, who was involved with the actual creative process of making it, etc., the involvement of one person in particular stands head and shoulders above everything else when talking about Lazarus, the latest from Cowboy Bebop brain Watanabe Shinichirou, and it’s not Watanabe himself. No, upon starting the first episode of the show you’re greeted with the [adult swim] logo, and then, a few minutes later, an executive producer credit for [adult swim]/Toonami….main guy, Jason DeMarco.

I have dreaded the day I would have to talk about DeMarco at length on this blog, but the time has finally come, so here are the very basics. Back in the day, DeMarco was in charge of the original Toonami block. In that role, he was responsible for bringing a number of generational anime over to Cartoon Network, most notably Dragonball Z and Sailor Moon, and exposing them to a broad, English-speaking audience for the first time. He’s certainly not solely responsible for that, although he sometimes certainly likes to make it sound that way, but credit where it’s due, the guy had taste and not just for obvious hits, not just anyone would think to pick up, say, The Big O. In the years since then, though, with the rebooted Toonami block that proved a surprise success for [adult swim] back in 2012, DeMarco has taken a more active role in getting anime actually made, usually by putting up funding and often snagging one of those executive producer credits for himself in the process. The first results of this particular effort were the original pair of FLCL “sequels,” the extremely controversial FLCL Progressive and FLCL Alternative. To defend DeMarco (and just the entire staffs of those shows) here for a minute, I actually like both of those seasons, essentially because they’re so different from the original and indeed from each other. (Alternative honestly has more in common with one of Gainax’s other out-there 00s anime, Diebuster.)

Somewhere along the way, though, DeMarco’s involvement began to be associated with a certain kind of staid, neo-traditional action anime. Examples include the Shenmu anime, Fena: The Pirate Princess, and last year’s Ninja Kamui, which, again, to be entirely fair, I actually liked at first, but it quickly dropped off in quality. Whether DeMarco’s presence somehow causes these anime to be like this or if it’s more the other way around—that he’s attracted to projects that will end up like this because of his own tastes—I can’t say. But the point is, there’s a pattern. If DeMarco’s name is attached to it, and it has a somewhat subdued color palette, you pretty much know what you’re getting. (The less said about the other half of DeMarco’s credits in this position, which include the Rick & Morty anime and last year’s instantly-infamous Uzumaki adaptation, the better.)

I bring this up despite the fact that DeMarco’s actual creative involvement on the project was, we must assume, fairly minimal, because again, it feels like a tell. Consider the actual creative force behind this project, Watanabe, nearly thirty years removed from his masterpiece.

In fact, here’s a brief review of that masterpiece, and also the other two Watanabe anime I’ve seen. Cowboy Bebop? Genuinely really good, although admittedly outside forces (mostly a certain kind of tedious forum nerd insisting it’s The Only Good Anime) have dimmed my opinion of it over the years, and it’s been a long time since I last watched it. (Speaking of Toonami, I always preferred Outlaw Star. How much can I trust this opinion I formed as a teenager now that I’m 31? Who knows.) Space Dandy? Solid but very much not my thing, one of the first shows the revived Toonami block had a hand in bringing into existence, and I dimly remember that back in 2014 this seemed like a good thing, although I can’t remember precisely why we all thought that. Carole & Tuesday? Eugh. It really feels like an anime that is in part about how computers can replace human creativity should have a lot of relevance and vitality in 2025, but anecdotally, I don’t know anyone who rates this series particularly highly and I never even finished it myself, mostly because what I did see was maudlin to a ridiculous, Hallmarkian degree.

All of this is a lot of context, most of which is about me and my own relationship to these peoples’ works, and a lot of bolded, italicized titles that are not Lazarus. But I can only blame Lazarus itself, because the show itself doesn’t give me a lot to work with in this first episode. There’s not really much of a hook, I don’t care about any of these characters, and what we get of a plot is boring and simply not engaging. As is usual in Watanabe’s anime, there are some good moments of moody contemplation, (though they’re obviously not nearly as memorable as Bebop‘s) some solid action pieces (although I found these lacking compared to past works), and some well-chosen bits of background music. Not to mention Watanabe entirely does deserve credit for being one of the few anime directors that seems to give a shit about having a realistically racially diverse cast. But I have to be careful here, because if I’m talking about a sci-fi anime with good music and action, but with bad writing, you might assume I was talking about Metallic Rouge. This is a rude comparison, partly because Lazarus‘ writing is not wildly irresponsible (at least so far) in the way that Metallic Rouge‘s was, but honestly? Also because Metallic Rouge was actually intermittently fun, and did manage to put together a solid first episode, despite its many flaws in other areas, something Lazarus doesn’t have much of a handle on.

Incidentally, aside from the waxy look of the 2D art, this girl’s underdye is about the only indication that this anime was made in the 2020s.

Just to not make this piece entirely me being a hater, here are the simple facts of Lazarus‘ plot. A scientist named Dr. Skinner, some years prior to the events of the series, developed a miracle drug called Hapna. Skinner disappears for three years as the world happily embraces freedom from pain and sickness. When he returns, it’s to sound the trumpet of Judgment Day. Hapna, he reveals, is actually designed to remain in the body permanently, and will kill anyone who takes it about three years after the first, and the first deaths will start just 30 days after his announcement. So betrayed, the world quickly descends into chaos.

In the midst of all this, Brazilian escape artist Axel Gilberto [Miyano Mamoru/Jack Stansbury] is serving an 888-year prison sentence. In the midst of a visit from the mysterious Hersch [Hayashibara Megumi/Jade Kelly], he makes another break for it and spends the remainder of the episode on the run. Thus, we follow Axel as he dodges the law before finally being cornered by Douglas Hadine [Furukawa Makoto/Jovan Jackson], who he seems to think is a police officer. One more escape attempt and a final subduing later (by having local blonde girl Christine [Uchida Maaya/Luci Christian] lure him into taking a picture with him and then zapping him with the shock bracelets on her wrist, naturally), it is revealed to Axel, and to us, that all of the people who’ve been chasing him are actually part of a secret organization called (dun dun dun) Lazarus! The first episode ends there, roll credits.

If that seems a little thin on the ground in recap form, I promise you it’s moreso to actually watch. Yeah, chase scenes are cool and all, but it’s hard to get a bead on who any of these people are or why I should care about any of them. My gut reaction is that introducing so much of the cast at once was a mistake and it would’ve made more sense to have us spend time with Axel. Maybe this will all make sense by episode six or seven, but I’d have to actually want to watch that far to see if it does. At present, I don’t. I really, truly tried to go into this series with as open a mind as possible, but there’s just nothing here to reward that.

Upsides are minor and fleeting. There’s a funny moment where Axel runs into a police officer while still in his jumpsuit from prison and the officer convinces himself that it’s “some fashion trend.” The action setpieces are cool enough, although some of them, especially later in the episode, feel bizarrely floaty. Axel himself is….likable enough, I guess?

Can you tell I’m grasping for straws here? Last season I wrote a scathing writeup of Sorairo Utility‘s first episode and I kind of regret it because A) that was not the most objectionable thing to air that season by an order of magnitude, Zenshu, which I did not and will not cover on this site, was, and B) because a slice of life series, no matter how bad—and don’t get me wrong, I do think that first episode of that show was very bad—just doesn’t deserve that vitriol. So, I am trying to frame my dislike of things in a more productive way when I dislike them, but I truly cannot think of anything nice to say about this show beyond what I’ve already said. It really is just a very dull first episode.

That, and it also seems very convinced of its own importance. The whole engineered drug-based death epidemic plot is extremely “hard sci fi with something to say.” In this way, Lazarus almost feels more like a very dim reflection of something like Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex more than anything else. It’s not cyberpunk enough for that comparison to be airtight, but what I mean here is that that was a series that also had a lot on its mind. The difference of course is that GiTS:SC, or any other such show you care to name, did not need to try to convince you that it had some relevance to modern life, it just was relevant to modern life. I am not saying that GiTS:SC is itself flawless or that its politics are beyond reproach (they certainly aren’t), but it is at least worth having a conversation about. That’s an ineffable, hard-to-pin-down difference, but it is unfortunately what ultimately puts the final nail in the coffin for this premiere. I simply don’t think, unless its subsequent episodes are a massive improvement, that anyone is going to care about what Lazarus is saying enough to talk about it. This feels absurd, given that the show is so obviously Trying To Say Stuff that it even features an economic crash just days after this fucking mess. Normally, coincidental timing like that locks a series in as a must-discuss talk of the season, but I just can’t see it happening with Lazarus.

I have never liked the “it insists upon itself” chestnut. Especially because, in the Family Guy scene that it’s from, the joke is that Peter is voicing a pompous opinion on something inane in the middle of a life-threatening situation. But hey, given the state of the world right now that’s basically what I’m doing, too. So sure, we’ll say Lazarus insists upon itself. Tedious, dry, lacking charm or compelling drama, the latest product of the Neo-Toonami Industrial Complex simply feels replaceable.

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: UMA MUSUME CINDERELLA GREY at the Starting Gate

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.

Somehow, this is the first full article I’ve devoted on this site to Uma Musume. I have to admit that that’s mostly my own fault, I was very late to this particular party, and only got onboard the proverbial horse-drawn carriage earlier this year. (I still haven’t seen the series’ proper third season.) Uma Musume, occasionally also called Pretty Derby, is a series whose reputation precedes it, given its odd premise and ties to a large, very successful franchise that most English-speaking anime fans are unfamiliar with beyond said premise.

The long and short of it is this; Uma Musume takes place in a world where horse-eared animal girls compete in vigorous races. The horse girls are named after actual, real horses—and in Uma Musume’s fiction they actually are those horses, reborn into the show’s setting—and the races themselves are largely patterned after real races. Using the real-world horse races as a scaffolding, Uma Musume then constructs a triumphant, pulse-pounding sports anime. Visually, the later Uma Musume entries, especially the OVA series Road To The Top and the movie Beginning of a New Era (which I have been trying to write an article about for months, incidentally) are some of the best and most intense anime of the 2020s, and one ignores them because they’re “silly” at their own peril. The rough-around-the-edges first season followed ambitious sweetheart Special Week. Season 2 traced the path of rocketship superstar Tokai Teio and her shonen rivalry girlfriend Mejiro McQueen. The Road To The Top OVAs studied a trio of often-intense rising stars, and the New Era film explored a rivalry between its leads that bordered on a deranged, psychosexual obsession. Each entry in the series has been increasingly spectacular, especially visually, which only makes sense. Remember: this is a sports anime.

All this in mind, Cinderella Gray has big horseshoes to fill, following as it does the story of Oguri Cap [Takayanagi Tomoyo] and her rise to fame. Perhaps wisely, right out the gate, Cinderella Gray actually engages in some scaling-back from the New Era film, the otherwise most-recent Uma Musume anime. We don’t begin our story at Tracen, the prestigious racing academy from the previous three seasons of the anime. Instead, our setting is a smaller academy that trains racers for regional competitions.

Our point of view character for most of this opening bit of scene-setting isn’t actually Oguri Cap herself, but rather Berno Light [Seto Momoko, in what looks to be one of her first roles], a much more ordinary horse girl (although one whose cute hair decorations shaped like capital Bs should not be ignored), and it’s through her that we get some sense of the reduced grandeur here. When she asks her homeroom teacher about the national races, she’s just straight up told that it’s not something she needs to worry about. A little rough! Inauspicious beginnings for what’s sure to be a tale of a meteoric rise to the top!

In fact, the very first character we follow isn’t even Berno, but rather Kitahara Jou [Konishi Katsuyuki], a trainer—and a human, as is traditional in Uma Musume’s trainer / horse girl setup—who laments the sorry state of the local scene. He’s looking for a star, and he’s pretty sure he’s not going to find one in the Gifu regionals.

Enter, of course, Oguri Cap. Cap, whose real-life counterpart was nicknamed “The Gray Monster,” is presented here as, essentially, an old-school shonen protagonist. She’s kind of dim, eats her own weight in food on the regular, and trains way, way harder than anyone else. She’s an archetype to be sure, but an instantly likeable and endearing one. “Someone you can root for from the bottom of your heart,” per Jou’s own words.

Not everyone necessarily feels that way, though. For much of her first day (and thus much of this episode), Oguri Cap is actually bullied by a trio of delinquent horses; the gyaru Norn Ace, the mean-looking Rudy Lemono, and the decidedly short Mini the Lady.

Lest anyone get the impression that Uma Musume is taking a sharp turn into being a school drama however, Oguri Cap is actually so oblivious to anything that’s not food or running that these attempts to get under her skin completely slide off of her. Up to and including Norn Ace, her dormmate, making her sleep in a supply closet. (Oguri, the very definition of a cartoon country girl, is just stoked to have her own room.)

She has the last laugh anyway. The episode’s final stretch consists of a practice race where Cap is set to run against Rudy, Mini, and Berno, and the former two prank her by undoing her shoelaces before the start of the race. In spite of having to stop to re-tie them, Oguri absolutely annihilates her competition, leaving them in the dust as she blasts past them, completely outpacing them.

Uma Musume has developed its own visual language with which to depict racing as its gone on; broad sweeping ‘karate chop’ hand motions, coiled cock-and-fire pistol shots of forward, springing motion, glowing Black Rock Shooter eyes and electrical auras, and so on. Oguri is drawn in a subtly different way, telegraphing her unusual gait, the secret weapon that makes her interesting to Jou beyond her raw talent, it’s explicated in just a line or two of dialogue, but as is often the case with Uma Musume, seeing is believing.

Can we root for Oguri Cap from the bottom of our hearts? It doesn’t take much to convince me when the show looks this good, but I do really think that this is not only a treat for longtime fans of the series but also an ideal jumping-on point for anyone who’s been waiting for one. Being set chronologically earlier in the franchise than seasons 1-3 means that the attention-grabbing cameos of previous seasons’ characters are kept to a minimum. There’s no real risk of feeling lost here, so I would say that just about anyone should check this thing out. You really have nothing to lose. (If anything, I think longtime fans are the ones more likely to have nitpicks. One could argue this is a slower start than, say, the first episode of season two. But this feels like such a minor point that, to me at least, it isn’t really worth making.)

Personally, what interests me most is not just Oguri Cap and the way she runs. We’re introduced to another horse girl here as well, alongside Cap, Berno, and the delinquent trio. That girl, Fujimasa March [Ise Mariya], who shares Cap’s white-gray hair and her immense talent as a runner, but is distinguished by an intense, sharp gaze, and a serious demeanor, seems like she’s being set up as Cap’s long-term rival. As Oguri Cap wins her practice race, blowing her competition out of the water, March is watching from the sidelines, ignoring the trainers trying to get her attention. Fujimasa March clearly knows that something big has just happened. In a subtle way, here in this particular place, the world has changed, and she can feel it. Can you?

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.

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