Tag: Review

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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.

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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.

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 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, 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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Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal Anime First Impressions: The Thorny Debut of ROCK IS A LADY’S MODESTY

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.

Suzunomiya Lilisa [Sekine Akira] is repressed. The daughter of a rich family by marriage, she doesn’t really feel like herself at her prestigious finishing school, the kind of all-girls mannering academy that’s all but extinct in real life but lives on through cultural touchstones such as anime. It’s not that her classmates dislike her, quite the opposite actually, she’s very popular. It’s that the academy’s curriculum of education, culture, and politeness does not come naturally to her, and she works very hard to keep up appearances. This is in spite of what’s implied to be a pretty strong culture shock from her current living situation. Throughout this first episode we see glimpses of a very different home life than the one Lilisa currently lives: not one of wealth and class with a real estate mogul father who’s yet to be seen on camera, but one with her loving, guitar-playing biological father. Unless I missed something, we don’t directly hear that said father is no longer alive, but that’s certainly the implication.

What does all of that add up to for Lilisa? Well, she’s left most of her passions behind her, and is focusing on getting a prestigious award from her school. (She has a reason for wanting it, we don’t yet know what that is.)

The internal turmoil of a repressed rich girl is not that interesting on its own, and I will be honest in that Rock is a Lady’s Modesty took a while to hook me here. It does help that there’s an eclectic set of influences being worn on the show’s sleeve right out the gate: the shoujo and Class S yuri manga responsible for keeping these sorts of girls’ schools in the public memory, Love is War!‘s later arcs, with their fixations on the often-empty inner lives of the wealthy, and of course the broader girl band current of which Lady’s Modesty is undeniably a part. (Although, as a matter of record-keeping, this is an adaptation, not an original series. The manga dates from late 2022, and having to adapt an existing story explains some of the more unusual structural choices, as we’ll get to.) These disparate sources add up to a very straightforward core conflict: the person who Lilisa is trying to be and the person who Lilisa is do not match up, and this is getting to her.

Which again, would not be that interesting, were it not for Kurogane Otoha [Shimabukuro Miyuri]. Otoha is a similarly well-mannered girl from a rich family. She and Lilisa meet by chance when they literally bump into each other, causing Otoha to drop a guitar pick. Lilisa tries to find a good time to return it to her—a classy lady having a guitar pick is uncouth, of course, especially one with a Hot Topicky skull-and-blood design like this one has—and in doing so learns that Otoha has been using an abandoned building on campus as a makeshift practice room. Now, small twist here, Otoha is actually a drummer. We don’t know who that guitar pick originally belonged to or what its significance is, but Otoha doesn’t use it herself.

Instead, she talks Lilisa into a jam session, first just by asking, and then, when Lilisa pushes back, by insinuating that Lilisa might not be very good at guitar.

Our heroine takes this very personally, and what ensues is a 1v1 music battle, the two trying to outdo each other, Lilisa on guitar, Otoha on the drums, over a backing track called “GHOST DANCE.” Lilisa, tellingly, imagines Otoha’s overpowering, thunderous drumwork as akin to being made to submit by a dominatrix. Those are her words, not mine.

And it only makes sense that she sees it this way, because Otoha really does overpower her completely. Which is to say, Lilisa’s guitar playing really isn’t that good. It’s fine. But not only are her actual skills not all that impressive for this genre but the show doesn’t really pick up any slack for her visually. (Most of the visual panache goes into her fantasies of being tied up in thorned rose vines instead.) We get shots of her playing, clearly very intensely focused and pouring a huge amount of sweat and effort into what she’s doing, but it lacks that ephemeral quality to make it truly memorable.

That’s how I’d put it, anyway.

Otoha is significantly less nice.

So that’s our big first episode twist. Surprise, you were supposed to think her guitar playing is kind of lame! It’s an interesting idea, certainly, but it’s not actually that unusual given that at this point a show actually having a barn-burner first episode performance would be the more surprising thing. (My baseless guess is that we’re saving that for, I don’t know, episode three?) Still, it’s a nice setup; Otoha flips her off before instantly flipping her ojou-sama switch back on, and just fuckin’ leaves, leaving Lilisa to stew in her own failure. The implication being of course that she’s realized that she cares about being good at this much more than she cares about being a good student. It’s a good hook, and I’m interested to see where the show takes it.

Of course, all of this is dodging a simpler question: is this show, at least this first episode, like, you know, good? I’d say so, but that comes with some caveats. The great Girl Band Renaissance in anime is, in the grand scheme of things, a recent and ongoing development. Bocchi the Rock, for reference, only aired in 2022, and the source manga for this series is from around the same time. Still, I have a hunch some might find the relatively slow start here a turnoff, and it is admittedly hard to imagine it stacking up, in the long run, to elephants in the room like Girls Band Cry or the It’s MyGO!!!!! / Ave Mujica subseries of BanG Dream! But Bocchi itself isn’t a bad reference point here, that show also took a bit to really get going, but once it did, it was one of the best anime of its year and is easily as iconic—moreso, honestly, if we’re talking simple name recognition, at least in the Anglosphere—than the other two shows I just mentioned. Still, by directly making competition part of its narrative, Rock is a Lady’s Modesty invites these comparisons, which I would probably otherwise avoid.

Can it live up to those expectations? I’m not sure, but I want to at least see it try, and that counts for a lot all on its own. Besides, I really do just need to see what is going on in Lilisa’s head that makes her imagine a guitar/drum duet as some kind of BDSM thing, although admittedly, the fact that she refers to Otoha in her narration as her “lifelong partner” might be a clue. I think you might be repressed in more ways than one, girl.

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.