Tag: tv

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: Spring 2026 Roundup

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’s been a while since I did a good roundup post! You know how these go, so let’s get on with it.

Akane-banashi: The widely-acclaimed Shonen Jump rakugo manga gets its anime adaptation this season. Depsite the trailers looking rather dull, I was actually quite impressed with this episode itself. However, as much as Akane-banashi at large is the story of its title character Akane [Nagase Anna], this first episode mostly isn’t. Instead, it’s mostly about her father, Osaki Tohru [Fukuyama Jun], stage name Arakawa Shinta. This episode takes place in Akane’s childhood, and it is clear throughout the episode that she loves and admires her father immensely. (And, well, if my dad was voiced by Lelouch Lamperouge I’d probably feel the same way.) She gets into a fight at school over a classmate disrespecting Tohru by calling him a deadbeat with no real job, and, when the kid’s mother wants to know what happened, she responds by acting out the entire scenario herself, in a very rakugo-esque manner, overtly gesturing to the talent she’s already fostering at a young age.

She might, in fact, be a better rakugoka than her father someday. Watanabe Ayumu (a man who is set to have a very busy spring, between directing this and the Witch Hat Atelier anime) and his team take great pains to depict Tohru as someone who is talented but who has to try quite a lot to really tap into that talent. The predominant mood of the episode is not of a preternatural talent here to blow you out of your seat like you’d get in an anime about rock music or such (or indeed like we might get later in this very series), but of effort. The very animation itself has a weathered, almost sepia look to it. A look that also gently implies that money might be an issue for the family. Certainly, it would explain Tohru’s desperation to become a shin’uchi. Rakugo’s third and highest rank, a shin’uchi. That level of accreditation would presumably open some doors for him, certainly.

The sweaty and nervous atmosphere of this guy absolutely bombing his promotion test is perhaps the emotional crux of the episode. Uncomfortable and unenviable, hotter than the spotlight directly on him. Even when things turn around there’s an air of inevitable personal tragedy over the whole thing and, yeah, he fails and gets expelled from the profession. So set is the stage for our true heroine, who we will be meeting in earnest next week. Incidentally, like last year’s Cinderella Gray, you can watch Akane-banashi legally and for free on Youtube. So that’s nice!

Daemons of The Shadow Realm: Fullmetal Alchemist author Arakawa Hiromu‘s latest ongoing, now in anime form! This first episode was, well, it was a fuck of a lot honestly! We start out with a very traditional and straightforward-seeming setup, two siblings born as night turns to day leads to an adolescence where the brother, Yuru [Ono Kenshou], protects his sister Asa [Miyamoto Yume] who lives in some kind of sanctuary inside the mountaintop village they call home. This is a bit odd in its own right, but it’s absolutely blown to pieces when planes and helicopters carrying armed soldiers invade, dropping both conventional modern military fighters and a pair of individuals who command supernatural agents called Daemons into the village to kill Asa and capture Yuru for unspecified purposes. One of these individuals, a woman, succeeds in killing Asa, only for her to inform a shocked Yuru that she is Asa (which Yuru, obviously, does not believe).

We don’t get any answers as to how or even whether that might be true here, though. He flees along with his village’s medicine seller (seemingly someone who’s tapped in about the existence of the modern world outside the village) and the episode ends on an interesting note. The medicine seller gives Yuru a key to a socket in front of the twin statues guarding the village. These, promptly, are brought to life as Yuru’s own Daemons, simply named Left and Right but taking the form of a buff demon man and woman.

There’s a lot to unpack here. The atmosphere of sudden, intense violence when the soldiers invade is classic Arakawa. They are downright ruthless, and the Daemon-wielder they have with them, Gabby, is honestly even worse, commanding her inky Pac-Man monster to chomp most of the village to death. All together I was a little surprised by how much I liked this since I”ve never been a huge Arakawa stan (I liked Fullmetal Alchemist just fine as a teenager, but not so much that I felt the need to seek out her other work, and I liked other things a lot better around that same time).

This show is slated for two consecutive cours and the pacing and plotting here is snappy enough that I’m really interested to see if I can keep it up for 24 whole episodes.

GHOST CONCERT : missing songs: An impressively incoherent full-speed trainwreck from the brain of Symphogear creator Agematsu Noriyasu. Agematsu has a lot of post-Symphogear stuff that is vaguely like this, in that they, like Ghost Concert, are concerned with the intersection of music (and artistic expression more generally) and technology. Ghost Concert piles a near-future sci fi setting where non-AI music is illegal on top of that, and then further adds a Fate-esque twist where the main character is a medium who can see and be possessed by the spirits of famous historical figures.

There is, suffice to say, a lot going on here, and if any of it made any kind of sense it might be great. As it is, well, I did already call it a trainwreck but honestly that’s underselling it a little. I have almost no idea what the different parts of this show have to do with each other, which given that we’re only a single episode in leaves me a bit flabbergasted.

What I will give the series is that it has pretty impressive action animation and direction—the directing here handled by Jinbou Masato and animated by a team at the infamous Studio ENGI—but aside from the fact that I don’t really expect that to last, it’s hard to latch on to empty calorie goodies like cool explosions, aspect ratio-changing AMV sequences, and glowing VFX during the fight scenes when you have no real idea of what’s happening or why. The episode’s actual plot is bizarrely vague, something about our main girl Aiba Seria being possessed by the ghost of Cleopatra and turned into an….evil slut, I guess? (As a side note it drives me crazy when stuff characterizes Cleopatra this way, but that’s more of a pet peeve than anything.) Possessed by Cleopatra and summoning the phantoms of Caesar and Mark Antony for help, she fights a blue-haired girl and a priest for vague reasons. There is singing. After the fight she has a massive row with her friends who I guess did not know she was some kind of medium? It’s all so hurried and haphazard that it barely registers as a story at all.

If nothing else, this at least seems to make the argument that the Symphogear guy doesn’t like genAI. I guess that’s nice, but it’s agreeable in the same way a Macklemore song is. Sure, the general sentiment is nice and some of the technical aspects are impressive. It’s still not anything you’d really ever listen to of your own volition.

SNOWBALL EARTH: I think even just a couple of years ago, I would’ve talked myself into watching a few more episodes of this on the basis that it “has potential” or something, but to be honest, an interesting premise alone a show does not make. We spend this whole first episode getting to that premise in the first place, so even if it did, I have not exactly been rewarded for my 20 minutes here.

The real death knell for the show is just its tone. We want this to be a serious thing about a lonely boy and his obligation to save the world with the help of his giant robot friend and we want it to be sad when the giant robot sacrifices himself at the end of the episode on some Iron Giant shit. But we also want this to be a goofy parody with a lot of knee-slapping corny humor that’s basically just a string of jokes that people made about Shinji in the early 2000s. It commits to neither so the two halves work against each other and the result is a show that mostly just pissed me off. This thing has the audacity to reference the original Gundam in its opening episode which if you’re going to do that, you better have more to show for it than this.

Petals of Reincarnation: Well this was really stupid! I’d say I don’t necessarily mean that in a bad way but, honestly, here I sort of do. It’s about half and half, I guess.

With the constant deluge of narou-kei bullshit I honestly welcome something that’s an edgelord revenge fantasy in a more direct and honestly more imaginative way. Granted, the bar is in the ground so “imaginative” means we’re doing the “powers borrowed from great figures of history” shtick. Fate is usually held to have invented this, but in terms of competence and general responsibility with its historical characters I am expecting something more along the lines of Nobuna-Gun. (This show is where the “Hitler as a little anime boy with a sharingan” image that’s been kicking around the internet lately is from, for reference, if you’ve seen that.)

I won’t go into the events of the narrative because they’re not important, or, honestly, even interesting. But the fights in this first episode were pretty cool, especially for a new studio (BENTEN Film, supposedly mostly ex-Gainax of Fukushima staff) and a team helmed by a not particularly acclaimed director (the Grendizer U guy is doing this). The show has what is for better or wores an extremely distinctive visual style, with some very, very, very bold color choices. Downright garish ones at times. Add in some SHAFT-y dialogue screens and such and you get a series that has the air of being distinctly the budget version of a couple other shows. There are way worse things to be, even if that’s hardly high praise. And the female lead, herself named Haito le Buffett [Maruoka Wakana], proves that if you make Miyamoto Musashi a girl she will always be the coolest character in the room. (Although this version doesn’t hold a candle to Fate‘s, obviously.)

The main thing holding me back here is that the main character is a vacuous edgelord and I kinda hate him in the wrong way. We’ll see how much juice he can get out of Mega Man’ing everyone else’s powers, but honestly how much more of this I watch is going to be down to how cool the action scenes are vs. how annoying I find him and the other characters. Other than Haito, none have left a particularly positive impression so far. Between this, Ghost Concert, and Killed Again, Mr. Detective (which I did not write about here, because I frankly had very little to say), it’s at least proving to be an interesting season for shows that are just very odd above all else. If you like those, you may get some enjoyment out of these. Otherwise, well, there’s always this option:

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 UMAMUSUME: CINDERELLA GRAY – Episode 22 – “Gray Phantom”

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 can be watched, legally and for free, on It’s Anime By REMOW on Youtube. A link is provided below for your convenience.

Native Dancer was an American thoroughbred racehorse. Without getting so into the nitty-gritty that this turns into a column on actual horseracing, the very short version is that he was one of the best. It’s hard to beat 21 victories in a 22-race career (although some have done so). To list just one accolade, the AP’s list of the best racehorses of the 20th century places him at third, behind only Man O’ War and Secretariat. For our purposes, though, his actual career is less important than two other things you need to keep in mind about Dancer. The first is that he had a nickname, the Gray Ghost. The second is that one of his children was Dancing Cap, a horse who, himself, we are primarily interested in here because of one of his children. You’re reading a column about him right now: Oguri Cap.

There is little reason to suspect that any version of Native Dancer ever existed in Umamusume. In general, lineage plays far less of a role in Umamusume than it does in actual horse racing, and the closest Umamusume has ever come to acknowledging any of the legendary racers who fill in the strange, fuzzy area outside of its immediate characters of focus is the vague insinuation that Manhattan Cafe’s mysterious “friend” might be the metaphorical or literal ghost of Sunday Silence. (As always, I recommend IronicLark’s blog if you want Umamusume analysis from someone who really knows their horseracing as opposed to someone with a mere passing interest in it like myself.) Nonetheless, watching this episode today, I thought about Native Dancer and his nickname. I have absolutely no way of proving this, but I think one of the most important aspects of this episode, and indeed the episode itself, takes its name from that epithet. In doing so, Cinderella Gray asks broader questions about what Umamusume actually is. Not as a franchise but as a story.

First, though, let’s pick up where we left off last week. The back half of the Arima Kinen is, to put it as simply as possible, nuts. After entering her Zone and blitzing past most of the playing field, Tamamo Cross duels it out with Oguri Cap for first place in the final leg. I repeat myself, but it’s worth repeating, it’s not merely that there are impressive action scenes here—though there definitely are—it’s that the raw emotion on display here is a very rare thing.

In literal terms, what happens here is the race’s four strongest competitors angling for the lead. Super Creek puts up a surprisingly strong performance, banking on pure stamina as opposed to anything flashier. Dicta Striker’s shotgun final spurt is a spectacle to behold as well, earning her probably the single most impressive cut of animation in the entire episode and deservedly putting her name in the conversation with the other greats here. Between the fierce showdown between rivals and the fireworks animation, I fall back on my old standby comparison: this is essentially a battle shonen anime, and the earlier half of this episode comes complete with plenty of “oh my god, the ultimate technique!”-style commentary from characters like Symboli Rudolf and Sensuke Fujii. This stuff is fantastic on even its worst day, and if that were all the episode was, it would still be great.

But, let’s be serious here. One of two umamusume are going to win this race. It’s either going to be Tamamo Cross or Oguri Cap. One of Cinderella Gray‘s favorite storytelling techniques is to dot an important race episode with little dollops of backstory or reflection from the runners. Previously, this has been used to characterize Oguri’s rivals. In the penultimate episode of the first cour, Tamamo Cross got that treatment, where the show strongly suggested that despite a thwarted crossing of the paths when they were both children, Tama and Oguri were, in some sense, always meant to run together. This episode reinforces that connection, but also reminds us of something else.

We see flashbacks to Oguri Cap’s childhood, a tiny gray puffball of a kidlin enraptured with the lightning-fast running she sees on TV. Her own legs, though, are weak, and her mother1 bandages them as she tries to stand and move around. The young Oguri asks her mother if she’ll ever run like the girls on TV, and her mother hugs her tight.

Of course she will.

And as Oguri’s mind turns to her gratitude toward her mother, it flows to everyone who’s helped get her where she is. The Kasamatsu gang, Fujimasa March, Belno, Jo, Musaka, every one of her rivals, all of whom have asked her, why do you run? Who are you aiming for?

And the answer, of course, is that Oguri isn’t trying to surpass anyone but herself. To whom running at all is a miracle, something fought for rather than given. She’s doing it because she loves it.

As soon as she realizes this, it all clicks into place, and we get to the episode’s namesake. The payoff, the gleefully cool-as-hell ultimate technique, Oguri Cap’s very own Zone.

A ghost, one might say.

Oguri and Tama continue running the final stretch neck to neck. But we actually see only relatively little of the literal events of the race from here on out. Instead, we’re transported to an emotion-driven image space, where the two talk. They reminisce, Tamamo Cross speaks of races come and gone and races that will never come, wistfully talking about how she owes Obey Your Master a beating at the next Japan Cup. But, she knows this won’t ever happen. Together, still in the shared mind space, Oguri and Tama begin running again. Tamamo Cross complains about how short the race is, even here, the finish line is in sight.

Nothing, not in sports, not in life, lasts forever. Every story has an end. There are no perpetual dawns, and any time the Sun rotates around our humble planet, it’s one day closer to going out forever. Here, in what they both know is their last dance together, Tamamo Cross and Oguri Cap bond for one final time over what keeps them going in spite of that, their love of life. Running more specifically, sure, but it is worth seriously understanding that finity and transience are two of Cinderella Gray‘s main thematic ideas.2 This, which is also what I was alluding to at the top of this column, is the first time we see those themes really underscored in a major way. It will not be the last.

Tamamo Cross’s story ends in defeat. Oguri Cap, reborn within the Gray Phantom, manages to edge over the finish line by just the slightest bit. This is not a sad ending, the victory and defeat are less important, perhaps, than who they are experienced alongside.

After the race, they have a talk that is heart-achingly sweet, and they embrace each other. To paraphrase the great Miko Iino, I am someone who enjoys hugs probably 50-70% more than the average person, this one here is one of the best anime hugs ever. I’m honestly jealous. Put it on the accolade board.

The end of the Arima Kinen is not a happy story for everybody. Dicta Striker gets properly fired up when she notices Oguri entering her Zone, but, the combined blood loss from her injury last episode and perhaps just general fatigue mean her body betrays her, and her legs give out as she attempts another shotgun surge. She still takes third, with Super Creek behind her taking fourth. Or at least, she would have taken fourth were she not ruled to be obstructing another racer’s movements after the fact, disqualifying her. It’s sneaky as hell to slip in the start of Creek’s upcoming arc here. But the nature of how Umamusume is written means it’s also a necessity, and it’s handled pretty well, juxtaposing as it does Creek’s embarrassment and loss with the overwhelming warmth of the rest of the episode’s final third.

(There are some other, smaller good bits as well, such as Symboli Rudolf heaping praise on Oguri, a really nice followup from that conversation she and Maruzensky had back in the first cour.)

That warmth truly is the dominant feeling. In what is by now a relative rarity for the series, we get an actual winning concert performance in place of the episode’s usual credits. Oguri Cap, Tamamo Cross, and Dicta Striker—patched up after her injuries, including breaking a tooth! which is perhaps why the concert seems to take place that night instead of immediately after the race—perform “Next Frontier”, one of Umamusume‘s standards, and a swelling, triumphant note to close out the episode.

Except there’s actually one more thing. After the concert, Oguri Cap takes the time to thank everyone who’s inspired her, who made her the racer she is today. She thanks her trainers, her rivals, and the crowd. That includes us.

Overall, “Gray Phantom” probably surpasses “Wild Joker” as Cinderella Gray’s best episode, and it’s one of the best in Umamusume on the whole. It also got me thinking, though, about the series’ overall nature. For a while now, I’ve been workshopping an as-yet unpublished article about a different piece of the Umamusume franchise. In that article, as I am about to here, I propose that despite its ostensibly “silly” or “very anime” premise, Umamusume is actually part of a very long lineage of work that seeks to anthropomorphize the minds and lives of non-human animals. I don’t have an answer as to whether that instinct is selfish, a bad habit of seeing all things as reflections of ourselves, or selfless, a genuine desire to connect with minds very different from our own.

Regardless of which side you fall on, it is fascinating to me that Oguri Cap, in some form or another, continues to inspire people 33 years after the end of his career and 15 after his death. (To float another conspiracy theory, I have wondered if the real Oguri’s epithet of “The Idol Horse” is how the premise of Umamusume was come up with in the first place.) If I can show my hand a little, I do think there’s something beautiful about the ideas that Cinderella Gray puts forward here, even the sad ones. Ultimately, though, these questions are a bit beyond the scope of this column, and I’ll save any harder arguments for another day. Tamamo Cross’s story is over, and while Oguri Cap’s will not last forever either, we still have a good, long time with her, assuming the anime gets renewed for another proper season (here’s hoping).

This isn’t the end of this season just yet, however. See you next week, umadacchi.

Now where have I heard that before?

1: It’s interesting that what little we know about Oguri Cap’s mother in Cinderella Gray doesn’t really fit the profile of either of the real Oguri Cap’s parents. Nonetheless, I usually refer to her as Narubi in my notes on the rare occasion she shows up, since it’s shorter than writing “Oguri Cap’s mom” every time.

2: There is a reason that, despite being “just” the last time we will see these two specific characters compete, this whole scene feels an awful lot like a depiction of some kind of afterlife. Tamamo Cross thus joins the storied ranks of sports anime characters who are being treated vaguely as though they’ve died when they’ve actually just retired or graduated or what have you. Sempai will be furthering her education, no doubt.

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 UMAMUSUME: CINDERELLA GRAY – Episode 19 – “A Zone Yet Unknown”

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 can be watched, legally and for free, on It’s Anime By REMOW on Youtube. A link is provided below for your convenience. The descriptive blurbs for these articles are taken from those of REMOW’s Youtube uploads.

Hello, Umadacchi. This week’s column arrives to you several days late. In my defense, I spent most of the past weekend being jabbed full of about a thousand vaccines I was behind on, and have been a real mess in the days since. I’m still not fully recovered, but I figure I’m well enough to do a little light writing. Luckily, this is a fairly light episode. There’s some important character work done here, to be sure. I also want to touch on the visual aspects since the first half of this episode is brilliantly-directed, but compared to the adrenaline burn of an actual race episode, we can afford to relax a little here.

Someone else who could maybe stand to relax is Oguri Cap herself. Stuck with the bronze medal in last week’s episode, the Gray Monster has entered a period of genuine burnout and self-doubt. While her chibi slumping about is pretty funny to witness, it is also genuinely sad to see our protagonist lose her confidence in such a major way.

It’s not subtle, either. Her classmates pick up on it pretty easily, since she’s been doing things like walking into walls and whatnot. The concerned include Mejiro Ardan, Sakura Chiyono O, and Dicta Striker, who Oguri is slated to race against in the upcoming Arima Kinen. Black Ale, still evidently a bit bitter over her loss to Oguri a whole anime season ago, is less sympathetic, but perhaps describing her as a baby or what-have-you is just the unruly horsegirl’s way of showing concern. (Probably not, but hey.)

I would love to know how many of you thought Black Ale would ever come up in this column again.

Oguri’s problem is that she feels that the two rivals who have bested her, Tamamo Cross and Obey Your Master, have something she doesn’t. Worse, she feels like she almost knows what that is, but not quite. Oguri isn’t the only one frustrated by her failure, either. Belno Light blames herself and, indeed, this is the most Belno-heavy episode in a good while, as she spends a large chunk of it trying to figure out what she can do to help Oguri train for the Arima Kinen. When Oguri meets Belno and Musaka to discuss the race, she seems almost disgusted with herself for what she says, but she’s honest nonetheless: she doesn’t think she can win.

We get a nice bit of scene interweaving here as Oguri’s rivals prepare for the clash at the Arima Kinen in their own ways. Dicta Striker runs, Super Creek boldly proclaims that with her trainer beside her, she can’t lose no matter who she’s running against, and Tamamo Cross….seems oddly reticent about the entire thing. She asks to talk to her trainer, it’s clearly serious, but what exactly is said is left as a mystery this week.

It’s Tamamo Cross who’s clearly on Oguri’s mind as she explains that, without that something that she and Obey have but Oguri doesn’t, she can’t imagine winning. This is more serious, even, than it might sound. Umamusume has a long history of dialing in on the mental state of its athletes as an indicator—maybe the indicator—of their performance. If Oguri Cap can’t conceive of herself winning, it’s difficult to believe she actually will. She’d hardly be the first character in this series to be psyched out by her own regrets.

Talking with Belno, Musaka ponders the intricacies of the Zone, in a very nicely-directed conversation that takes a SHAFT-y visualized-dialogue approach to keep things interesting. The result is some of the nicest looking moments in the entire series, and also a very telling one.

Musaka doesn’t entirely understand the Zone either—it’s been all but said that nobody really does—but what’s certain is that it’s the rarified territory of the racers who define their times. If Oguri Cap is shut out from this exclusive group, what can she really do?

Well, she can train. Musaka, who hilariously comments that this “isn’t an anime”, rejects the notion that the Zone is some kind of cheat or sure-shot victory card. Indeed, over the course of the rest of the episode it’s clear that his main strategy here is reigniting Oguri’s passion for the sport in the first place. If she can remember why she’s running at all, maybe all of this will seem less insurmountable.

To that end, this is the obligatory “everyone from Kasamatsu shows up” episode of the cour. And it’s genuinely great to see all of these characters again, especially Fujimasa March, last seen in the adaptation of “The Mermaid Left Behind” that was the first episode of this cour, and Kitahara Jo, fresh off from flunking the URA national trainer exams. (Better luck next year, Jo.) Musaka’s strategy seems, by the end of the episode, like it’s more or less worked. Oguri’s back in good spirits because she’s been reunited with and training with her hometown friends. There’s even a terribly cute moment where March and Oguri challenge each other in the exact same way they did back toward the start of the first cour, with Oguri directly calling back to her pose and “I won’t lose to you!” declaration. But there’s a lingering question over the entire thing: does that actually mean she can win the Arima Kinen?

We’ll find out on Sunday, I suppose.

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 UMAMUSUME: CINDERELLA GRAY – EPISODE 17 – “THE JAPAN CUP”

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 can be watched, legally and for free, on It’s Anime By REMOW on Youtube. A link is provided below for your convenience. The descriptive blurbs for these articles are taken from those of REMOW’s Youtube uploads.

We open with Oguri on the practice track, remembering the sting of defeat at the Tenno Sho. Today, she swears to herself, is the day she closes that distance. Is it really? Can our ash-haired champion make a comeback?

One of the lovely things about the relatively curt episode titles that Cinderella Gray has used so far is that they point out certain reflections and repetitions within the story. Each of the episodes we’ve had which are directly named after a race—of which this is the third—have marked major inflection points in the series. “The Japanese Derby” showed us Oguri at her most dominant, a competitor so good that her absence overshadowed the race that was actually run. “The Fall Tenno Sho” focused on Tamamo Cross, Oguri’s strongest rival thus far and the first since her transfer to actually defeat her. This episode, then, seems to promise at least the possibility of a comeback story for Oguri.

In typical Oguri fashion, she’s not content to simply run. She wants to try something new and a bit daring. Specifically, she asks Musaka if she can run in the pace chaser style as opposed to staying farther back as she usually does. Her idea here being that Tamamo Cross mainly won due to being able to spurt farther ahead on the last leg of the Tenno Sho. If she’s in a better position, Oguri reasons, she’ll have a better shot at actually outpacing her. It’s a pretty sizable switchup, but Roppei agrees. Again, the elements for a comeback are all here.

Except, of course, the fact that Tamamo Cross and Oguri Cap are not the only two people running in this race. A walkout sequence quickly brings in all the competitors we met or met again last week, saving two in particular for last: Tamamo Cross herself, and Obey Your Master, who meet for the first time on their way out to the field.

Obey, apparently not above taking the low road, makes a psychological play. We know from earlier in the series that Tamtam is normally pretty nervous before a race, but, as with the Tenno Sho, she seems calm here. (We don’t know who exactly, but Tamamo Cross was on the phone with someone, evidently someone important to her, earlier in the episode. Perhaps these two things are related.) So it certainly seems like she’s in great shape both physically and mentally, until Obey tries getting under her skin. It’s not hard to conclude, following on from last week, that Obey is deliberately attempting to psyche her biggest competitor out. She’s surprisingly good at it, too, initially leading with a bit of fake buddy-buddy talk that Tama immediately catches on to, only to hit her with this.

Mood down?

This doesn’t seem to properly rattle Tamamo Cross, but it definitely at least ticks her off. A more stabilizing presence though is, unsurprisingly, Oguri Cap herself, and it’s cute to see the two of them do the whole “I won’t lose to you!” rival bit.

Once the race starts, Oguri actually seems to be doing rather well right up until she finds herself next to Michelle My Baby. Michelle, being American, does not have the sense of decorum most of the Japanese racers—Oguri included—are necessarily used to. What I mean by this is that when Oguri finds herself in a spot Michelle wants, Michelle has no problem attempting to take it by literally elbowing her out of the way. (Similar things play out up and down the pack, including between Ellerslie Pride and Gold City towards its back half. Noteworthy, as the two got a bit of banter in before the start of the race.)

Aside from being pretty borderline in terms of whether or not it’s actually allowed, this is also terrible news for Oguri in general. Already lower on stamina than she’d like to be given that she’s pace chasing (and thus having to run harder to stay near the top of the pack), Michelle’s rough tactics sap her of most of her strength entirely, and she falls back to the second half of the pack in the last few minutes of the episode.

It’s a pretty disheartening showing for our protagonist, and it’s hard to imagine her coming back from it. Though, as Musaka points out, the race isn’t over ’til it’s over.

At around this point, Toni Bianca, the favorite of the overseas racers and, as we established last week, really the smart money to win this thing in general, stops playing around. Bianca has up to this point been biding her time in the dead middle of the pack, so this is her going for the win. As she does so, she remarks that Tamamo Cross—coming in from the outside to avoid the physical contact stuff from the foreign racers—must be very arrogant to think that that kind of recklessness is going to help her against someone like Toni.

Here’s the thing though, it absolutely does help her against Toni. For the second time, we see lightning strike the racecourse.

About “the Zone” (almost always written in quotation marks, from what I’ve seen): it’s a natural question to ask whether what we’re seeing is “real” within the context of the fiction—regardless of whether anyone who’s not an elite racer can actually see it—or if this is visual metaphor presented for the sake of us, the audience. I think, though, it’s an imperfect and incorrect question. Umamusume likes to play coy with whether or not “magic” (or at least something sufficiently close to it) exists in its universe beyond the obvious conceit of the horsegirls themselves. I think the honest answer is that leaving it open to interpretation actually makes these scenes more compelling. Is this merely Tamamo Cross breathing rarified air, giving it 110% with whatever powerful but still mundane techniques she’s learned, or is there actually some kind of Horsegirl Domain Expansion thing that she has access to? I personally lean more toward the former, since I think it’s largely more interesting. But I also admit that there’s part of me that practically vibrates in my seat at the thought of umamusume with superpowers, so it’s not a clear-cut case of one being better than the other. Hitting both sides of that internal divide is one more stylistic thing that makes Cinderella Gray so great.

Everything, then, seems primed for Tamamo Cross to take another G1, which would put her at a ridiculous seven such wins in a row. Here’s a question though, about the “Zone” and about Cinderella Gray in general; is there any reason at all to believe Tamamo Cross is the only umamusume who can do that?

And that’s the note we end the episode on! Tamamo Cross a streak of lightning across the track, suddenly staked to the ground by a sinister, all-seeing eye. What the finale of the race holds, we can only guess. See you next week, umadacchi.

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 The Weekly Orbit

The Weekly Orbit [8/4/25]

The Weekly Orbit is a (sometimes) weekly column collecting and refining my more casual anime- and manga-related thoughts from the previous week. Mostly, these are taken from my tumblr blog, and assume familiarity with the works covered. Be wary of spoilers!

Happy Monday! These are probably going to be going up on Mondays for the rest of the season, provided my energy levels and outside obligations don’t interfere. We’ve got a long one today, with a couple doubles, so I hope you’re ready to read all about the anime I’ve been loving (or even just kinda liking) this week.

Anime – Seasonal

My Dress-Up Darling, Season 2 – Episodes 3-5

This show is so warm. I love the unifying theme between these episodes; cosplay on the boundary of gender expression. Amane’s cosplaying is something he stuck to even as his ex-girlfriend found it creepy and offputting (his cheerful “so I dumped her!” line when explaining this is absolutely hysterical. Queen shit). A contrast is drawn between that attitude, which in the world of the show—I’d like to think in the real world as well, but who can quite say—is quickly fading, and the present reality of Gojo and Marin’s classmates, who both support and are enthusiastic about Marin’s crossplaying for their school festival event. Episode five continues along this path as Gojo has to learn to ask for help while preparing the perfect crossplay for Marin, a storyline that promises to come to a head next episode. I’ve honestly been loving every second of Dress-Up Darling since it came back, I don’t know if I realized I missed it that much.

Ruri Rocks – Episode 4

A more character-driven and comedic episode from the mineralogical slice of life series this week. Still a great one, though, and I particularly appreciate how much of this episode is devoted to teaching Ruri (and by extension the audience) to understand the interconnectedness of place. Grains of sand in a river were once on a mountain. Over the course of millions of years, time and tide have eroded them, and just as natural forces moved them downstream to where Ruri and Nagi collected them, so too is Ruri herself slowly changing from an impatient gemstone-hunter to someone who truly understands the scope and scale of the natural world. Of course, this episode subtly suggests that in doing so she might be moving away from her previous group of friends in the process. But I can’t imagine they’ll stay removed from Ruri’s geological adventures for very long.

Gachiakuta – Episode 3 & 4

Full credit, I liked this a lot more than episode two, and honestly a fair bit more than episode one as well. My feelings are still pretty mixed overall, but I might actually stick with this for a while longer? Depends on how circumstance shakes out. More on that below.

So, straightforward positives. There’s some pretty neat (if not necessarily super original, but that doesn’t really matter for something like this) worldbuilding stuff in this episode. The dynamic between Enjin and Rudo is a very classic somewhat strained mentor and student sort of thing, and I think it works pretty well. We’re introduced to our main monsters-of-the-week here, and Rudo meets a new character, Nijiku Zanka [Matsuoka Yoshitsugu].

My main problem here is still just with the adaptation itself. Politely, it’s a bit lacking in visual urgency, and the muddy color palette—while appropriate, given the subject matter—doesn’t exactly make most of this stuff pop. There’s a nice ambiance to the city itself, but outside of the backgrounds I just don’t love how the show looks overall. Impolitely, it’s giving a bit of Sabikui Bisco. I do somewhat question this production’s ability to stay afloat over the course of two consecutive cours. That said, the Rudo / Zanka fight scene was nice. So maybe this is being planned out better than I’m giving it credit for. Definitionally, there’s no real way to know until we get there.

About that fight scene. I liked the quick subversion of the usual cliche where new characters meet and fight before getting to know each other. Rudo actually tries talking to Zanka first, remembering some advice from his father figure Regto as he attempts to talk Zanka down. This works until Rudo tries smiling at him (long story) and is so bad at it that Zanka assumes he’s being mocked, and we thus get back to the usual fight setup. It’s a fun and funny way to work with the expected beats of something like this. And, in Zanka’s defense, Rudo’s “smile” looks like this:

The whole….bit with the plunger, which I am just not going to describe in detail because I dislike toilet humor, is, well, I’d call it the episode’s low point, certainly. The episode ends with Zanka and Rudo kinda-sorta reconciling in Enjin’s jeep as Rudo officially joins the cleaners. Also introduced here briefly is a character whose name I don’t think we get from the episode itself but who Anilist tells me is named Riyou [Hanamori Yumiri]. She is, I believe, the final member of the core cast, and our token Girl. I didn’t get much of an impression of her off of her brief scene here, but she seems neat. (I am perhaps unsurprisingly always a little biased toward the women in battle shonen. We’ll see how Gachiakuta scores in that regard.)

Also, she spends a bunch of time touching Rudo’s hair, which, huge tangent here, is very true to life. Having been on both ends of this—I’m transfem, if you’re a new reader—girls just do love hair. We’re fascinated by it, I’m not sure what it is, it’s just a very interesting thing in a lot of people.

In any case, yeah, Gachiakuta has probably avoided my chopping block for the time being. This is actually slightly annoying, because I was planning to pick up another show—Bad Girl—in the free slot I’d have. But, I may just end up dropping Kamitsubaki City instead. That show, unlike this one which I’m just a bit mixed on, is just genuinely very bad, an incoherent mess at best. And I’m not sure how worth it it is to keep watching just to hear V.W.P.’s songs. (Also, Takopi’s Original Sin ended this week—keep scrolling for more on that—so I’ll have some extra time there, too.)

I’m rambling. If I can make two more quick minor gripes before I end the section on episode three (which has gotten oddly long by the standards of the posts I usually transfer over here), the bit at the start with the old woman who looks like an old man is super cringy, and the episode really had to work to win me back after that. Similarly, the bit about Rudo being able to turn any object he touches into a vital instrument just feels sort of….I don’t know, a little much? Give the guy some limits!

These minor complaints aside, episode three was solid! I’m happy to report much the same is true of episode four, and I think at this point Gachiakuta has fully won me over.

Conceptually, four is a very simple episode. We’re getting Rudo acclimated to the Cleaners as an organization and as allies, so he’s introduced to a few of them and accompanies one of them—Riyou, in fact—on a job to fight some “small” trash beasts.

Of course, said beasts turn out to be anything but small. Even the relatively little ones are iron, skull-faced antelopes that can easily bowl a man over, and the largest in the group is a massive wedge-headed thing that takes all of Riyou’s power and attention. (When she destroys it, she finds that it’s mysteriously powered by a Vital Instrument not unlike the Cleaners’ own, thus nicely setting up a future plot thread.) Riyou is the real star of the show in this episode, and there are some real shades of Kill la Kill with her, given her bombastic design compared to everyone else and the fact that she fights with a giant scissor blade. (Which she mostly wields with her feet? Interesting decisions are being made here.)

Her death blow against the giant trash beast at the end of the episode is probably the best the series has looked so far. Hopefully it continues to stay the course in that regard. All around, the past two episodes have done a lot to persuade me to stick with the series.

CITY The Animation – Episode 4 & 5

Episode four is our first that ends with an actual cliffhanger, thus bringing something of a semblance of an actual, overarching plot to CITY. Regardless of whatever’s in that locket, I think the show will probably continue to be just as wildly zany as it has been, so I’m not too concerned about the (very slight) change in direction.

What of episode five you ask? Total! Sensory! Overload! In the absolute best way possible.

It’s difficult to nail down using written language what CITY mostly says purely visually, but that’s especially so here. This episode’s bursting-at-the-seams color, bonkers animation, and general technical wizardry really have to be seen to be believed. In terms of story we mostly follow Nagumo and the still-unnamed “Nice Man” from a few episodes back. The how is secondary to the what; through a series of zany misadventures, Nagumo and the Nice Guy find themselves having to descend through a tower of increasingly silly obstacles in order to escape. What are they trying to escape? Too much hospitality of course, although Nagumo regrets her decision to try leaving almost as soon as she attempts it, and thus tries to lose on each floor. This makes it all the funnier when the floors mostly solve themselves, starting with a magician whose tricks turn on him and just getting weirder and more surreal from there.

The what, it must be stressed, is also secondary to something else; the presentation. About halfway through the episode, CITY zones itself off into multiple screens, like the picture-in-picture mode on a digital TV, and it just keeps doing this until the episode is following essentially the entire cast of the show up to this point, showcasing events from every possible angle at once before finally breaking down even further into a morass of blobs containing one or two characters each.

In its final scene these blobs finally knit themselves back together as Nagumo, The Nice Man, and Wako (also along for the ride) finally leave the tower only to discover that a huge party has sprung up on the tower’s front lawn.

It’s joyous, full of life, and just an absolutely mindbendingly gorgeous work of art. With this episode, CITY passes through any mere “anime of the season” conversations, demonstrating that it is not content to just hold the torch of its stylistic predecessor Nichijou; it wants to build on and surpass it.

Call of The Night, Season 2 – Episode 5

If there’s one thing Call of The Night seems really keen on, it’s complicating its central metaphor.

Here, continuing the flashback from last week’s episode, Kabura learns from Haru about how she has to hunt on her own. Becoming a vampire, Call of the Night suggests, comes with its own set of rules and obligations, but we don’t actually get to see much of Kabura learning from Haru here.

Instead, Haru leaves Kabura behind. Requesting in the process that she care for her born-vampire child, revealed to be Nazuna. It’s both fascinating and absolutely heartbreaking. This poor woman, someone who spent much of her life cloistered off from other people, has now been abandoned again, explaining both her generally cold demeanor and her self-professed habit of trying to steal potential offspring from other vampires.

Or does it explain all that? Again, it’s just complications on complications here. There’s no easy map for Kabura and Nazuna’s unusual relationship, and at some point it almost feels like the story is trying to actively frustrate any applicability. If you wanted to be uncharitable, you could write all of this off as an around-the-bend way for Ko to still be Nazuna’s perfectly heteronormative first love.

But this, of course, brushes off the complicated and compassionate writing of Kabura herself. Late in the episode, after Kabura has told Nazuna that she hates looking at her because her face brings back painful memories, Ko calls her bluff, describing Kabura’s demeanor as concerned and almost motherly. Kabura admits he’s not entirely wrong, but she, and Call of the Night itself, swat Ko’s “mom” label away as restrictive and insulting. He doesn’t know her, and really, neither do we. At the same time, she ends her conversation with Ko by warmly telling him to build a good relationship with Nazuna. Later on, Nazuna herself seems to know, both from how Kabura always did her hair and how—in a flashback not explicitly from anyone’s point of view in particular—Kabura would hug her tight. Crying for her lost love, sure, but an embrace is an embrace.

All but said outright is that these two facts about Kabura; both her endless brokenhearted frustration with Haru, and the resentment she feels toward Nazuna as a result, and the fact that she nonetheless does genuinely care about Nazuna, are two facets of a very complex person who has lived an equally complex life. (And there is some implication that the story Kabura tells Ko and Nazuna isn’t the whole truth anyway.)

The episode—and thus this short arc about Kabura—ends with an application of that not just to Kabura but to everyone. A short comedic sequence aside, the episode’s remaining runtime is eaten up by Ko wondering what in the vampire-hating detective Anko’s past could have led her to such extremes. There’s a cut to Anko herself, stalking the hospital where Kabura works and barging into the derelict room where Kabura had kept all of her memorabilia from when she was human. Anko sighs with frustration; the room has been emptied. Kabura has already thrown her past away, Anko can’t catch her out either.

Dan Da Dan, Season 2 – Episodes 2 & 3

A huge step up from the second season’s premiere. Evil Eye’s backstory in episode two is particularly well done, and I also love the fight scenes in episode three. Dandadan truly feels like it’s back now and I can’t wait to be fully caught up.

Necronomico & The Cosmic Horror Show – Episode 5

Still mixed on this one, but I think if the show continues on this track I’ll be fully won over before too long. A bit against my own wishes, even.

The obvious “problem” with this show is Eita, right? Eita is just not that interesting of a villain. He definitely sucks, don’t get me wrong, and it’s funny and a bit cathartic when he malds about the game (a twisted quiz show in this episode) being rigged or whatever. But he sucks in such a vapid, air-sucking way that watching him ham it up for the camera during the rest of the episode is exhausting instead of fun. Even the reveal that he went to the guy he magic’d up a car crash on in the hospital and literally yanked his life support, normally the kind of thing that’s so over the top it’d loop back around to being interesting, just comes off as an attempt to gas a fundamentally lame villain. At one point, Gua (the redheaded old god) says that in another life he “might’ve shaped history”, which is a hilariously stupid thing to say about a guy who’s basically an evil version of Ninja.

I do sort of think the show might be gearing up to get rid of him, though, because all he really accomplished this episode was making everyone else angrier at him than they were already. Then again, this genre loves its utterly vile villains, so maybe I’m being overly optimistic.

In the positives column, you’ve got basically everything else. The actual premise of this episode is pretty neat. The idea of a quiz show where all the answers are about the contestants and so what you’re really sacrificing is either goodwill (if the question is about someone else) or your own dignity (if it’s about you) to score points is interesting, much moreso than the tedious lateral thinking puzzle that kicks the episode off, thank god we got past that quickly. Eita shafts another player again, in this case Kanna, but she manages to bounce back by answering a question about herself. In the process, she reveals to the other contestants that she was horribly abused as a child and ran away from home when she was younger, which is also why she lives by herself (how she does that, on a streamer’s earnings, is a question left unanswered). Then at the end of the episode, Miko gives them a pretty good put-down:

At which point they reveal they’ve been livestreaming this entire event, so Kanna did in fact just reveal her domestic abuse to the world. Pretty harsh!

She gets something of a silver lining in that the “Lord of All Things” (I don’t know my Cthulu Mythos very well. I think that’s Azatoth?) intervenes to help her during the quiz itself, and seems to be favoring her in general. I really hope this plot—including some of Cthulu’s more ambiguous comments about it—goes somewhere, because it’s easily the most interesting thing introduced this episode. If I’m writing a wishlist, Kanna turning heel and murdering Eita would be amazing.

Speaking of amazing things, the episode ends on the reveal that a witch hunter from the Vatican is now aware of the Cosmic Horror Show. I think this has the distinction of being the first absolutely fucking hilarious appearance of the Catholic Church in an unexpected place in anime since Pope Leo XIV took office. I’m sure he’s thrilled.

Takopi’s Original Sin – Episode 6 (Finale)

They really got me with this last episode man, I’m not even going to try to pretend otherwise.

Takopi ends on a bittersweet note and, honestly, essentially where it started. In removing himself not just from Shizuka’s life but from everyone on Earth’s life, Takopi leaves her with nothing. Nothing except the time they spent together—now buried in some deep, deep well of the unconscious that just a bit more timeline-shifting-proof than the rest of her mind—some hugs, and the idea that talking to people is a good way to get to know them. Kids shit, basically, but it’s enough for Takopi to finally improve Shizuka and Marina’s lives, even if just a little bit.

Their mutual quasi-memory of Takopi, who lives on as a doodle in one of Shizuka’s notebooks, is enough to finally get the two of them to stop fighting in the new and final timeline. Chappy thus doesn’t die, preventing Shizuka from going past the point of no return, and while all of the other hardships in her and Marina’s lives are still present, The epilogue implies that they’re actually quite close now. Takopi, gone from the world, has finally given them something. Not by trying to directly fix their problems—remember, Takopi’s a kid too, he never really had the ability to do that—but just by being their friend. It’s a beautiful ending to one of 2025’s most complete thoughts.

I will say, as an olive branch to the other half of the audience, I have seen backlash to this show and while I don’t agree with it, I do at least understand how it could at least fail to affect someone as profoundly as it’s affected me. Because, ultimately, the emotional impact of the narrative is contingent on you sympathizing with these kids (and Takopi, again, also a kid) in the first place and I know some have had some difficulty in getting there. I do think it depends on one’s own experiences somewhat.

Personally….I mean, I won’t pretend I had it nearly as bad as Shizuka or Marina, but I had a pretty rough childhood in some aspects and, even more honestly, it’s led to a pretty rough adulthood. So I do see something of myself in all of these kids. It’s not that surprising, this in mind, that Takopi got genuine tears out of me. A fantastic show, overall. Maybe even—although this is a judgement for the long view of history alone—a generational one.

Until we meet again. See you, space octopus.

Anime – Non Seasonal

Key The Metal Idol – Episodes 1 & 2

Key the Metal Idol is a fascinating little OVA I started the other day. Its first episode sets up the premise—our titular robot girl, Key herself [Iwao Junko], must make 30,000 “friends” before her final battery runs out, the last wish of her creator now that he’s no longer around to repair her—but more than its actual story, what has gripped me about the show so far are its palette of moods and a few standout individual moments.

That’s not to say it’s devoid of overarching plot or themes, there are actually about a half-dozen plot threads running even just already by my count, and thematically we’re clearly doing something with dehumanization and the commercialization of bodies—one of the first things that happens to Key in the story is that she’s scouted by a sleazy gravure model manager—but however that might look when it eventually comes to a head, that’s all a way’s off.

So, yeah, moments and moods. In this second episode, Key’s friend(?) and impromptu roommate Kuriyagawa Sakura [Nagasawa Miki] ends up confronting that gravure manager and his hulking bodyguard. Except, she doesn’t actually have to fight him, because quite literally just Some Random Guy [Tataki Shuuichi, Anilist tells me, VA: Morikawa Toshiyuki] who happens to be at the video store she works at goes Bruce Lee on their asses. Because he’s a “martial arts otaku.”

There are moments of deadpan comedy like this throughout Key The Metal Idol thus far; bizarre things presented in a very deadpan way so as to not jostle the otherwise moody and downbeat nature of the episodes. For example, tracking Key for his own reasons is a shadowy figure named Sergei [Kosugi Juurouta] with shady connections to android experiments. This wouldn’t be out of place in any cyberpunk or contemporary sci fi series, but what’s notably weird (and thus funny) about the guy is that he….spits gumballs at things to break them a few times? This isn’t commented on, it just happens and we’re left to either laugh at it or accept it at our leisure. Sometimes the jokes roll over into more serious story beats, thus bending the arc of our attention back to the more thoughtful and emotional aspects of this setting. At one point, Sakura leaves a note for Key that she should take a shower. She does so, but Key being a robot girl who doesn’t really understand much about the world, she stays in the shower all day. On its own? Pretty funny. What’s less so is Key actually passing out for some reason, and Sakura’s duress when she comes home and finds her unconscious in the shower.

The second episode ends with a truly great scene where Key watches a tape of an idol. This idol is introduced earlier in the episode (she seems like she’s going to be important), as is the tape itself. When first introduced, the tape is accompanied by its actual music, a nice little bop that sells the character’s status as this important and unflappably cool musical figure pretty well. But when Key watches it later, we don’t hear the music anymore, just the mechanical whirring of the tape as she studies the idol’s movements in silence. Hologram hands reach out to her as the episode comes to a close, and we get a sense of why the show might be called specifically Key the Metal Idol.

That’s about all for this week, as usual, if you liked what you read here, a donation to my Ko-Fi page is always a huge help. Every penny counts.

One final side note; if you follow me on tumblr and wonder why my Bullet/Bullet writeup didn’t make it into this column, it’s mainly because I’ve been trying to cut down on the amount of things on this blog that are that negative. Although honestly knowing me I’ll probably reverse this particular policy decision in a month or two, I can never quite seem to settle on how to organize this place, and what “counts” for this column or not.

In any case, for the Bonus Screencap this week, I wanted to go with this simple but pleasantly My Neighbor Totoro-esque shot of Takopi and Shizuka. They won’t be appearing in this column again, so it felt only right to give them a nice send off.

When it rains, it pours.

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

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

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch: UMA MUSUME – CINDERELLA GRAY Episode 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.