Tag: Uma Musume

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 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 anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch UMAMUSUME: CINDERELLA GRAY – Episode 16 – “The World’s Best”

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

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

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. Your beloved blogger is a bit under the weather this week, but luckily, this particular episode of Cinderella Gray is mostly one of laying groundwork and doing some character introductions. As such, it’s pretty simple to cover.

Plainly, this episode serves to introduce (or reintroduce, in a few cases) Oguri Cap’s competition at the upcoming Japan Cup. The episode is actually structured as such that it largely introduces Oguri’s foreign rivals first—which makes sense, there’s more to cover there—but we’re going to flip that around and talk about her domestic competition to start with. There are just fewer umamusume in this category, and one of them, Tamamo Cross, is essentially the show’s defending champion. Tamtam gets a nice little practice vignette with her trainer, who warns her against pushing herself. A gentle reassurance from someone who cares, or foreshadowing of something greater? We can’t yet say, but it’s good to see Tamamo around, and it also gives us the delightful treat of seeing her with her head ornamentation removed. Cute!

Oguri’s other main competitor from Japan is Gold City, who actually practices with her at Musaka’s behest as they try to build Oguri’s stamina, given that the Japan Cup, at 2400 meters, is longer than any race Oguri’s yet run.

Oguri and Gold City, in a nice change of pace from some of Oguri’s more serious rivalries, hit it off pretty much immediately, and the episode’s penultimate scene is a funny exchange between the two of them wherein Oguri asks Gold how she keeps her hair so nice, leading to a whole bit about shampoo.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the international competition is given a bit more focus. Umamusume doesn’t get the chance to feature horsegirls from anywhere but Japan terribly often, so when they do, they tend to go all out. It is also worth noting that this is another case where the umamusume aren’t named directly after the real racehorses—rights issues, one imagines—and it’s fun to compare whose legally-distinct name is an upgrade and try to imagine how they might have gotten from one name to another.

Easily the most prominent of the umamusume featured here is Toni Bianca [Kaida Yuuko, based on the real horse Tony Bin], presented as a genuine menace. Enough so to merit an at least passing comparison to Symboli Rudolf (herself the last Japanese horsegirl to win the Japan Cup). She has an impressive record, too, most notably, she’s the most recent Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe champion.

Of the girls introduced here, Bianca is perhaps the most classically in the ‘arrogant rival’ mold. When our good friend the reporter Fuuji, a recurring presence throughout this episode, asks her what she intends to accomplish by running in the Japan Cup, Toni replies nothing. She intends to win, and she will win, and that’s that. Fuuji is impressed by this of course, but there’s the subtle implication of something more complex going on when later, on her own, she contemplates that the upcoming race will be her magnum opus. What that could mean, we don’t yet know, but it’s enough to raise some intrigue about a character who is otherwise a bit broad.

Even more so is the UK’s representative, Moonlight Lunacy [Sekine Akira, based on Moon Madness. I’m honestly not sure how they got away with that one].

She has a refined and elegant design, and some banter with Fuuji reveals that the two have at least some prior history together—she apparently competed in the last Japan Cup, only to come in fifth—and she kicks him for being tactless when he brings up her previous defeat in the race. Still, I’d say she’s firmly the least interesting of the umamusume introduced here.

Contrast, for example, Ellerslie Pride [Tomita Miyu, based on Bonecrusher, easily the biggest name downgrade here], the sole Japan Cup runner from the southern hemisphere and representing the hope of not just her home country New Zealand, but that entire half of the globe in general.

Her somewhat tough appearance (and the straight-up intimidating name of her inspiration) belie a horsegirl who is clearly a little desperate to put her country on the map. She actually visits a shrine as her first order of business in Japan, apparently praying for her own success. (Fuuji bothers her, too, and gets a giant shrine bell dropped on his head for the trouble.)

And of course, there are the Americans. Michelle My Baby [Takagaki Ayahi, based on My Big Boy] is incredibly tall compared to almost every other character we’ve seen in the series so far. We don’t learn terribly much about her—although on a fact-finding mission for Musaka, Belno Light describes her as having the strength of a bulldozer—but when you’re introduced by slam dunking a basketball from across the court, maybe you don’t need much in the way of complicated character motivation.

Which leaves us with one last character to meet. The other American umamusume is an apparently utterly unremarkable racer, no G1 wins, no record of really any note at all, and she’s also rather hard to get ahold of. Fuuji tries to find her but doesn’t succeed. Belno does, though, although one gets the sense it might be because she wanted to be found.

This is how we meet Obey Your Master

[Ishigami Shizuka, based on Pay The Butler].

When Belno finds her, Obey is literally face down, ass in the air, sniffing the grass. Why is she doing this? Who knows! Belno asks her, and her response is that it “smells amazing.” So at first, one might reasonably conclude that Obey is just weird. Weird girls are not new territory for Umamusume—see Gold Ship, a generational cryptid sort of girl, as just one example—but Belno, and indeed Oguri Cap, are not so lucky. Obey seems to immediately cotton on to what Belno is doing (and jokingly calls her “James Bond”). In fact, Obey knows all about Oguri Cap, starting from her career as a regional star in Kasamatsu up to the Fall Tenno Sho where she lost to Tamamo Cross. But actually, Obey even knows who Belno is, and it is with some sense of alarm that Belno Light processes that the last girl she’s been sent to find is not normal.

We can just say it. Obey is a freak. I fucking love her, she is one of my favorite charcters from Cinderella Gray in general, but she is an odd, odd character. The combination of everything we see here; her wild eccentricity, the star-shaped pupils, her encyclopedic knowledge of the competition, and of course the episode’s instantly-infamous final scene where she dances alone in the dark, Oguri Cap and Tamamo Cross’ race playing on her television and her rivals’ photos plastered all over her walls, brings to mind nothing less specific than Kurokawa Akane from Oshi no Ko. In fact, despite some obvious differences, she comes off as an outright interpolation of the character into a radically different context. I can’t prove that the inspiration actually worked that way—if it did, mangaka Kuzumi Taiyou would have to have been pretty quick on the draw, as Cinderella Gray and OnK started serializing around the same time—so if that reference point seems improbable to you, we can also just say that Obey comes off as a bit serial killer-y in, especially, that final sequence. This is, of course, fantastic, and it implicitly suggests that the true showdown in the Japan Cup will not be between Oguri Cap, Tamamo Cross, and—as one could be fooled into thinking from the start of this episode—Toni Bianca, but between those two and Obey.

Obey explicitly identifies Tamamo Cross and Oguri Cap as her “enemies” for the Japan Cup. And they both, it seems, will have to be careful to not be her next victim.

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 15 – “Our Story”

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.

Let’s talk about Super Creek [Yuuki Kana].

Actually, before we talk about Super Creek, let’s talk about characters, and how Umamusume handles them. Full disclosure, I’m going to be pulling extensively here—both in this column specifically and, honestly, probably whenever I talk about Umamusume going forward—from IronicLark’s excellent Umadacchi Densetsu blog, a fantastic resource for all things Umamusume and, so far as I am aware, easily the most thorough exploration of the series and its various components available in English. I highly recommend diving into it yourself sometime if what I am doing in these columns interests you even a little bit. Frankly, Lark is significantly more knowledgeable on the subject than I am.

So, characters. Most things I cover on this blog are either standalone anime projects, or they’re anime adapted from some single specific source, a manga, a light novel, etc. Umamusume belongs to the other category of things I cover here, and has more in common structurally with, say, Love Live, than most other anime I write about. What I mean by this is that it’s a media mix1 franchise. Without getting too into it (because that distinction alone is worth having a long conversation about) what this essentially means is that rather than one component of the franchise being the “primary” unit that all other adaptations pull from, there are many distinct components given roughly equal weight. Now, this isn’t strictly the case with all or even most media mix properties, as in the case of Umamusume and many others, there is a “central” project—the game—but the distribution of influence is much more horizontal than it is in something like, say, the Yano-kun anime airing this season, which is a straight one-to-one adaptation of a single specific story.

This approach changes how a series handles many things, but most relevant here is how it handles characterization. Because, if you primarily know Super Creek from the Umamusume game—and I’m betting that describes at least some of you—you might wonder how that character and her doting, motherly personality fit in to the generally fairly serious ‘sports anime’ tone that Cinderella Gray has going on. The answer is that Umamusume, as with many media mix properties, tends to emphasize or scale back different character traits depending on the needs of the story. As such, different iterations of the same character can feel pretty distinct, even if the “core” remains the same. (As a complete tangent, the most extreme example of this approach I can think of is actually Transformers, a series in which this guy, this guy, and this guy all have the same name, at least some of the time, despite being nothing alike.) Nothing so extreme as that example is present in Umamusume, but I bring all this up just to say: when we see Creek here, she is somewhat different from the Super Creek you’ve seen people make all those googoo babies jokes about on the internet. (Although, elements of that doting characterization do remain, I don’t want to overstate the differences.)

Creek is formally introduced here after having kicked around in the background of Part 1, and—not to spoil anything—we are going to be following her, at least intermittently, for quite a while. Her introduction is actually relatively low-key at first, though. We see her training. We see her trainer, Fumino Nase [Yū Shimamura2] apparently a prodigy who’s brought her trainees pretty significant success even early on in her career, beset by reporters. Nase seems to find all the media attention annoying at best (and particularly bristles at an offhand mention of her father, evidently also a trainer), but she’s willing to throw them a bone by telling them that she intends to have Super Creek compete in the Kikuka Sho, one third of Japan’s Triple Crown and, importantly, the longest race of the three. This comes as a surprise to the reporter interviewing her as, to hear that reporter tell it, Creek’s race results haven’t been that impressive, and she’s actually not even a sure thing to so much as run in the race, as someone would have to drop out first. Nase is of course aware of all this, though, and explains that as a trainer, she considers it part of her job to believe in miracles, no matter how unlikely they might be.

Naturally, just then, word comes down the line that one of the other competitors has had to drop out. Super Creek has an in.

The actual Kikuka Sho race follows both Creek and one of her main competitors. Yaeno Muteki, whose name you probably remember. It’s hard not to feel a bit bad for Muteki, who keeps getting put in these situations where she’s trained so hard and has good prospects only to end up facing a rare, generational talent.

And make no mistake, Super Creek is one of those. For a race as long as the Kikuka Sho both physical stamina and clarity of mind are important, so while Muteki holds the most promising position for a majority of the race, Creek is eventually able to angle her way from the middle of the pack straight to the front, and she ends up not only winning but winning by a pretty large margin. (A quick reference check on the real race that this episode is based on shows that the real Super Creek overtook the second-place horse, Gakuten to Beat, by five lengths. I am choosing to assume a similar margin here, in the absence of any other evidence. I suppose he really did beat Gakuten.)

Creek’s strength, as emphasized here, lies in her incredible endurance. Something she and Nase have evidently been working on for some time. A brief flashback between the two invokes the Cinderella metaphor once again.

Apropos of nothing, it is worth pointing out that Creek and her trainer seem very close.

It’s worth going over again, the term “Cinderella story” refers to, in sports, a longshot victory by an underdog. Usually several such victories over the course of a tournament or the like. In the context of Cinderella Gray, well, the second part of the title spoils that this mostly refers to Oguri Cap. But it can, just as easily, be taken to refer to many of Oguri’s contemporaries, including Tamamo Cross and, yes, Super Creek as well. (Given her chestnut brown hair, she’s an almost-literal dark horse.) Her victory here is clearly hard-fought, and the fire in her eyes on the final spurt is really something to behold. I’m probably not going to surprise anyone by saying I absolutely love Creek, especially this incarnation of the character. I am hoping this episode might turn at least a few more people in the world into Super Creek fans. Fingers crossed.

(On the note of “beholding”, it’s worth addressing the elephant in the room at least briefly. There has been some amount of discourse about the show’s somewhat reduced animation prowess from the first part of the first season, the Kasamatsu arc. There’s some truth to this, probably related to staff being shuffled around, but the highlights of this race stack up to anything else in the series so far. We’ll see how the rest of the season plays out in this regard. I feel the need to give a good amount of credit to the show continually paying attention to how the racers run, though. Even in the weakest moments of the race, Creek is consistently drawn as taking long, comparatively slow strides. Right up until that final spurt, where she starts really putting the pedal to the metal.)

In any case, while Yaeno Muteki takes her loss hard, she and her master keep up their training. Muteki has an endurance of her own, in this regard, and as I’ve gone through this story she’s become one of my favorite supporting pieces of Cinderella Gray‘s cast, which is not exactly lacking for strong characters.

And as for the Ashen Beast? Well, this arc does mark the point at which Cinderella Gray goes from being largely about Oguri Cap to being something of an ensemble piece, and I suspect we’ll get a lot more of these focus episodes in the weeks (and hopefully, years) ahead. But, she is here. The entire time Super Creek is making history on the racetrack, a pair of distant eyes are on her, and they are those of none other than our very own Gray Monster. She, Belno, and Musaka make a number of comments during the race, in fact, but what sticks out to me most are the ice-blue bullets Oguri stares into the screen when she senses she has gained yet another rival. Truly, our girl is a monster.

Super Creek will not be the last girl to give Oguri a hard time this arc, by a long shot. A brief post credits scene introduces us to Toni Bianca [Kaida Yuuko], the Italian umamusume who stands as one of many international racers Oguri and all other Japanese racers competing in the Japan Cup will have to face. Toni is wildly dismissive of them, time will tell if she can back up that talk.

Oh, and there’s another umamusume from abroad who arrives as well. Some blonde girl with tacky stars-and-stripes leggings. Probably no one important, in any case.

Famously a thing us Americans say a lot.

But! We’ll get to find out together. See you next week, Umamusume fans.

1: While the Japanese term “media mix” is quite similar to the English phrase “mixed media”, I’m rendering it as-is here, because “mixed media” has a different connotation in English, whereas a “media mix” is something a fair bit more specific.

2: As with the Sirius Symboli case in Part 1 of the anime, my usual sources are not helping me here, but I found a few stray references indicating that she’s voiced by Yu Shimamura, and am taking those at their word.

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

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

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Let’s Watch UMAMUSUME: CINDERELLA GRAY – Episode 14 – “Another Peak to Climb”

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.

Oguri Cap faced her first major defeat on the race track at the hands of her rival Tamamo Cross in the finale of Cinderella Gray‘s first cour back in late June. Since then, the world has appreciably changed for Umamusume as a series. Perhaps most notably, the Global (read: English-language) version of the mobile game this is all meant to promote finally launched, and I know for a fact I was hardly the only person there on launch day to redeem my 3* voucher to get Oguri herself. This is relevant because, due to the game’s success, there is a very real possibility that this column going forward will have a much larger potential audience than it did back in Part 1. To that end, I’m gonna go ahead and say that if you’re not caught up with these columns, I, a completely unbiased source, think they’re pretty worth reading, and you can do so here. Also, welcome aboard.

I’ve also read the manga, or at least, what exists of the manga fan translated into English. I won’t spoil any twists before they come, but it has given me the confidence to say that Cinderella Gray not only remains as good a powerful sports shonen narrative as it was in the first cour, but it actually gets even better over time, right up to the present. There are stories I can’t wait to share with you all, and characters I can’t wait for you to meet. But we’ll get to those as they happen.

What’s not a spoiler, or indeed a surprise to anyone who’s been watching the trailers ReMOW has been putting up, is that this upcoming arc focuses on the Japan Cup, a prestigious international race that will see Oguri and some of her domestic rivals compete against umamusume from all over the globe. That Cinderella Gray returns today, on the day of the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe—a different prestigious international horse race that Umamusume as a series is somewhat obsessed with (it was a plot point in Umamusume‘s third season, in fact. This despite the fact that a Japanese horse has never won it)—feels significant.

Interestingly though, that’s not where Part 2 starts. Instead, it makes the rather interesting decision to adapt the one-off spinoff The Mermaid Left Behind. What this means is that rather than diving straight into the Japan Cup stuff—what all of Part 2’s trailers were about, mind you—we instead return to the setting of the first half of Part 1, Kasamatsu, and the first story of the second cour is not about any of Oguri’s current rivals, but her first: Fujimasa March.

As Umamusume goes, what unfolds here is a pretty simple tale of rivals whose emotional bonds are unaffected by the physical distance between them. March is fresh off a haircut and a major loss at the Tokai Derby. We saw her conversation with Oguri Cap back in episode ten, where it seemed to reignite her competitive fire and give her renewed confidence to try again.

Yamano Thousand, the umamusume that March actually lost to in the Tokai Derby, does not see things that way.

Thousand is offended that March keeps trying to chase after someone who isn’t even here, and accuses her of running after ghosts. (She also insults the Norn Ace / Mini the Lady / Rudy Lemono trio by calling them Oguri’s “groupies”, which is admittedly pretty funny.) But if this seriously shakes March in any way, we don’t see it. It’s Mini, funny enough, who assesses Thousand accurately; her bark is worse than her bite, and her end closer strategy is a poor fit for a track with corners as tight as the ones here. In the end, March’s renewed passion perhaps as much as any strategic consideration lets her win handily, and she explains to Thousand—and implicitly to us as well—that she’s not chasing Oguri’s ghost. She’s chasing the real thing. This is the same March who first lit Oguri Cap’s competitive fire, and Thousand failing to understand that the glint in her eye and the blush on her cheeks are both because of Oguri Cap is part of why she loses. I don’t believe we’ll get another check-in on Fujimasa March like this, so this episode is, in a way, a nice sendoff to a Oguri’s first rival. A promise that her story is still being written, somewhere just out of view.1

The second half of the episode returns us to Tokyo. It largely focuses on Oguri’s national rivals but, once again, opts to refocus on who we already know instead of rushing headlong into introducing new characters. Most of these little vignettes focus on the umamusume preparing for their next race. For Oguri, that’s the Japan Cup that’s the center of this arc. Some of her rivals will be there too, but others, such as Dicta Striker [Hanamori Yumiri] have different aims. The latter in particular leads to a very charming scene where Striker attempts to do the old “intimidating rival challenging the protagonist on a level playing field” bit, talking about how she wants to hand Oguri her second loss in the Mile Championship, only for Oguri to promptly explain that she isn’t actually running in that. (She’s tailing Tamamo Cross, of course: the Japan Cup and the Arima Kinen, best known to players of the Umamusume game as where careers go to die, are her next two destinations.)

If there’s a unifying theme here, it’s that Oguri Cap and Tamamo Cross’ showdown has inspired everyone with an eye on the scene, from Oguri’s hometown friends to her rivals in the nationals, to greater heights. Even Sakura Chiyono O, the actual winner of the Japanese Derby that really was haunted by the ghost of the missing Oguri Cap, gets a scene here to show off that she’s not resting on her laurels. Nor is Yaeno Muteki, another of Oguri’s rivals and a perpetual underdog. Dicta Striker will get to run against her eventually, as well: she’s aiming for the Arima Kinen, too.

This even applies to Oguri herself to some extent, as Fujimasa March looks toward her, so does Oguri look toward Tamamo Cross. Each serves as the proverbial new peak to climb for the previous racer. (We must naturally assume that there is, thus, also some fresh-faced new student at Kasamatsu who thinks of Fujimasa March as an ideal to aspire to.)

All told, this is an odd and transitional episode and, generally speaking, a bit of a strange choice for Cinderella Gray‘s triumphant return. Still, it’s nice to see Fujimarch again, and the strong thematic throughline makes it make emotional sense as a returning point. Plus, the few crumbs we get here are going to feed March x Oguri fans for the next several months, so it certainly isn’t a bad episode by any means. It’s hard to deny though that the real lightning-in-a-bottle moments from this arc are very much still ahead of us. Part 2 is short—just ten episodes as opposed to the thirteen of the first cour—so I imagine we’re going to be getting into the main body of the arc relatively soon, within a couple episodes at most. We’ll see what that looks like in the weeks ahead.

1: Interestingly, March’s race against Thousand is also done in full racing silks. This goes against the series’ usual conventions as I understand them, where only national G1s are run in silks. Still, I’m not going to complain. March’s snazzy blue outfit is lovely.

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

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

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch UMA MUSUME – CINDERELLA GRAY Episode 12 – “The Fall Tenno Sho”

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

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

I’ve largely been pretty happy with how Cinderella Gray has presented its storytelling so far, but there’s an obvious disadvantage to the particular way this series, and really Uma Musume in general, is constructed. Because these stories are loosely built around real events, you don’t have the luxury of really picking and choosing what characters play what role in a given circumstance. Because of this, the Fall Tenno Sho is the first time Oguri Cap and Tamamo Cross have actually competed against each other in any way. And as a direct consequence of that, Tamamo has not gotten a ton of screentime.

That began to change last episode, and the trend continues here. If there’s a single thing this episode absolutely nails, it’s giving You The Viewer, should you perhaps have been skeptical, reason to care about Tamamo Cross. A pretty impressive amount of character work is crammed into these 20-odd minutes, and it’s probably the episode’s biggest accomplishment. In addition to, you know, all of the usual high points that Uma Musume hits.

There are two main techniques at play here. First, the episode opens with a straight-up flashback, depicting a very young Tamamo and her mother as, somewhat surprisingly, vagrants of some sort. To my recollection, this is the first real indicator that poverty as such exists in Uma Musume at all, and it’s a bit shocking to see them break that particular seal so casually. [A rare after the fact edit from me here: This was my initial read, but a friend has since pointed out that it’s possible they were just trying to find a home near a racetrack, and this would explain the more casual nature of the scene while still leaving the stakes roughly intact and honestly makes a bit more sense. This is what I get for writing late at night!] Still, the scene is effective, showing the two attempting to find housing in Kasamatsu and failing. Oguri’s mother even makes a brief cameo, pretty heavily implying that if things had worked out just slightly differently, Oguri Cap and Tamamo Cross would’ve known each other as children.

In addition to being excellent fuel for fanwork, that kind of what-if is meant to tie Oguri and Tamamo even more strongly together, the idea that these two were in some sense always “meant” to meet is a powerful one, and it bleeds over into their interactions in the present day.

Before we get into that, though, spare a thought for Lord Royal [Yamamura Hibiku], who has her first and, if I had to guess, probably last moment of any real relevance in this episode.

Royal, a frontrunner introduced in last week’s episode, is the only one of the other contestants given much attention aside from some jokes. She clearly thinks very highly of herself, and she actually has an impressive, commanding lead for much of the race. Arrogance is a hell of a thing though, and as soon as she starts imagining herself in true royal attire as the race’s obvious winner, she is interrupted by a streak of white lightning to her right.

Most Uma Musume racers, if their style is brought up, are defined by a single approach. As once again laid out by journalist and commentary character Sensuke, you have your frontrunners, pace chasers, late surgers, and end closers. Four different approaches that roughly demarcate how a particular horse girl runs; frontrunners attempt to get to the front of the pack early and stay there the entire race, pacers match the pace of the leading runner from not far behind her and attempt to overtake her at the end, surgers do much the same but from farther back, and end closers attempt last-second bullet zooms as the race comes to a close.

These categories aren’t absolute, but they are the boxes that most race styles fit into. Tamamo Cross, it’s noted, is an end closer. Adopting this approach after an incident during her debut where she collided with another horse girl mid-race. Her reputation as such seems to bother her a bit, as she runs here, she notes being unsatisfied with a style defined by her fear of the pack. (This makes her come off as both brimming with a charismatic, earned confidence, and as a bit of a trickster. The cool factor cannot be overstated.) And accordingly—and unusually—she completely switches her approach for this race, surprising even her own trainer. She keeps pace with Lord Royal for most of the track, and Royal is ahead of her for most of that time, but while Royal has a strategy of her own—deliberately making it seem like she’s tired out, when she in fact still has gas in the tank—she does not have the winds of destiny at her back. Thus, in the final leg of the race, Tamamo Cross passes her with ease. Better luck next time, Royal.

That’s not to say that Tamamo Cross’s victory is a sure thing, because the entire time she’s running, she feels something from behind her. Not the pack itself, but some singular, immense pressure. Like a force of nature bearing down on her. Something….monstrous.

This is, at the end of the day, Oguri Cap’s show. She is the titular Cinderella gray. In this arc people have started calling her “The Ashen Beast”, a title more fit for a Dark Souls boss than a racehorse. We don’t actually see who wins, here, as the episode ends on a truly wicked cliffhanger, but the show is doing an incredible job of making it seem plausible that it could be either her or Tamamo. Roppei points out that all of Oguri Cap’s victories have taught her to trust her raw power; unlike Tamamo, who is performing a dramatic switchup of her style here, Oguri is doing what she’s been doing this entire season, running low to the ground, tearing through the track like a monster, and leaving no survivors.

So who takes it? The White Lightning or the Gray Monster? The Ashen Beast or the trickster with the supersonic feet? Goku or Vegeta? We don’t know! But that kind of edge-of-your-seat tension, simplicity itself in description but impossibly difficult to actually nail, is what makes this series so great. Here, it accomplishes this with a clever perspective flip that effectively makes Tamamo our protagonist for the first part of the final race. It’s enough to leave the results up in the air. The finale, and the finish line, await.

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

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

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.