Tag: Uma Musume – Cinderella Gray

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

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

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

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

“Eclipse first, the rest nowhere.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Kaiden Michiko]

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch: UMA MUSUME – CINDERELLA GRAY Episode 6 – “The Beast”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nonetheless, the race waits for no one.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch: UMA MUSUME – CINDERELLA GRAY Episode 5 – “What’s Best For Her”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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