Tag: Umamusume

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

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

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

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

“Eclipse first, the rest nowhere.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Kaiden Michiko]

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: UMA MUSUME CINDERELLA GREY at the Starting Gate

Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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