Tag: Yaeno Muteki

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch UMAMUSUME: CINDERELLA GRAY – Episode 15 – “Our Story”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Famously a thing us Americans say a lot.

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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