Ok, imagine….cat girls. But instead of cats, we use horses. Horse girl. Not centaur, that’s different. Two legs. Horse Girl. Like cat girl, but horse. Genius.
Uma Musume: Pretty Derby is a currently airing anime for the spring 2018 season by P.A. Works. It is based off a mobile game for iOS and Android that…hasn’t even been released yet. Wait, so wouldn’t that make the game based off of the anime though because it came first? I don’t know.
Anyway, the series follows the lives of a bunch of anthropomorphic horses who attend a school to get better at racing. Not content with other shows that give us centaurs, Uma Musume is an adorable series that gives these girls the running speed and fortitude that you would expect from a racehorse, but compacted into the petite Japanese schoolgirl frame with horse ears and a tail. But hey, they do treat the horse ears as actual ears, so that’s something.
Our plucky young protagonist is Special Week, a new horse girl who prior to moving to the big city has never met another horse girl before. She’s also coming to the school after the term has already started, so we can check off the “Transfer Student” trope box right off the bat.
The story is about her need to become a proper racehorse, to go on and win championships, and become the best horse girl in all of Japan. She has a silent and stoic senpai who she can both admire and also have to cheer her on. She has friends, who also race, some not as well as others though.
This show is trying to fill the niche for this season’s version of “cute girls doing cute things with a twist”, and for the most part it does do that job rather well. The character personalities are bright and fluffy, the character designs are all wonderful, but P.A. Works has a good track record for that sort of thing. (Heh…track record) Though there is this weird character design thing where all the girls have like extra blush on their faces, which to me just makes them all look a little drunk.
Largely though, I question the creation of the series, the motive behind it. It has a lot of polish to it, but it just seems like a horse otaku really wanted to make a series about race horses, but they knew that wouldn’t sell so they added all these popular tropes to pump those viewing numbers up.
This show is actually loosely based on a real story. All the horse girls have actual real live horse counterparts from Japanese racehorse history. Though the vast majority of those horses are stallions, but hey, we have a particular audience here. Just waiting though for that episode where we get a cameo from mi boi Potoooooooo (Pot-8-Os).
Anthropomorphism has been popular lately, so let’s combine that with a sports anime and then BOOM you got yourself a popular title. BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE! THE HORSES ARE ALSO IDOLS. WHAT?!
Seriously, when a horse girl wins their race, they get the honour of performing on a stage for an audience in true idol fashion. But this is so tacked on, that it’s not even funny. You can imagine what kind of mobile game this will eventually be when it’s released.
It’s hard for me to say how this show is going to turn out. On the one hand, it needs to be perfect advertising material for their upcoming game, I guess. But on the other hand, it is based off of these horses’ actual lives and if you look deep enough, there is tragedy there. But there is also hope.
It doesn’t hit all the right notes for me to utterly praise it, with things like the perverted teacher dude. However, moments like Special Week running late with a carrot in her mouth are worth a chuckle, even if I’ve already laughed at that joke elsewhere this season.
If cute horse girls are your thing, or you think they might become a thing you didn’t know you needed in your life, then this might be something worth checking out because there is enough possibly story here to make a heartwarming tournament anime about an underdog. Or an under-horse, I suppose. But personally I might find it hard to keep up with, considering all the tacked on elements and the tropes that – to me – just don’t make sense.
Okay, so she gets yelled at for being late and past curfew, but then it’s revealed next episode that her roommate is the girl she saw race the day before and she only missed curfew because she stayed for that idol performance! But if they’re both roommates, wouldn’t they be subject to the same curfew? If that’s the case, why does she get in trouble anyway except to waste our frickin’ time? But I digress.
The series is available to watch over on Crunchyroll, if you have access to it, and they have an optional premium service, which you will need if you want to watch the show as it is airing.
That’s it from me for today. Thank you for reading and, until next time, stay frosty.
At this rate it almost feels like we'll have an anime series for every popular animal on earth anthropomorphised as cute girls. I almost love how meta anime is getting, but it's also sad that so many of these new shows feel like they're just the exact same anime we've been watching for decades, just with different gimmicks. You have to wonder if they'll start seeing diminishing returns on these eventually.
Glad you covered this one so that I don't have to!
Well, you're absolutely free to do your own too! I always enjoy hearing others opinions on shows that I've talked about. But if this was a show you didn't think you'd like covering, then in that case I'm glad I could help you out ;)
I'd go mad if I tried to cover everything, and I don't even make videos for my coverage!
However I actually ended up checking the show out for myself though because your video made me curious. There was one thing I noticed which I don't think you pointed out. There seems to be humans in this world on top of there being horse girls (and no horse boys) which just seems really strange to me. The fact that there aren't any other anthropomorphic humans wondering around based on other animals also just kinda makes the narrative's world feel pretty artificial to me, on top of all the tacked on tropes you already pointed out.
I'd have probably been able to buy into this world more if the entire world was comprised of horse people of both genders, or at the very least, if they'd thought more about how horse girls would work in such a world such as including aspects of ergonomic design for the horse girls. As is I imagine having a tail would be really uncomfortable in a world designed for tailless humans.
It was still pretty charming and visually appealing, though, the expressions were great and the use of CG seemed to be fairly minimal. There's worse anime to watch but I agree that I with you that it's not likely to hold my attention.
Anyway, keep up the good work man!
japanizing beam strikes again!
but on a serious note I came not expecting anything from the show since the idea of horse girls just doesn't fascinate me but man was I surprised at how they handled the supposedly absurd premise by adding comedy, a bit of drama and tension on various scenes and topped off by the neat running animation, ah I'm sold. And for the record I'm not a furry lol.