Uma Musume: Cinderella Gray Season 2

Episodes 14-16

Like a come-from-behind Cinderella story that so often emerges from sports, Uma Musume: Cinderella Gray got its second cour voted in for daily streaming reviews! Really, Oguri Cap and I can only be grateful to the fine fans of these foals and fillies who believed in and placed their bet on the show. Following a pretty impressive popularity bump in the wake of Horse Girl Summer, spurred by the mobile game's English release, my next hope was that the anime could continue to live up to the lofty expectations fans like me had built up for it. But then, just in this week's episode, they formally introduced Michelle My Baby: a six-foot-four, tanned, shredded, American horse girl who's got serious hops on the basketball court. So uh, mission accomplished Cinderella Gray, this is already the best I could expect the show to be, everything else is going to be a victory lap.

Cinderella Gray mainly comes off as confident as it gradually returns from the off-season. Oguri Cap herself has mostly been an anchoring background element at this point, with the anime instead more interested, for the moment, in building up the world around her. This makes sense—Cap's loss to Tamamo Cross at the end of the first cour was a signal to her that there were still horizons to chase, mountains to conquer. Cap is simple, but that also means she's straightforward enough to see those goals ahead. It's not enough that Cross is still there for her to beat; now she's got international horses coming out of the woodwork to compete. Uma Musume has always strived, after one fashion or another, to make its goofy-ass conceptual world feel whole and cohesive, and the mind paid to the intersecting competitive stories and the international inclusions now rolling in speaks further to that.

It does, however, in the grander scope of things, make it feel like the second cour of Cinderella Gray is still only just getting started as of its first three episodes. The show reopens with an adaptation of the spin-off one-shot manga The Mermaid Left Behind, which turns out to be essential reading in contextualizing Fujimasa March and her ongoing efforts after Cap moved up to the Twinkle Series. The next episode expands on the previously teased Super Creek, showing off her own Cinderella story and demonstrating Uma Musume's usual point about how virtually every competitor has one of those. Both feature the climactically directed races the franchise is known for, but they still feel like one-offs in service of building up that bigger world around the focal Cap and friends. They aren't climactic cap-offs to arcs because they are incidental details in the arcs themselves.

So it feels honestly appropriate that the next episode is basically just an exercise in introducing the next round of international opponents to be faced in the Japan Cup, and letting them cut a series of wrestling promos. The actual world is arriving to challenge Cap, Cross, and the others, so it feels like a proper scope increase for this second wave of episodes. There is some repetition in this process, having reporter Fujii first make the rounds to introduce the new girls, before Belno Light goes undercover for some more proper information-gathering on them. It does beg the question of how much actual, usable data Fujii was able to get that he was offering to Musaka, which might be intentional, but mostly all comes off as an excuse to double-dip on showing off the new set of competitors. I'm not really complaining, though, more Michelle My Baby in this episode is only going to make me bump the review score up higher.

Belno Light's rounds continue the more densely stats-and-strats-based approach to the racing that Cinderella Gray was refining through its first cour. Tons of mind is paid to the approaches each horse girl used and how it was influenced by the terrain and conditions of their home. This similarly interacts with the training that Cap is seen doing to condition herself to spurt more effectively in a long race. There's so much more mention of spurting this season, by the way. It's even in the OP now. Regardless, all this talk of numbers and data is still cool in the crunchy, power-level-esque way that Cinderella Gray was already embracing shonen sports-style conventions. It ties into the training and strategies used in the mobile game. If this were a younger series, I might worry about how the show will properly dramatically deploy all this data that can fly over some viewers' heads, but Uma Musume in general and Cinderella Gray in particular has shown how good it is at that particular trick. The drama of Super Creek's strategic win in episode 15 alone reaffirms that this series still knows what it's doing.

Similarly, Cinderella Gray knows it can't be above getting a little bit weird and wild with things. As I was contemplating that the series' turn toward more serious sports story style theater meant it was leaving behind the quirky comedy Uma Musume was known for earlier, Belno Light stumbled ass-first onto dark-horse competitor Obey Your Master huffing grass. It's an auspicious intro because Obey Your Master has a fundamentally absurd design accompanying outlandish behavior (you know she's from America because she says "Hella"), but quickly marks herself as a contender through threatening invocations of how much she knows about Oguri Cap and her foreboding ambitions about the race. And this is before a cut into her scary stalker den at the end of the episode. So Obey Your Master is weird and funny and ominous as hell. That's a needle that Uma Musume can very specifically thread, and even then it's probably only going to work because people are at least a season deep into this goofily serious show about the dramatic sports career of a cartoon horse girl who eats a bunch. That is, even as Cinderella Gray is gradually working its way through downtime and building up to the actual action of its next story, the fundamental appeal of itself as itself remains. These horses are still worth backing, and we've never been so back.

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Uma Musume: Cinderella Gray Season 2 is currently streaming on Amazon Prime.

Chris was backing the horse girls before they were cool, and he's so happy they've spurted off the way they have now. You can follow him reskeeting fanart of Vodka, Michelle My Baby, and the other cool ones over on his BlueSky.