Uma Musume: Cinderella Gray Season 2

Episode 22

It's impossible to know how a race can turn out. I can sit here for the past few weeks, writing reviews where I theorize about how many episodes this climactic Arima Kinen will be made to last. I can talk about how I think the storytelling structure might pace out backstory flashbacks or dial up dramatic irony. I can inadvertently spoil myself on the historical winner of this race being depicted through the fictionalized lens of Uma Musume: Cinderella Gray. I could even read the original manga to get a heads-up on the specific material that's being animated. And yet, through all of that, everyone watching still can't know exactly what this anime is going to do and how it's going to do it until all those horses cross the finish line.

Contrary to my expectations, Cinderella Gray finishes up the Arima Kinen just one episode after it started—hardly the multi-episode competition arc that I might've expected from seeing, say, Haikyuu!! stretch one match out across an entire season. As such, the writing doesn't go nuts, padding things out with informative flashbacks either. There are a few cuts, sure, including a strategic aside for Super Creek and an evocative last-minute spiritual union between Oguri Cap and Tamamo Cross as they burn toward the finish line. But there's nothing to agonizingly detail what's driving Tama's retirement. Viewers still aren't given any additional context for her state other than her in-the-moment desire to run.

And perhaps I criticized that potential lack of context last week, but I couldn't have known how the series would let the actual events play out in this week's episode. Some of it does adhere to that shonen sports manga-style framework. Onlookers in disbelief narrate Tamamo Cross's incredible ability to exert conscious control over The Zone—the athletic flow state that gives her an edge on her competitors. In some moments, this dedication to adaptation undercuts the presentation somewhat, with Tama's own narration of how her opponents appear to be standing still as she runs by coming off superfluous next to the animation and direction doing a bang-up job of depicting just that. But then the direction is still so dead-on, here and in the other moment-to-moment shifts depicted, that it doesn't matter. Music fades out to silence against sound effects, before roaring back as decisively as the competing racers. The pacing of the auditory complements the visual perfectly.

That focus, that laser-honed purposeful pacing, that's what makes the motivational backstory falling by the wayside not matter so much at this point in Cinderella Gray. Much is made of Oguri Cap having shifted her position to be the one chased by Tamamo Cross, compared to their previous showdowns, but here it also places her at the center of her story at this critical moment. Oguri has unwittingly found herself at the center of this race even as she was pointedly resolving to race only for herself. Viewers are intimately familiar with Oguri's story and what led her here, and all her old friends are here to cheer her on and remind those viewers, just in case. So the other characters, Tama included, using Oguri as the point to chase after, set those specific stakes. It's not about why Tama needs to win in this last chance; it's about what Oguri can do to hold her place and succeed against all these others who have their own reasons implicitly at the same level for wanting to win as badly as she does.

Oguri does win, of course. Anyone can look up the historical numbers or even pull up a video of the actual Arima Kinen where this happened. But Uma Musume: Cinderella Gray is not just a presentation of records. It's an adaptation, a dramatization, and they dramatize the hell out of this result. It's easy to joke about the absurd-on-its-face anthropomorphization device of the horse girls, but the final flashback-coded neck-and-neck finish between Oguri Cap and Tamamo Cross wouldn't work the way it does without these endearing human-shaped anime people being the ones sharing this emotionally bonded climax. Did this sort of childhood meeting really happen this way? Who cares? These horses weren't actually people, and their race didn't actually have this kind of emotional connection. What's important is to be able to, like Oguri and Tama, simply enjoy the run itself in this moment.

Cygames Pictures is treating the material with all the horsepower it deserves. I talked about the pacing and direction already, but the effects themselves on things like designing the different "Zones" that Tamamo Cross, Dicta Striker, and Oguri Cap once she enters it (all of them with their own cool special-move names, of course) go a long way to defining the vibes of each horse girl and dressing up this race to show how much things have escalated. It's the way jacked-up power levels are supposed to be depicted in shonen-derived action like this. And pop-offs like that let the shocks and swerves hit too, like Dicta Striker gassing herself out one (1) second after resolving to go all-out against Oguri. It's understandable since she's lost a fair amount of blood by that point.

This is all Cinderella Gray hitting its climax at the apex of its abilities so far, is what I'm saying. Is it perfect? Still not quite, no, I don't think. That whole bit with Tama's story is still rather zig-zagged for how it brought her here in the narrative. I've long since made peace with the whole "horse girls do an idol dance after winning" part of this franchise, even as the series itself forgets about it much of the time. But that still means it's still going to be jarring every time it does come up, especially after the genuine intensity of a preceding race like this one. It does let them call attention to Oguri's first dance way back at the beginning of the series, which is both very funny and a nice way to iterate the whole "how far she's come" concept, so I'll mostly allow it here even as it's throwing me. And it makes for a neat enough soundtrack to play credits over as characters resolve themselves and a few codas roll out (Super Creek and her trainer Fumino are so in love). Climactic as this was, it leaves me hungry for what's coming up in the "New Era" of next week, to say nothing of what else Cinderella Gray has in its still-ongoing story. I could never predict exactly how this race would turn out, and a finish like this means I never want to stop watching.

Rating:

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

Chris backed 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.