Rejoice, anime fans, they managed to screw up Uma Musume even more than Season 3 did. Playing to the worst of the Shounen/Young Jump formulas set by the editors, whose only job is selling more worthless papers instead of trying to create respectable stories, Uma Musume finally reaches the ranks amongst the most stereotypical sports anime carried by their hype moments. There is nothing to engage here, just your typical turn your brain off and enjoy the hype moments you are getting fed, and be thankful to your overlords who are kind enough to spoon-feed you the essential information by ham-fisted dialogue that is more than enough to hospitalize a competent writer. They are so kind that they even make sure to put expository dialogue and bland backstories in the middle of the racing instead of between them, so they can eliminate the chance that you might miss those "important" moments while you are doomscrooling on your phone since there is nothing "exciting" going on the screen. If you are a consumer who only wants to experience hype moments instead of trying to engage with the story you are presented with, go ahead and watch Cinderella Gray, you will enjoy it, and I'm saying this with no malicious intent. There is nothing wrong with wanting to enjoy heart-throbbing moments without tiring out your brain. Sometimes you just want to sit down and relax while watching something pretty or exciting without putting much thought into it, and that's totally okay. However, there is also nothing respectable about the product in question when you are looking at it from a critical standpoint. It's just anime fast food from a restaurant with a 1.7/5 rating, fried in a week-old oil.

Character reactions are always delivered by monologues instead of showing us the said reaction and letting us figure out what the character thinks. The jokes are so bland and old that they smell of mold. The races, where the hype moments designated by the sports mangaka's handbook happen, are interrupted by soulless backstories narrated by the character in case you can't make assessments from what you just have seen by yourself and race strategies that should've been given to us before the racing so we could've watched them unfold with a natural flow. By the way, who was I kidding with, "while you are doomscrooling on your phone" this kind of bullshit writing tricks are pulled because they had to sell the next issue of their magazine. They are stretching the races (or fights in action manga) to dozens of chapters with those cheap tricks so you can buy the next issue with the hopes of, "Surely something important will happen this week." It's already a vile, soulless strategy in manga format, and when it's adapted to animation, where you can adapt those long ass races/fights that span out of months in a very short time, it still keeps its vileness but without any goal to accomplish. However, they also can't change the course of events to fix that awful pacing in the animation because that would take too much time and effort, so just slap whatever you have in the source material 1:1 and call it a day. The audience doesn't care anyway. In fact, they are even happy that they got a 1:1 adaptation, even though it doesn't suit the media the source material is getting adapted into, and could've been fixed by better planning. This isn't the fault of the anime staff, by the way. Making TV anime is already hard enough, and in a climate where the producers only want fast and cheap manga advertisements, the best they can do is making sure that mess of an adaptation look good enough, and Cinderella Gray sure looks good, just not as good as the studio's other works, and I'm glad it's like this. I'm more than happy to see that Cygames' priorities this year were Apocalypse Hotel and The Summer Hikaru Died instead of stereotypical cardboard cut sports manga number 945.

It's understandable to see fans of sports anime/manga like Haikyuu, Kuroko, Blue Lock, or whatever is the next Jump series in the making going nuts over this show, but I'll never understand the Uma Musume fans who are over the heel for Cinderella Gray. It barely has been a year since we got Beginning of a New Era, a triumphal achievement in the medium of animation, for fucks sake...

With how many notes I wrote down while watching the show weekly, this review was supposed to be longer, but whatever, I don't even care anymore. Here's what you are all here for:

PEAK. KINO. ABSOLUTE CINEMA. PEAK FICTION. ANIME OF THE YEAR. 11/10.