The life of a race horse is ephemeral in nature. They run fast, they work hard, and while they’re treated like stars during their careers, things can take a drastic downward spiral once they’re out of commission. Whether it’s a broken leg, a loss of willpower or simply old age, a race horse who can’t race is often not long for this world... But what if they could have a second chance? What if they could be reincarnated as anime waifus? In the world of Uma Musume, this fever dream has become an equally feverish reality, where teenage girls with the ears and tails of an equine beast and the physical stamina to match have taken to the track for another shot at glory! For Special Week, a young up and comer with a sparkle in her eye and a dream in her heart, this is more than just a goal, it’s the lifelong dream of both her and both of her mutually exclusive mothers, and when she sees the decorated mare named Silent Suzuka in action, she knows that there’s no other option; She must become the fastest horse girl in all of Japan!

For Uma Musume, pretty Derby, we are once again visiting the anime production company named PA Works, which has no small number of beautiful titles in its stable. Most of their work involves lending a helping hand to other studios, primarily through in-between animation, but they are also very well known for producing high quality anime in their own right, at least from a visual perspective. I won’t lie to you and say that I’ve liked every anime I’ve seen from them, but I also can’t recall any of them looking anything less than decent, and thankfully, this debut entry in the Uma Musume franchise is no exception. I haven’t seen any of the other titles that series director Kei Oikawa has directed... With the exception of maybe one episode of Outbreak Company a long-ass time ago... But I definitely like the approach that he took here, skillfully executing the animation so as to not waste money where it’s not needed, using cost-cutting techniques where they will never be noticed unless you’re looking for them, and pouring the resulting surplus right where it belongs, in the actual racing scenes.

Speaking of the racing scenes, that might actually be my favorite thing about this show, because damn do they look cool. For those who don’t know, running and walking are one of the hardest things you can possibly animate, which is why a lot of anime like to resort to cheap tactics like bouncing character frames up and down in closeup to simulate movement, and when they actually do manage to put together a half-decent running/walking cycle, it gets recycled to the point of absurdity, where it looks like every character moves the same, or like there’s no gravity to them, and they’re just being clicked and dragged against the background. None of this happens in Uma Musume. I don’t know how realistic the running animation may be, but it’s fast, it’s cool, and they show it from an insane amount of unique angles. My only complaint is that every character runs with the exact same stance, making it look repetitive, but I can live with that.

I also really like the design work. For starters, these girls apparently do not have human ears, just animal ears placed atop their heads, and they are all specifically designed so that their hair(or headgear) conveniently covers the sides of their faces, so the viewer doesn’t get squicked out by the absence of human ears. On an individual note, every character has a unique aesthetic and their own over the top hairstyle, as well as their own unique version of the different outfits everyone has to wear. The way they look and dress may not be practical for their chosen sport, I mean how can anybody run that fast in a track suit without overheating? How aerodynamic are those hairstyles? But these issues are well within my suspension of disbelief, it’s an anime, if you can’t have crazy hairstyles here, where can you have them? And besides, it’s a good thing the characters look different, because it’s not as if the writing is strong enough for you to be able to tell them apart.

Okay, before I go into the nitty gritty, we need to set some shit straight. I am completely and utterly new to this franchise. I’ve never played the games myself, and outside of watching a few Vtubers react to the results of opening up their loot boxes to get the specific horse waifus they wanted, I know nothing about them, so just like Kancolle, I am reviewing this series on its own merits, without any nostalgic connection whatsoever to the rest of the franchise. I don’t play gacha games, and while I’ve been told there have been other adaptations of Uma Musume that were overall better than this one, that’s not how I roll. When I’m getting into a franchise, I like to start at the beginning, not chronologically, but in terms of release, and I like to judge that first (anime) entry alone, by its own merits. Some people don’t like that... I pissed somebody off once by reviewing Bakemonogatari without knowing every scrap of lore from all of its prequels, that was fun... But that’s who I am, and that’s how I operate.

Much like Kancolle, it’s entirely possible that if I had played the games first, I would have a more positive experience with this show like all of the preexisting fans did... Except no, I wouldn’t, because according to my research, this series actually predates the official release of the games, which means this isn’t an adaptation, so much as a proof of concept. I am actually in the same boat as the people who watched this series back when it was airing in 2018, which means I’m in the same boat I was already in when I saw the first season of Strike Witches back in the late 2000s. I am watching the first official release of an ambitious multimedia franchise based around a weird concept of themed waifus, which means UNLIKE anime based on pre-existing gacha games, I am in my fucking wheelhouse for that one! Instead of looking at every strange concept and saying “Yeah, but I bet it made sense in the game,” I get to analyze this bizarre concept on its own merits, with no guilt whatsoever, and you guys know I love bizarre concepts! So how well does this bizarre, out of the box idea hold up?

Well, first off, I guess we should start at the beginning. One of the main foundations of this concept is that like the themed waifus from Strike Witches, who were named and designed after famous fighter jets and their pilots, the horsegirls are designed after actual historical champion racehorses, and while that’s not a subject I’m personally familiar with, I’ve been told that they found a lot of clever ways to reference those origins in the story without creating too much of a distraction to people like me who won’t get the reference. The only one that didn’t work for me, and I had to have explained, was the main character’s very odd backstory. Apparently, the main character is based on a horse named Special Week, whose mother died in childbirth, and he had to be raised by another mare. For Special Week, this is described as “I have two moms... The one who died giving birth to me, and the one who she entrusted me to.”

This is shown in a flashback as her mother in a hospital bed, calmly passing her newborn baby off to another woman... Presumably to die afterward? Did she just know she was going to die? And does that work in practice? Even if a new mother does know she’s about to die, can she just hand off her baby to another person without the state getting involved? Someone suggested to me that the two moms were a lesbian couple, but this is never confirmed nor communicated to the audience, and gay marriage still isn’t legal in Japan. Yeah, same sex partnerships do have SOME rights, but immediate parental recognition in the case of death? I don’t fucking know, maybe that’s allowed, somebody’s gonna have to look that one up for me. What’s important is, this kind of sets a precedent for horse girl references that might seem cute or subtle in the moment, but only serve to raise awkward or uncomfortable questions if you think about them for too long.

Like, Horseshoes? Really? Putting aside the fact that even owned horses primarily only wear shoes for hard labor and traveling on rough surfaces(they are not required for racing or running in the grass), these girls are nailing horse shoes to the underside of their actual human shoes. So, stabbing their feet and making it impossible to run. There are some subtle visual gags that I liked... For example, landline telephones with really long receivers stretching from their mouths to their horse ears, and their propensity for kicking backwards... But for the most part, these references are DUMB. The most obvious example is that you see carrots fucking everywhere. Yeah, it might have been a little funny to see a girl running late have a carrot hanging out of her mouth instead of a piece of toast, but a big carrot plushie? A whole stack of books labelled Carrot Books? They eat carrots a lot, but it’s not consistent, because it seems like they can also just generally eat anything they want to, from pork barbecue to sushi and seafood to salisbury steak(which just sort of lazilly has a carrot sticking out of it).

Even aside from the references, there are plenty of ideas that just don’t work... Like, if a horsegirl wins a race, she has to perform as the lead in an idol concert immediately afterward, which makes no sense and adds nothing to the characters or the story. They don’t even warn Special Week about this for her first win, they just shove her on stage without any songs or practice. There’s also an episode where after Special Week is shown with a comically oversized stomach after celebrating something, it’s revealed that she gained weight and has to lose it to run... Not only is this same oversized gut visual gag used later on other characters without the same consequences, but I’m sorry, shouldn’t competitive runners be encouraged to eat a lot of food? With all the running they do, wouldn’t they be constantly imbibing calories and working them off by, you know, running? Again, this is a sport I’m unfamiliar with, so I want you to correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think I’m wrong with this one.

And I’d like to wrap up this part of my analysis by pointing out that, functionally speaking, there’s no reason for these characters to be horse girls. That gimmick adds nothing to the story when you really think about it. There's no reason this couldn’t just be an anime about human girls competing in track and field or something. Yeah, the animal ears were completely unnecessary in Strike Witches, but at least there was a very clear reason for the cast to be jet fighter waifus. I don’t know, I’d be more impressed if the cast of this anime were centaurs or something, but I guess that wouldn’t fit the aesthetic of the franchise as it was planned, would it? So yeah, I’m sorry, the concept kind of fails overall, at least in this iteration of the franchise, maybe what came later did it better. The better question is, is the writing any better? Does Uma Musume at least tell a good story?

To answer this question, I would like to compare Uma Musume to a weirdly similar series, Battle Athletes Victory. And when I say similar, I mean I’m seriously wondering if Oikawa was directly inspired by it, because there are several moments in this show that are noticeably reminiscent of that one. To keep things streamlined, though, here’s one plot point the two have in common. There are mild spoilers here. The main character is a newcomer to athletic competition, having joined to fulfill the wish of her dying mom, and she’s close friends with someone more accomplished than she is, and is always trying to motivate her. They seem destined to compete together for the long run, but then that friend breaks her leg, and when she runs before it can properly heal, it breaks again, testing their bond. Now, there really isn’t any extra context to how this plays out in Uma Musume, it’s pretty simple and basic in it’s execution, but lets take a moment to appreciate how Battle Athletes Victory does this plot point differently.

First off, while Special Week starts off as a promising prospect, Akari starts from the bottom, and has to overcome several obstacles, both internal and external, in order to improve. A broken leg isn’t just a thing that happens to her friend, it defines her personality. She’s completely gungho and preaches persistence, spirit and guts, because that’s how she overcame her handicap, and she doesn’t just break it again because she ran on it too hard... She saw how fast Akari was improving, and felt threatened at the idea that all of her hard work in the face of adversity was about to be invalidated by a former sloth who just started coming into her own as a prodigy, so she challenged Akari to a race, and in a moment of desperation, she broke her leg by trying to cheat. In a narrative sense, she broke her leg because like so many other characters in that show, she was confronted by a hard truth about herself, and faltered, creating lasting repercussions for the next several episodes and Akari’s overall character development. This entire story arc is literally my favorite moment in anime history, my heart is pumping just talking about it.

More importantly, it utilizes a few narrative elements that Uma Musume just doesn’t understand; Complex writing, intricate character development, emotional storytelling, etcetera. There aren’t really any stakes in Battle Athletes Victory, at least not until the final story arc, but you can’t help but become so emotionally invested in Akari that everything she tries to do just feels important. She has her endearing qualities, but she also has deep, complex flaws, some of which she deals with even while overcoming the other ones. I don’t feel any of that from Special Week. She wants to be the best, she wants to race with Suzuka, and she’s generally a nice and sincere person whose maybe a little naive... Who fucking cares? She’s likeable on a basic level, but I wouldn’t be sad seeing her lose a race. Hell, after seeing her scream and cry over coming in second, I kind of want her to lose. I want to see her get crushed and come in last. Wasn’t that the big lesson that Tamako from Bamboo Blade had to learn? You can’t truly succeed until you learn how to cope with failure.

The rest of the cast is no better. Aside from the group’s male trainer, who is memorable for all the wrong reasons, there is not one character in this show who really stands out in any meaningful way. It kind of has the same problem as Kancolle, where it has a massive cast that it has no idea how to manage, even though once again I will have to give it one point above Kancolle for the fact that it doesn’t feature any characters who look the same. They look good, they look distinct from one another, but I still don’t know or remember any of them. I think one of them kept getting hit in the eye with things, one of them with grass in her name beat Special Week while she was distracted... Then there’s Suzuka? Given Special Week’s intense fixation on her, you’d think Suzuka would have some big, charismatic personality, like Mio from Strike Witches or Ichino from Battle Athletes Victory, but nope. She’s quiet, passive, and Special Week’s idolization of her is the only interesting thing about her. Spoilers again, but she injures her leg twice in this show, and she’s back on the track less than two episodes later each time, who cares at that point?

Worst of all, this show is just so fucking boring. There is nothing here that’s worth getting invested in. There’s no stakes, either internal or external, there’s nobody worth rooting for because at no point is there any threat to the status quo, there’s no fear of consequence for anything the characters try to do, and while a better show might recognize these problems and try to hook you in emotionally, it doesn’t even do that. When I was about halfway through, I made a joke in the feed about this show being written by AI... That was just a joke, it’s not THAT bad, I was just being a dick... But it does feel like a series that was written by somebody who had seen a lot of sports anime, and recognized the technical framing of that kind of story, but had no idea how to actually achieve the powerful emotions those shows made him feel. More than anything else, Uma Musume reminds me of a coffee maker, or a pencil sharpener. A functional product that is capable of performing the task that it was designed for, but could never possibly provide you with a memorable experience.

Uma Musume Pretty Derby is available for streaming on Crunchyroll and Amazon Prime, but has never seen an official physical release. The same can probably be said for its multiple sequels and spinoffs. The original gacha game can be played on Ios, Android and Windows.

For decades now, it seems like we’ve been cursed to suffer a slew of terrible video game movies, and equally awful video game anime, and while there have certainly been a few exceptions to this rule, especially in recent years, I am disappointed to report that Uma Musume: Pretty Derby is not one of them. True, it doesn’t feel as mean spirited or cynical as anything from the Uwe Boll catalogue, I’m willing to believe at least some creativity and passion went into this, but it just doesn’t come together into a competent final project, and I’m sorry, but it’s just not very good. I guess it is possible that with such a huge franchise, out of the multiple follow-up seasons that this title received and a few highly praised spin-offs, there may be something in this franchise that I might actually like, but at this point, I’m not exactly racing to find out.

I give Uma Musume a 3/10