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.
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