The Spring 2025 Anime Preview Guide

Uma Musume: Cinderella Gray

Kasamatsu Training Center Academy is located in a deserted area. One Uma Musume appears there. Her name is Oguri Cap. Her overwhelming running style overturns all common sense. Soon, the ash-covered girl known as a "monster" will carve out a new legend.

Uma Musume: Cinderella Gray is based on a manga by Taiyo Kuzumi. It's part of the larger Uma Musume franchise. The anime series is streaming on YouTube and Amazon Prime Video on Sundays.

Oh, Uma Musume, you are so utterly ridiculous. You don't have the guts to be Equestria Girls, but you still go as hard on the “literal horse girls” as you can, while still avoiding a copyright issue with Hasbro. Sneakers sound like clopping horseshoes, as do slippers, but bare feet make no sound. “Eating like a horse” takes on a varied, nearly nuanced, definition in the academy's cafeteria. Parents name their daughters things like “Belno Light” and “Mini the Lady,” and no one bats an eye. Your world is truly unique.

Oddly enough, that's not what sold me on this episode; I actually didn't care for the previous installments of this franchise. Instead, what I loved was our protagonist, Oguri Cap, AKA Dust Bunny, and how very little she cares about anything and anyone around her. When a trio of mean girls decides that she'll be their bullying target for the horrible high school crimes of “showing up late” and “wearing dirty clothes,” Oguri just rolls with it. You think it's punishment to make her sleep in the storage room? Joke's on you; she's just excited to have her own room with electricity and everything! Try to untie her shoelace to trip her up during a race? Sorry, she's fast enough to retie her lace as slowly as possible and still come in first. Whether she's oblivious, socially inept, or just honestly doesn't care, I love how she just lets all of their tricks and comments fly right past her. We should all be able to disarm bullies so easily.

The racing aspects of the episode are a bit less interesting. There's something uncomfortably dehumanizing about the way people – mostly men, although there's one lady scout and a few women in the audience – look at the uma musume, as if they're objects rather than people. Oguri gets the best treatment, and part of that is because she embarrassed trainer/scout Kitahara Jo when she saw him narrating his own exercise as if he was a horse boy. (Are there horse boys?) This interaction, brief though it was, made Oguri into more of a person because he was embarrassed; he reacted as if a girl saw him rather than a horse.

It's also not particularly interesting to watch the girls run. There's some effort made with the animation, such as how Oguri's knees hyperextend backwards just a little bit, which Kitahara believes is what gives her an edge, but there's also something very off about how their feet look hitting the ground. The casual swishing of tails when the girls are just hanging out is great, but the character designs themselves aren't all that exciting – and when they are, they make baffling choices like giving a horse girl shark teeth. It's a mixed bag overall.

Still, Cinderella Gray has Oguri going for it, and that's pretty good. I'm not sure if she can keep viewers like me, who don't have an investment or interest in the franchise, watching, but she certainly was a delight for this first episode.

I'm going to be upfront: Uma Musume is an anime that has never made much sense to me. That might sound strange coming from me, considering how much I am in favor of having more monster girls and beastie-babes in anime. Well, for one, I think the creators of Uma Musume are cowards. A bunch of regular-ass cartoon girls with some ears and a tail? Please. At least make them, like, fauns or something! Otherwise, it's just a track-and-field anime where all of the girls are in low-effort horse cosplay, and that's just silly.

On top of that, though, is the fact that the horse-girl world just doesn't make a (salt) lick of sense to me. Why do the girls wear horseshoes attached to the bottom of regular shoes, on their regular human feet? Do their legs operate on the complex system of hyper-dense musculature and freakish tendon-mechanisms that allow horses to move so fast? Now, it could be that these questions are answered in completely logical and consistent ways for fans that have watched the show for years, but I'm talking more about how the show doesn't make sense on a vibes level. It just doesn't feel right, do you get me? Also, why in the everloving bejeesus do the horse-girls wear horseshoes?

I'm being cheeky, obviously, and if I'm being honest, I can squint and see the appeal of Uma Musume from a distance. It's basically just an idol anime, except these idols also run intense foot-races before they do their song-and-dance bits, which I guess is…well, it's some kind of novelty, anyways. I went into Uma Musume: Cinderella Gray as a Horse Girl Neophtye, though, so this preview is really more for folks like me who are curious if this iteration of the ven-neigh-reated franchise is something that will convert any of us nonbelievers. The answer, I think, is no, but not for lack of trying.

Look, so far as I can tell, Cinderella Gray is basically just more Uma Musume, except with some new characters and maybe some racing gimmicks that won't stand out much to folks who aren't in the know. Oguri is not like all those other horse-girls, after all, because of her ridiculous flexibility and running stance. Her existence, in fact, might just answer my questions about the girls' freakish horse-tendons, though the implications of that physiology being crammed into the otherwise completely normal legs of a human girl is genuinely quite horrifying…

No! Dammit, I promised I wouldn't get sidetracked by Stupid Horse Trivia. The point is, Oguri runs weird, but in a good way for racing, I guess, and so she's going to become the number one horse-girl racer. Presumably, I mean. At some point, down the road. That's what it says in the show's plot description, anyways. So far as what we see in this premiere, it's the usual mix of idol-anime and sports-anime cliches. We set up the academy the horse girls train at; we meet the horse friends and horse en-neigh-mies that Oguri is going to encounter on her path to stardom; we watch the horse girls race. Et cetera.

You know, it's funny. The last time I think I covered one of these shows was exactly seven years ago, back when Uma Musume first premiered. I just went back to see what my thoughts were on the show, then, and I made pretty much the exact same points; I was even just as hung-up on the horseshoes nonsense. As such, I think it's safe to say that the new Horse Girl Anime is going to be for exactly the same crowd that the old Horse Girl Anime was for. More power to you, but I'll be moseying on out of these here muddy stables and looking for greener pastures.

Every horse girl has her own Cinderella story. Such is the wide, real-life-based world of Uma Musume, that there's background to each one of these characters, even actual background characters like everyone's favorite balloon-bellied horse, Oguri Cap. Cinderella Gray ventures to tell the story of her rise and how she got to the Twinkle Series, and actually show her in action in a slightly more serious manner than just having her do her One Bit as she usually does across the franchise. Though don't worry, she does still do that bit in this first episode. Cygames knows why we're here.

Coming courtesy of the still-fresh Cygames Pictures studio, Cinderella Gray is a horse of a different color compared to the past proper Uma Musume seasons. The art is aggressively stylized, leaning well into the atmosphere of the backwater, rural Kasamatsu area that Oguri's story starts in. There's a moody charm to it, captured in the scrappy grunginess of Oguri's dirty training clothes and her unassuming demeanor. Vindictive horse mean girls smile with sharp teeth and aggressive fashion. There're some lovely horsey little character animations seen in scenes like Oguri lining up in the gate at the start of her practice race. And the races themselves as seen so far are blistering, angular affairs, with glimpses of those delightfully strained faces seen in Road to the Top. This should be a very cool series just to watch.

That's all just a little trot to show off as Cinderella Gray makes its way to the starting gate. The story itself is just glimpses of potential, much like Oguri's underdog beginnings. Much of this is actually followed through the eyes of another horse girl, Belno Light, who observes and reacts to the events and shake-ups that Oguri finds herself party to. It makes sense; in keeping with her background gag origins, Oguri is a horse girl of few words, but her reactions do well to tell viewers everything they need to know about her. Her earnestly enthusiastic reaction to getting her "own room" (actually a storage closet the horse mean girls coerce her into) is a funny, endearing moment that shows how she'll be able to carry this series.

The emotional core, always the secret sauce to Uma Musume's success, should hopefully start shining as well. Oguri's past with her mother is already getting touched on, and she's forging an odd connection with trainer Kitahara Jo, who's got his own scrappiness that sets him apart from the Trainer of the main Uma Musume anime seasons. True to the Cinderella title, this is looking to be a story about how anyone and everyone has the makings of a star, which is as optimistic a take on the happenings of horse racing as this series always shoots for.

This is a fresh entry that's at the same time playing with feelings of nostalgia, with some of the old-school aspect ratio sensibilities seen in parts of its direction. That and being a clean-start spin-off means it might work as an entry point for those who haven't sampled Uma Musume before, especially as it departs a bit from the more candy-coated aesthetic of the mainline entries. It hasn't quite gotten off to the races yet, but it's a promising start.

I may not be the most ravenous fan of Uma Musume, but I have to give the series credit where credit is due. What started off as the most processed thing in the world since SPAM is beginning to grow on me for that very same reason. The series continues to work as a giant portmanteau, rolling sports, high school drama, cute animalized girls, and a few dashes of idolatry into something so bizarre and engaging that no wonder it hasn't lost steam for nearly seven years now--for the record, that's just three shy of an entire decade! This spin-off is no exception. Yes, this show is still being made to sell a mobile game, yet this first episode of Uma Musume: Cinderella Gray doesn't feel like the workings of a corporation trying to milk a cash cow. Or a cash horse? You decide on that one.

Cinderella Gray is a new story that arrives at old and familiar territory. A tapestry showing the long history of Uma Musume is revealed to us, our main cast of characters arrive at a prestigious academy, some slice of life antics ensue, and the episode ends with a practice race that's more dramatic than it needs to be. It's more or less exactly what you would expect at this point, but I don't think this is an inherently bad thing. On one hand, its formulaic tendencies will no doubt disappoint people wanting something new from the franchise, and it's easy to see exactly which direction the show will go down from its opening moments. The characters themselves aren't exactly bursting with personality yet, and the show sets our leading heroine up for the big, predictable win that will happen after inevitably going through some major hurdles. There's nothing earth-shattering to be had here, and that's the point. At the end of the day, Uma Musume is meant to be light fare for otaku smitten with cute horse girls racing their way to their dreams. It doesn't give the show an excuse to skimp on quality in general (the animation can be hit-or-miss at times), although as a whole the quality isn't exactly skimped here, even if it's not elevated to new heights either. As they say, if it ain't broke, don't fix it, and nothing here will seem broken to Uma Musume's long-time fans.

Either way you look at it, I'm here for Cinderella Gray, and while it's far from being the most captivating thing this season will put out, it's still fun and bizarre enough for it to warrant a watch, and a good thing to see the franchise race its way into its fans' hearts once more. Despite the series partially nicknaming its eponymous lead as “Peak,” I highly doubt that the show will be the peak kino its fans would like to perceive it, but it can make for a nice little guilty pleasure nonetheless.