Title: Uma Musume: Cinderella Gray
Season: Spring 2025
Studio: CygamesPictures
screencaps captured from Amazon Prime Video
First and foremost, try out the game. It's amazing.
I did not expect a story about a real life horse to be so interesting. I definitely think its better than a lot of sports anime out there. Oguri Cap's storyline converted into an anime girl media just made it so hype.
To me, what made this dynamic of sport anime so fun to me was that, in most sport anime you play for/with a team. Here, really you are only playing for yourself. You can play your heart out for fame, glory, or for someone.
I really enjoyed this cast as well. Oguri Cap's personality is replicated very nice to the real life counterpart. I found her to be really similar to Fate's Artoria Pendragon. Her eating, her sneezing, her shaking, and the growth in finding the reason to win, made me smile. Kitahara Joe wasn't an annoying character either. Being the most important non Uma character in the cast, his presence was important to Oguri's growth. His redemption arc was pretty nice to see but a bit too predictable. As for Belno Light, I think she is a good side main character to pair alongside Oguri Cap. She essentially creates the opportunities that make Oguri's character. They wrote her in a way that she follows Oguri without her being a complete opposite.
Now for the story structure, I really enjoyed it. You don't really get a lot of sports anime where a character does so well that they transfer to a better league. A lot of the times its usually like middle school going into a powerhouse high school or bringing
glory to a weak highschool. Here, it was more about representing the countryside (Kasamatsu). The fact that they made Oguri's hometown characters be very similar to his fellow horses from back then, is so sick.
Of course, a sports anime would be boring if they straight up kept winning all the time or they lose once and win everytime after that. The losses here feel like wins to the viewers. Seeing some of the winners of the racers in here, gives you the feeling of also wanting to cheer for them. Also some nods to the real life events of characters
like Symboli Rudolf, Maruzensky, Sakura Chiyono O, and even TM Opera O, were nice to see as a player of the game. The whole TM Opera O reference with the Oguri Cap rule was awesome fanservice even if it didn't really add much to the main story. I also really liked the
way how they portrayed the relationship of Tamamo Cross. Real life rivals and here they wanted to emphasize that with the back stories and such. That ending made you question who you wanted to win in the end (of this season at least).
Finally, lets talk about animation. CygamesPictures is amazing at what they do. Every sequence of a scene really gave the tingles that they try to give you, like the scenes where Oguri hits her final spurt. It's got a cool tone to it as well. The kind of tone you see in
KyotoAnimation works or really high budget ones. Obviously theres some usage of CGI, but its expected with the amount of actual motion going on in the planned scene. For the closeups in the races, they are beautifully animated. Anything with that kind of ominous aura animation, will
always get me.
Overall, I think Cinderella Gray despite it being a niche type of sport anime, is a lot better than most of the shows out there. Having it being based off of real life is really unique too when you get to compare the actual races off some recording on YouTube. I definitely think any piece of Uma Musume content consumed before or after this would make no difference in total enjoyment of the franchise. You could play the game before this and it would definitely hit hard for Oguri Cap fans. For anime watchers before Cinderella Gray, I think its an even better story than season 1, albeit anything after season 1 is straight up better.
Hey! This is a rewritten version of the review I wrote on July 31, 2025. I wasn't really satisfied with that kind of writing I produced there. Here I tried to improve upon the summarizing that made 75% of that "review" and tried to comment on actual positivies. I still kind of find it hard to describe positives but I can definitely talk about negatives in anime. It's kind of a problem I had when writing essays back in school and still is. Hopefully I can get better from here.
Thanks for reading!