The Spring 2025 Anime Preview Guide

Uma Musume: Cinderella Gray

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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.

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Rebecca Silverman
Rating:

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.