On February 27th at 7:30pm, a movie theater in Fayetteville will be showing a movie called Umamusume: Pretty Derby - Beginning of a New Era. The tickets are sold out. Welcome to 2026, the Year of the Horse.
Umamusume is the strangest cultural import of 2025. It shows how far anime has come in the west that something so profoundly Japanese can find an audience globally. Is it a good thing that more people are enjoying anime? Of course not, they are enjoying it in the wrong way for the wrong reasons.
Anime has become another venue at which one can examine the emergent clades of the Zoomer zeitgeist. We have hood weebs, troons, chuds, normgroids and they all have a different relationship with what is becoming a prominent medium for western youth. It goes without saying that network TV has no purchase on the young people. While streaming service-slop and youtube certainly eat up a large portion of screen time, anime has closed the gap.
In January the Kentucky Horse Park hosted the Uma No Kokoro exhibit at it’s museum. As part of the exhibit, person-sized cut outs of various Umamusume were displayed to the general American public.
There are a few Umamusume series and Cinderella Grey is the only one worth watching by my reckoning. Beneath the novelty of the premise there is a story worth telling. The Japanese are a detail oriented people with an appreciation for love, beauty and romance. Horse racing is a romantic tradition. What makes Uma work for me is how particular they really are about the way the whole thing works. This serves to elevate it past gacha crap into something with an earnestly artistic element.
Each series follows a particular Uma. As is tradition they are highschool students who also run races and sing little songs for their adoring fans. The first thing to understand is that the show will follow the real career of the corresponding race horse perfectly. They will run the same races in the same order against the same opponents with the same outcomes. Elements that cannot be transposed directly are carefully transformed into something else. Race horses typically race for three or so years before retiring based on their health. So follows that Umas need to drop in and out of the narrative as their careers begin and end relative to one another. They accomplish this by essentially placing any horse younger than the protagonist in purgatory in middle school with already “retired” horses in University purgatory so that they may linger about the academy. That being said the oldest Uma raced in the mid-70s while the youngest ones were active as recently as 2020 so the shows are best contextualized as essentially separate continuities.
Cinderella Grey follows a horse named Oguri Cap, who raced in the late 80s. He was one of the most famous race horses in Japanese history, who built a legacy not only as a winning horse but as an under dog from rural Kasamatsu credited with reviving public interest in the sport. He was barred from racing the Japanese classics on a technicality. A rule which was later overturned as a result of public outcry which paved the way for later Hall of Fame inductees. His retirement race and final victory at the 1990 Arima Kinen may be greatest race in JRA history. From living in a stable with a leaky roof and hoof rot, to winning the biggest races in Tokyo his career was indeed a Cinderella story. One that really resonated with people. All this is to say, race horses are quixotic creatures whose careers are often as tumultuous, unpredictable and inspiring as any human athlete’s. Umamusume succeeds as a serious ambassador for these underappreciated beings, bringing their stories to the masses in a manner that is suitably beautiful, idealistic, and respectful. The earlier Uma series fail in this regard because they are frankly not serious enough about the subject matter.
I could go on about the impressive degree of detail and effort Cygames spends realizing the strange world of Uma, such as extra long telephones (to reach their horse ears), running lanes on roadways for jogging Umas, and a hundred more creative background gags. Trainers who are amalgams of the many real jockeys, trainers, and owners involved with the real horses. The detailed ruleset which informs the visual designs of the characters, including mismatching shoes for horses who suffered leg injuries, ear ornaments which indicate the gender of the real horse, color schemes representing the coat and racing silks, and so on. Individual story elements taken from anecdotes and details from the horses actual lives (Oguri’s hoof rot being represented as busted shoes in the first few episodes).
Uma is not a must watch and it won’t change your life. It’s there to shill waifus and take your money like any other gacha project. But, Oguri was one hell of a horse and if you can spare the time Cinderella Grey is a pretty good way to find out why.
The 1990 Arima Kinen (with context for the tail end of Cap’s career, Arima Kinen begins @ 6:48): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUmCZvqswPE