The “cute girls doing cute things” genre has been a staple in the anime industry for decades, with every new installment putting some new twist on the formula to get fans of slice-of-life stories invested. One of the more modern takes on the genre, a horse-girl racing franchise called Uma Musume, which originally launched in 2016 and has since exploded into a multimedia project, has been able to grow its massive audience thanks to its adorable character designs, charming visuals, and, surprisingly enough, the spirited energy in the races.
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The world of Uma Musume is, in many ways, relatively unserious, following a group of horse girls – human girls with horse ears and tails – that are the reincarnations of successful racehorses of a bygone era being sent to a special academy in Tokyo to hone their skills on the track and relive their glory as racers. The silly setup is, of course, complimented by every single one of the characters in the franchise’s massive cast being some iconic anime girl trope and having their own ambitions for wanting to become successful in their new life.
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As with other franchises whose success is primarily driven by their characters, Uma Musume has received a number of spin-off series, with the most recent being an anime project called Uma Musume Cinderella Gray, which follows one of the characters from the main series, Oguri Cap, and her time at the Kasamatsu Training Center Academy. Oguri Cap, like the other girls in the series, was based on a real-life racehorse celebrity from the Heisei era who was referred to as “The Idol Horse” and led to the second major wave of horse racing fans in Japan. To the surprise of Cinderella Gray fans, Cygames recently released a brand-new teaser announcing that the show will be a 2-cour series set to air in April 2025.
Oguri Cap Was the Perfect Choice For a More Serious Take On Uma Musume’s Ridiculous World
Compared to the mainline Uma Musume storyline, Cinderella Gray has a much more serious tone, showcasing Oguri’s more serious personality and her rise to becoming one of the cast’s strongest racers. The teaser trailer is gorgeously animated, too, making it seem as though Cinderella Gray will be putting a much bigger focus on the racing aspects of the story more than just showing cute moments from Oguri’s day-to-day life. The upcoming spin-off will, like other Uma Musume anime projects, be produced by CygamesPictures and directed by Yuki Ito and Takehiro Miura, with Aki Kindaichi taking care of series composition, Masafumi Sugiura handling script writing, as well as having Takuya Miyahara and Keigo Sasaki onboard as character designers.
