Uma Musume Cinderella Gray: The Perfect Heisei-era (Horse) Anime
There's one thing i've been slowly picking up on as i'm watching Uma Musume Cinderella Gray and it's that... the entire series has this very distinctly 'golden age shounen' feel to it - everything from the direction to the overall visual 'look' of it, with its use of almost garishly saturated yellows and oranges and compositing that borders on overexposed--a lot of which I personally associate with the 2000s digipaint era of anime.
Unlike the other seasons of Pretty Derby, whose characters all have the right amount of moeblob, CinGray's artstyle paints racers like Oguri Cap, Tamamo Cross, and Symboli Rudolf whom we'd normally associate with their cute and puffy in-game models, with sharp, piercing features and crazed expressions that give the series a distinctly more 'shounen' feel than its other media.
Then I hear the score and that sort of distinct brassy focus to it that I immediately clock as being the work of Kenji Kawai, who composed the scores for shows like Patlabor, Gundam 00, and Kamen Rider Build. His music to me has such a distinct early-2000s quality that he earnestly has never moved away from, and it's one of the aspects of his work that I find the most endearing and memorable. The fun part was that I was able to pick up and clock his involvement without a single bit of prior research or background knowledge on this show's production, purely by listening to the music organically weave into the scenes.
In episode 4, Oguri Cap debuts BRIGHTEST HEART in her Winning Concert, composed by Takuya Ichihashi from Cygames in-house sound team, and arranged by Ryota Nakano, with lyrics by Erica Masaki.
The song takes its main stylistic influence from a particular era of late 90s/early 2000s j-pop and anison, notable for its heavy electronic dance beats (a trait borrowed from eurodance, trance, and techno), bright brassy supersaw synths, laid down with some energetic power chords chugging along underneath. If you've ever seen Gundam SEED, Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, Symphogear, or hell, if you've listened to ANY fripSide song ever, you'll probably be able to name at least four different songs that sound just like this.
Beyond just the sound of the music itself, it's worth pointing out that even the lyrics seem to harken back to a lot of common themes present in songs of this time, with a lot of imagery centered around space, galaxies, and shooting stars. I'd wager that if you were to show this song to anyone with a vague familiarity of anime without the actual context behind Uma Musume, they would probably assume this to be the opening to a mecha anime.
Lyrics taken from the Uma Musume Wikia
(As a side-note, I'm honestly a bit surprised they didn't decide to get Cygames' own Akihiro Honda to produce the song, considering one of his best works is a Symphogear-esque power anthem performed by Nana Mizuki, one of the most prolific artists of this style.)
It's clear to me now that I feel like all of this was meant to be the point - when tasked with adapting a story about a racer with as seasoned of a history as Oguri Cap, Cygames chose present it in a way that is so distinctly tied to an older age of anime, giving it this 'old school' edge that neither Pretty Derby nor the other standalone films have, despite being a 2024 production spearheaded by a studio that largely did not exist prior to the 2020s. For the most part, Cinderella Gray follows a continuity that is purposely 'disconnected' from Pretty Derby; we don't see many iconic horses like Special Week, Tokai Teio, or Gold Ship, and a majority of the supporting cast are actually entirely new characters not tied to any existing horses. This allows the series to feel almost like a 'vague prequel' in terms of its chronology to the rest of the series, and it is even heavily implied that events in Cinderella Gray directly impact future generations of racers in Japan.
The Uma Musume franchise is one built on a foundation of pure-hearted love and passion for keiba and its rich history, and to see them so effortlessly weave that history into the media that Cygames creates for it ignites a creative spirit in me that I never thought I would see out of a modern anime production.
