The anime Uma Musume: Pretty Derby is a spin-off of a mobile game where horse-girls compete in races and also sing like idols. We don't know the reason, but this game seems to be quite in demand, so we decided to write about it.
This is a game that is both musical and sporty, infused with moe, elements that can also be seen in the anime, which aired in the Japanese spring season of 2018, and which has a total of 13 episodes. This was a time when animal girls, ship girls, airplane girls, among others, were very popular.
This anime deals with much more than just the protagonist's journey as a sportsman, but also about everything that is involved in it, also showing the emotional side of the protagonist and how she had to learn to control it to achieve her goal, her dream of be a runner I'm sure you will fall in love with this anime.
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Why Horse Girls?
This game and anime were not created without reason; its creators were clever in combining two things that Japanese people love, moe girls and horse racing. That's right, horse races are quite popular in Japan.
As mentioned at the beginning of the article, the authors also wanted to ride the wave of anime that mix girls with other creatures. And since the goal was to be a mobile game, this combination was perfect.
To give you an idea, a very popular game in Japan involving horse racing is Japan World Cup 3 often referred to as a bizarre game in the West. It is a horse racing game with unusual characters.
The dream of being a runner
The story of this anime features as protagonist Special Week, a girl who dreams of becoming the best horse-girl runner in the country. To achieve this, she goes to a school where horse-girls receive training to race. In this school, she meets Silence Suzuka, who becomes her friend, and joins her team, Spica.
And so begins the career of Special Week in the race. The horse-girls that star in the franchise were based on real-world racehorses, even having the same names, as well as certain characteristics of theirs.
Although it has many comedic scenes and is quite light most of the time, Uma Musume: Pretty Derby also has a serious side, discussing the work done by the characters and even the interactions they have with each other before, during, and after the races.
In addition, there is a lot of consistency in terms of the way the elements are treated throughout the series, the way the themes are worked and how we can reflect on each of them.
The tone of verisimilitude of the anime
If you do not know the meaning of verisimilitude, it is about coherence, the harmonic connection between the fanciful or imaginary elements that are essential for the understanding of the text. Where everything in the anime seems really true, that you forget it's a fantasy world.
They got it very right in the verisimilitude; in the anime, we find phones adapted for the horse ears of the girls; there are also foreign characters who do not speak Japanese; when some girls get hurt, the time to recover is similar to that of real horses; although the protagonist is great at running, she is not invincible; and several times during the anime, her emotional imbalance harms her during the races. The anime focuses on details with the aim of making the audience feel as if there really is a world where horse girls exist.
But even with all this solid foundation, it is still possible for the story to be poorly executed by relying on clichés, shallow characters or fanservice. But that is not what happens in this anime, as several clichés were set aside to give more emphasis to the training and races, which makes the story much more interesting to watch, since we won't have so many predictable elements.
But of course, the cliché situations occur during the anime, including most of the characters are not even widely developed, however, the fact that they try to bring a certain variation of that and join these more silly moments with more serious excerpts that work well everything that has to do with the practice of sport, make this anime very interesting and demonstrate the creativity of the producers.
Using these elements in franchises of this type without forgetting to add charisma to the characters and work the situations that occur with them in a creative way is a great idea. Because, even if the consumer doesn't like fun and cute girls, he will probably like what happens to them during the work.
Realistic and fictional elements
Another very good thing in Uma Musume: Pretty Derby is the winding way in which Special Week's path takes her to the top. It is true that during the anime most of the race results are inspired by real events, but everything that was done to reach those results depended exclusively on the production team.
This was good because they managed to give us the feeling that the character was evolving with each result, and that even though she had great talent for racing, she still had to take care of her emotional side to become the best of all, in addition to showing the producer creativity. We saw that effort and talent were not enough, but emotional maturity was also needed.
The endings of the anime
Another extremely interesting thing about this work was the fact that it had a strong objective from the beginning - which was Special Week's dream of becoming the best horse-girl in Japan - which ended up coming true in the end.
And, besides that, it also managed to add another goal in the middle of the journey — that Special Week and Silence Suzuka would run together – which was also completed in the end. That was another very good thing, because it wrapped up everything that was important to have a conclusion at the end of the anime.
In the end, Uma Musume: Pretty Derby proves to be a great anime, as it managed to go beyond the basic, but without losing the simplicity or the emotional appeal that the anime needs to gain the audience's empathy.
