Caelin Bragg
Lantern Staff
While its premise is out there and its gait way too fast, Uma Musume: Pretty Derby has something to it that’s keeping me along for the ride.
Imagine my process of choosing what anime to watch each season. I look through all the new anime airing and pick out the ones with the most interesting premises first and go through one more pass to make sure I didn’t miss something big. After I finished looking at them through that lens, I then do one pass based on the studio producing the show. Sometimes I might skip on a premise that sounds uninteresting or boring to me, but the studio itself can produce shows I enjoy that don’t pique my interest purely on the premise.
As I’m going through all the studios, I stumble upon one show that pushed my love for one of my favorite studios to its breaking point. Pretty Derby is ridiculous on all accounts. It’s about high school derby racing, except instead of the typical horse and jockey combination, they decided to combine the two together, literally calling them “horse girls.”
P.A. Works, the studio behind the show, is known for making some beautiful quality with all their shows, and Pretty Derby is no different. The show does feature instances of computer generated imagery (CGI) rather than hand drawn animation, which is usually a red flag, but, in most cases, the CGI blends in seamlessly and doesn’t stand out.
The story is pretty typical of most sports anime, but it seems to move at light-speed as the first episode consists of introductions to the characters and world and ends with the start of the first major race for the main character. This is an unfortunate reality for most dozen-episode series that air as it’s very difficult to fit a complete story in such a short amount of time. Sports anime usually tend to air for more than 50 episodes, which allows viewers to get attached to the characters and lets the show have a believable progression as the characters grow. Pretty Derby does in three episodes what most sports anime spend 10 episodes realistically building.
I have the weirdest relationship with this show. It’s not intrinsically terrible, but suffers from pacing issues that makes it hard to build any sort of attachment to the characters. We’re three episodes into the show so far, and I’m still watching because I’ve gotten too invested to drop it now.
