A young horse girl strives to be the best racer ever but learns that victory requires hard work, steady endurance and help from others. The film lauds athletic effort and friendship. And it’s a beautifully produced anime with next to nothing to stumble over content-wise.
Umamusume. They are born to run.
They may just look like pretty young girls who happen to have horse ears and a tail, but there’s much more in their horse-girl DNA. An Umamusume has an innate drive to run, a need to gallop and reach great speeds. They are designed to aim for goals beyond mere mortal eyes.
That passionate longing hit Jungle Pocket—Pokke to her friends—when she went to see her first Umamusume competition at the local racetrack. She watched the famed Fuji Kiseki fly around the track with muscular grace and perfectly balanced power. And Pokke instantly knew that she too must find a way to reach that kind of speed and perfection.
In what seemed like no time at all, Pokke was given her chance. She was accepted at Tracen Academy, where hopeful Umamusume girls train to compete in the Twinkle Series races. And she was even welcomed under the tutelage of trainer Tanabe, the same brilliant man who trained Fuji Kiseki. In fact, since Fuji’s injury, Pokke has had the chance to learn from her as well.
Pokke has been improving in such leaps and bounds that she feels right on the verge of proving to the world that Jungle Pocket is the greatest Umamusume racer there ever was. Just a few more victories will catapult her to glory in the Japanese Derby.
That’s when Pokke meets Agnes Tachyon.
They say “tachyons” are hypothetical subatomic particles that always travel faster than the speed of light. And Agnes lived up to her namesake. When Pokke encounters Agnes as they walked down the stadium entry hallway together, she can smell the speed and strength emanating from this horse girl.
Agnes Tachyon is impossibly fast. Impossibly illusive. When Agnes leaps forward in the race—sending a clod of dirt and mud into Pokke’s face—it’s almost beyond belief. Pokke has seen fast, but Agnes is in another league.
It’s this moment that reveals everything to Pokke. The future becomes clear.
This quirky and unencumbered Umamusume, Agnes Tachyon, will be Pokke’s rival. She will drive Pokke to great heights. Together they will reach for glory never dreamed of before. And Pokke will battle to surpass Agnes and cement the name Jungle Pocket in the annals of Umamusume history!
First, though, Pokke needs to get Agnes to remember who she is.
Pokke is an exuberant and determined horse girl. She comes to realize that reaching for a goal takes more than self-confidence; it requires hard work, endurance, grit and a little help from those around her. Pokke learns to push past her fears and stop letting self-doubts defeat her before she even begins.
Along that path, Pokke’s trainer and friends give her support and strong words of love and encouragement. And the movie points out that even competitors can help push one another to greater heights—not simply as battling foes but as inspiration.
Not everyone wins, the film says, but everyone gains from the hard work of reaching for difficult goals—especially when they work alongside good friends.
Umamusume: Pretty Derby – Beginning of a New Era helps illustrate the great effort and mental focus of athletes as they strain for victory and hit a competitive zone. It also demonstrates how characters can persevere after a loss. For instance, one defeated racer declares, “In a world full of winners, I can’t stay a loser.” And that spurs her to better effort and eventual victory. Several friends training together encourage one another.
When Pokke wins a derby race, Fuji sincerely thanks her for giving Tanabe a derby win, something he had long aspired to. The trainer weeps in joy.
The film’s narration introduces Umamusume: “Born with names from other worlds, sometimes with strange, sometimes with glorious histories, [Umamusume] inherit the souls of these names and run.”
We see some characters at the beach in bikini swimsuits. Fuji’s racing gear has a low-cut top. We see a quick shot of some Umamusume wrapped in full-length towels in a locker room.
A horse girl racer injures herself during the extreme strain of a race. Afterward, she stands with her injured foot quivering. We see several Umamusume with their feet or legs wrapped after injuries. A racer stumbles and falls at the beginning of a race, putting her at a race-losing disadvantage.
A discouraged Pokke pushes herself to extremes, and we see the painful and exhausting training she puts herself through. Her trainer is able to calmly ease her back from the edge. “Just a single misstep could break you,” he warns.
[The film is presented in Japanese with English subtitles.]
There are two instances where someone says, “What the h—?” There’s a single use of “d–n.” There’s one use of the word “friggin’.”
None.
None.
When people hear about Umamusume anime—and the fact that it’s about horse girls—their first question is usually: You mean like My Little Pony?
The answer to that is a definite no. Umamusume are actually very human-looking girls with horse ears and tails who train to compete in stadium races. (Uma musume is literally “horse girl” in Japanese.) So Pretty Derby – Beginning of a New Era is more of a sports anime than anything else.
The next question from adult males is usually, Should I be watching that?
There are some well-established tropes surrounding anime films and even the My Little Pony franchise—tropes involving over-sexualized female characters and the fans of those characters. But I can say that there’s generally nothing problematic to be found in the TV series of Umamusume. And you won’t encounter any sexual issues, nudity, violence, gore, profanity or substance abuse in the movie, either.
In fact, the worst of this film’s content is one anime girl wearing a somewhat low-cut racing uniform and a couple of mild profanities in the dialogue. (Though I should note that the lightly coarse language is in Japanese with English subtitles.)
OK, so what will you find in this not-my-little-pony movie?
Umamusume: Pretty Derby – Beginning of a New Era offers up a strikingly well-animated racing story. The production is excellent. It vividly captures the speed and emotion of competitors pounding around a racetrack with colorful art direction, impactful sound and an eclectic variety of musical underscores. But more importantly, it tells an immersive story of several young women who form friendships with each other as they diligently work through the joys and difficulties of reaching for a dream.
Those are things that people of any age can watch, enjoy and consider in the context of their own lives. It’s the sort of uplifting, smile-worthy and, well, life-affirming stuff that anime is often really good at conveying. In fact, this one-hour-and-48-minute pic will trot past you so quickly, it might leave you hoping for more.
And the creators of this movie (and the multiple seasons of the Umamusume anime TV show) are happy to say, Right this way.
After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.
