Anime is a medium that's no stranger to weird and wacky concepts. Numerous isekai series have played around with the idea of their protagonists becoming strange or unwieldy inhuman creatures in a new life. But perhaps the craziest of these new franchises is Uma Musume Pretty Derby. Its premise is beyond ridiculous, but that's just the beginning. Not only did an anime adaptation of the series' spinoff just air, but a second season of the original series is on the way. Here's what makes Uma Musume the zaniest anime this side of the glue factory.
That Time I Got Reincarnated As a Horse
The anime is the franchise's biggest point of reference, but it's actually something of an adaptation. Uma Musume began in 2017 with the announcement of a mobile game from Cygames planned for release the following year. The game would be delayed indefinitely and is still unreleased to this day, but that didn't stop the anime from premiering in April of 2018. As mentioned, the storyline is so laughable that the show beckons a watch entirely because of it. The protagonists of the series are horse girls, having the general appearances of humans, but with the tails, ears, physical training and weird names of horses. In fact, they even make clopping noises when they run.
Animal-eared anime characters aren't exactly an oddity, but it's the backstory that explains these equine maidens that are. Apparently, these horse girls are the reincarnations of famous racehorses from another dimension -- supposedly our own. The main character is a lass named Special Week who, like the rest of the horse girls, attends Japan's Tracen Academy to become the most popular and well-known horse girl throughout all the land. Her personal dream is to race on the same team as Silence Suzuka. The horse girls' aspirations also include, strangely enough, becoming pop idols with chart-busting hit songs. It all boils down to essential an equestrian version of The Idolmaster, and it's quickly become an expansive franchise of its own.
The Horse Girls Are Surprisingly Mysterious
The show comes loaded with questions once the bizarre concept is peeked into even slightly. For one thing, due to keeping their names from their previous lives as actual horses, one of the horse girls is actually named Narita Brian. Narita is an area in Japan where the horse was likely from, but an ostensibly male name for a clearly female horse raises all sorts of questions about what does and doesn't exist in this world. All of the horse girls are just that, young ladies, and there don't seem to be any male or elderly horse people. This perhaps means that they age like actual horses, which is strange given how uncanny their "humanity" is. The lack of any horse boys also seems to imply that reincarnation is the only way that these ponies increase their number. On top of that, the world of the horse girls doesn't have any actual regular horses, so the horse training that the girls receive should be a completely alien concept.
Also preceding the anime was a manga version of the stable story, titled Starting Gate!: Uma Musume Pretty Derby. The web series, published on the Cygames Cycomics website, continues to this day and has so far been collected into four manga volumes. It was joined in 2018 by Umayon, a spinoff comic focusing on the everyday lives of different characters from the main series. There's also a Youtube channel for the franchise called Pakatube, which spotlights the character Gold Ship. The anime adaptation of Umayon recently finished the first of what could be several seasons, having added new storylines not seen in the manga. The original series' anime aired all the way back in 2018, but it will finally be receiving a continuation sometime next year. Despite emphasizing the idol aspect of the horse girls' fame, the show notoriously skips over concert scenes, instead, focusing mainly on the races. Uma Musume has quickly become one of the most eccentric multimedia franchises to come out of Japan in the last few years, taking the dead horse of the isekai genre and throwing a pop star bridle on it.
