Uma Musume: Pretty Derby - Shin Jidai no Tobira

It's everything I hoped for and more.

Coincidentally caught the movie while on vacation in Tokyo recently and was once again impressed by this series. The movie manages to capture in great detail the serious elements seen in S2. I found no pacing issues in it's arguably short runtime.

While all of the elements of the movie stood out as amazing, the direction and cinematography particularly during races is to me worth much more than my mere 2000 yen ticket. Even if a new viewer had not watched any previous installments in the film, the movie is presented in a manner that conveys the basic premise ... extremely well without making the movie difficult for fans of the series.

One of the best movie I've ever seen

BOANE premiered in cinemas on May 24th this year, and I've waited for a chance to see it outside of cinemas, especially with the high praise it got from those who got the opportunity to see it. Even with the high bar of expectation that was set for it, it exceeded it in all metrics.

Tight pacing, incredible composition, beautiful colors, fluid animation, wonderful character writing, and acting, and it all meshes in 1 hour and 45 minutes of absolute cinema. It is everything that you'd want in a movie. Everything that Cygames has done in the past is completely ... outclassed by this movie, for it seems that they took what they've learned from making previous shows like Priconne and bangbangbravern and applied that knowledge to make this movie.

Will not go into details so that more people can watch this unspoiled, but I will point out my one nitpick of the movie is Cafe's slightly lacking involvement in the movie, despite being promoted as part of the main 4. This is a nitpick because she did serve her purpose in the narrative and theme of the movie, but I do think it is the time constraint of 1 hour and 45 minutes that causes this, however, this does mean that they managed to focus more on Jungle pocket and keeping the pacing tight, which is definitely the right decision.

Interesting to see only positive reviews for this one. From the protagonist who is a generic shounen protag carbon copy whose only character trait is the "want to be the best", to the lack of development or even basic characterisation of most of the supposting cast it seems quite baffling to me. Dantsu has basically no role in this movie, and Manhattan Cafe's motivations are hinted at but never really explored. Tachyon as the antagonist does carry the movie pretty hard though. The relationship with the trainer and the retired horse girl is done reasonably well, but was ultimately just an inferior version of the ... season 3 plot with Kitasan Black. The animation is great, but the races are definitely over-edited where the "last spurt" moments which are supposed to be the highlights of the races just become drawn out internal monologue scenes with colourful effects everywhere. Sometimes it's nice to see the girls actually racing each other rather than just against themselves... Contrary to popular belief, using sakuga with people screaming does not infinitely create hype and gets boring after a while.

All the humour and memes from the show are gone, and due to the aforementioned issues with the characters and the depictions of the races, I found for the first time when watching Uma Musume that I didn't really care who won the races either. Saddest was definitely the final race against a legendary horse girl foreshadowed throughout the movie, only to be animated in the same way as the other races and dwelled on for all of about 2 seconds after its end before moving on. Only watch this movie if you like battle-shounen anime as that is the formula they seem to have chosen for some reason, and the target audience whom I imagine are the ones scoring this movie so highly.