Umamusume: Cinderella Gray

Three more Grade I wins came after the last episode

Oguri Cap was a gray stallion, foaled in March 1985, who started out at Kasamatsu, a country track in Gifu Prefecture. He won nine of his first eleven races on the regional circuit, moved up to the national one in January 1988, and took his first Grade I that December, the Arima Kinen. The series follows him from those debuts to that race, and stops.

What it leaves out: three more Grade I wins, a career running to December 1990, a death in July 2010. In the adaptation, the horse is a gray-haired girl who runs on two legs for the Kasamatsu academy. CygamesPictures animated the series, Takehiro Miura and Yūki Itō directed it, and Kenji Kawai wrote the score, thirty years after Ghost in the Shell.

The Story

The academy sits in a deserted stretch of country, and the girl who turns up there runs in a way that overturns common sense. Jō Kitahara, a rising trainer whose attention she catches, sets out to take her as far as she can go, with her friend Belno Light alongside. From there she moves up into the races that matter nationally.

The manga came out in Weekly Young Jump, Shueisha's seinen weekly, from June 2020 to December 2025: twenty-three volumes written by Masafumi Sugiura and drawn by Taiyou Kuzumi. It placed second of fifty nominees in the print category of the Next Manga Awards.

The Ideal Audience

The twenty-three episodes aired on TBS in two blocks across 2025, April to June and October to December. ADN carried them subtitled in French and German, Prime Video and the It's Anime channel took North America, the United Kingdom, Ireland and Australia, Anime Onegai Latin America. Voters at the twelfth Anime Trending Awards made it Anime of the Year.

Common Sense Media puts it at ten and up, with mild bullying between students and coarse language as its only warnings. Stopping at the Arima Kinen of 1988 is the interesting decision: it makes a first Grade I the summit of the story, when the record shows it was a start.