Umamusume: Pretty Derby – Beginning of a New Era – Movie Review

What’s it about? Jungle Pocket is a rowdy, rookie umamusume athlete ready to defeat every challenger and make a name for herself. But when her rival, the intense and eccentric Agnes Tachyon, suddenly retires from racing entirely, Jungle Pocket will need to rediscover her own motivation for running.

Originally released in 2024, Beginning of a New Era has been galloping across the world with an official English-language release in 2026, likely spurred on by the runaway success of the Umamusume mobile game’s global release. If this movie’s place in a looming multimedia franchise seems daunting, worry not: Jungle Pocket’s story functions just fine as a standalone. Character cameos from the broader story universe are fun Easter Eggs rather than distracting references; and while, technically, this is a fantastical sports biopic about how the real racehorse Jungle Pocket rose to fame, knowledge of Horse Canon is not required to pick up what the movie’s putting down. If you’re unfamiliar with it, don’t let the inherent absurdity of the whole “reincarnated racehorses” premise trip you up—just suspend your disbelief, open your heart, and settle in to enjoy the stellar animation and fantastically feral female protagonists that this film has to offer you.

I’m not a sakuga nerd by nature, but I must highlight how good this movie looks (it’s relevant to the feminist analysis too, I promise). Bloody hell, this movie looks good! Gone are the clunky 3DCG running models from Season 1, the action scenes in Beginning of a New Era do an incredible job capturing the epic scope of the races and the frankly freakish ability of the umamusume themselves. Sound design, music, motion and color all come together to create an almost startling sense of power. The air itself warps around these runners, the earth ripples and tears asunder under their footfalls, and they surge past each other streaming sweat and baring their teeth in terrifying, determined grimaces. And that’s before we get into the more abstract animation that bends reality itself to show how racing feels to these athletes.

I appreciate the extent to which the protagonists are allowed to be expressive, intense, and sometimes downright off-putting in these scenes. Jungle Pocket and her fellows get to look gross and horrifying and feral, the animation capturing the strength inherent in their horse-girl bodies with a grand sense of physicality. Overwhelmingly I get the impression that the appeal of these characters comes from their power rather than, say, their cuteness or beauty or other more typically feminine-coded appeal points, which is refreshing given the series’ gacha game context (there’s also basically no fan service; even the unbuttoned blouse in Fuji Kiseki’s racewear is presented very matter-of-factly, with no leering storyboarding, and comes off as couture rather than something meant to be titillating).

For all its spectacle, Beginning of a New Era does also have a solid emotional core. Jungle Pocket is brash, reckless, and “heart full, head empty” in a way I usually associate with shonen protagonists, and again, it’s refreshing to see that in a girl from a franchise that has an idol component. But her character isn’t one-note, either, nor is this a straightforward power trip. Her bravado is thrown into disarray when her foil drops out of the circuit, denying her the glory and emotional closure of defeating her rival. If Jungle Pocket wins, is it just because Agnes Tachyon wasn’t there to get in the way? Why is she even running, if her motivation was to beat someone she can no longer face? Her hard-won fame feels hollow and her self-doubt quickly turns self-destructive, all of which is also shown in beautiful, expressive animation.

Maybe it’s not a unique character arc in the world of sports anime—and indeed even in Umamusume—but it’s compelling enough to carry the movie and give Jungle Pocket that extra character depth to make her really engaging rather than just fun to watch. She’s accompanied by a range of other characters, too. From her benevolent yet secretly melancholy mentor Fuji Kiseki, to the bombastic final boss of the racing circuit T.M. Opera O, to the eerie and mad-scientist-coded Agnes Tachyon, there’s an entertaining mix of personalities, none of which neatly fit into tropey boxes, many of which get their own mini-arcs to complement Jungle Pocket’s.

I understand if people bounce off Umamusume on principle—it sits at the perhaps uniquely fraught intersection of the gacha game industry and real-life horse racing, after all—but if you are curious about what this franchise has to offer, this is an excellent bite-sized entry point. Beginning of a New Era tells a snappy one-off story that encapsulates the heart of the series: supernaturally-gifted athletes chasing their hopes and dreams, passionately butting heads with their rivals, and pushing past both physical and emotional defeat to redefine what victory means to them (all to a banger of a soundtrack). It commits to its larger-than-life sports anime premise and lets its female leads be almost terrifyingly competent athletes, giving them meaningful character arcs along to way, too. Its heightened emotions and visual splendor also just make this a really fun experience (especially if you can catch it in a cinema on a big screen and with all that surround sound for extra oomph!). I’m not horsing around when I say this is probably going to make the list of my favorite movies from this year.