“The Opera: “Alas, It Is My Fate””
What They Say:
The horse girls are back to charm you in this special, bite-size anime. Umayon comes alive as a cute and eye-catching anime! At a school-turned-training facility, the girls will race, perform, and train… but that’s not all! Saddle up for a short-form anime that displays the laidback school days of the horse girls! Aaaaand, they’re off!
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
With a couple of episodes that have helped to familiarize with the concept a bit having not watched the main series, this episode takes us to the opera! Being a high-end kind of academy with a lot of prestige to it and performance elements, an opera isn’t a surprise. Though it feels more like a standard musical as we get a group of the girls working a performance to good effect here, even if the story feels meaningless to me. I know I’m not getting the full effect of it since I lack character connections here, but it shows off their abilities well with the singing, sword-fighting, and general stagecraft which makes it enjoyable to watch.
In Summary:
The shorts have definitely raised my interest in checking out the main series because it looks like it has a fun world design to it and an amusing if too-large cast of characters. That’s been my main frustration with most of the really popular idol properties in that it stacks them on top of each other like commodities. Still, there’s a cuteness here that works and each episode draws me in a little more even if it is just silly fluff. I’ll take a dose of silly fluff for three minutes easily in the time of Corona.
Grade: B
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment:
Sony KDL70R550A 70″ LED 1080P HDTV, Apple TV via HDMI set to 1080p, Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.
