Tomoyo Takayanagi -- Mugen（∞）

 

I've mentioned about sentimentalism a few times over the past few days, and yesterday was a prime example. As some of you know, I used to have a biweekly Sunday anime + food outing with my anime buddy for about a decade but when COVID stopped those plans, we never really got around to picking things up again. 

However, yesterday, a few of us did get together for some lunch at our favourite diner and then for dinner, we grew our group by three times to make the annual Shinta run, and what I mean by that is that every year around this time, we all get together at our favourite yakiniku restaurant, Shinta, up in Richmond Hill for tons of meat for an hour and a half, and then a fair amount of creme brulee and soft-serve ice cream to cool us down. Man, I sure don't eat as much as I used to. 

We did plug in some anime between meals though. But as a bit of backstory, allow me to explain. In the pre-COVID era, my buddy and I did watch the first season of what has become a successful video game-to-anime adaptation of a franchise called "Uma Musume: Pretty Derby"（ウマ娘 プリティーダービー...Horse Girls）, all about horse girls who vie to become the very best at their craft. The characters have been named after some of the finest true-life thoroughbreds that have ever raced in Japan over the last several decades, and it seems like the characters have been portrayed by pretty much every female seiyuu that has gone behind the mike. 

It was a fun first season and I did watch some of the episodes of the subsequent seasons, but I never really got all that excited about the various theme songs used at the beginning and endings of each episode.

Well, yesterday, I got to see the first few episodes of the second separate anime from the franchise. "Uma Musume: Cinderella Gray"（ウマ娘 シンデレラグレイ）which had its run throughout much of 2025 last year. Again, it has that feeling of The Little Train That Could as the button-down but brilliant Oguri Cap（オグリキャップ）begins to make her mark on the racing world in Japan while making friends and even making enemies into friends (or frenemies).

Oguri Cap (1985-2010) was indeed a legendary racehorse whose popularity loomed so large that he was dubbed "The Idol Horse". I was never a big fan of horseracing myself although I remember my parents taking my brother and I down to the old Greenwood Racetrack here in Toronto to watch some of the races. Making origami cranes out of the thrown-away ticket stubs was more our thing between races. However, even I had heard of Oguri Cap via television; it would be hard not to forget with that name.

Anyways, the anime version of Oguri Cap as played by seiyuu Tomoyo Takayanagi（高柳知葉）actually got to sing the first ending theme for "Cinderella Gray", and it's the first acknowledgement of a "Uma Musume" theme song on KKP. "Mugen" (Infinity) has a nice indies pop sound to it which is reassuring to hear, especially if things get a little too intense by the end of an episode, and I have to say that Takayanagi has some fine vocals to the point that I wonder if she has released some non-anime albums. The song was written and composed by Honoka Takahashi（たかはしほのか）, one-half of the pop-rock duo Regallily（リーガルリリー）.

What I had also forgotten was that Takayanagi already has standing on the blog since she was part of Coro Machikado（コーロまちカド）, the seiyuu quartet who came up with the beefy bass-heavy "Yoi Machi Cantare"（よいまちカンターレ）for the anime "Machikado Mazoku"（まちカドまぞく...The Demon Girl Next Door）.