Alternative title(s): Gunjou no Fanfare
Anime original by Lay-duce
Streaming on Crunchyroll

Premise

Yu Arimura is a 15-year old boy and former idol who quits his highly successful entertainment career to become a jockey. Enrolling in a prestigious horse racing academy, he meets several other first-year students, each with dreams and challenges of their own.

Artemis’ verdict: Probably Not Meant To Be A Comedy

I barely know what to say. Pretty much everything about this is laughably bad, from the jarring CG bits to frankly the entire set-up, in which everything is somehow played absolutely straight. A magical “ghost horse” who presumably appears only to students who are destined for greatness, an instructor who sprinkles all his dialogue with English words completely at random, a student who’s basically a horse whisperer, the main character whose dream is to become the kind of jockey that’s “at one with his horse”… this is clearly an amazing high school anime parody just waiting to be written, and here it’s delivered like any other earnest “ganbaru your way to your dreams” kind of sports/school story. It’s hilarious, but I’m fairly sure it’s not intended to be, and unfortunately not in a way that would induce me to watch a second episode.

Jel’s verdict: Calm Down, it’s Just Horse Racing

Whoever wrote this must really love horse racing. This episode portrays it as some kind of higher calling, or even a religious experience, to the point where the main guy is literally guided by horse spirits. It’s ironic then that there doesn’t seem to be a lot of actual horse racing, or even learning about horses. Ultimately I think this is just supposed to be a setup for cute boys to stare deeply into each others souls, and in the process we get a self-serious, unintentionally funny mess. It’s probably fine if you want a new group of boys to ship, but otherwise not much else to see.