If there's one thing I find this film, it's inconsistent. This seems like Liao Chengzhi's directorial debut, and it shows. This director REALLY loves post processing his footage, to the point that I find it distracting. There's so much artificially added light, bloom, (SO MUCH) blur, and particle effects I feel like I'm watch a student film. And there are quite a few shots and segments that feel like the director was showing off his directorial skills more than telling the story optimally. A lot of the dialogue (even from characters we know and love from the series) felt kind of stiff, or awkwardly delivered.As an example, there was a scene in the cafeteria where Top Road had not finished her food. Rice and another horse girl come in and discuss why she hasn't finished her food. And every piece of dialogue had an unusually long pause at the end each sentence. It felt like an old PS1 game where you had to wait for the dialogue to load in to hear the next line. This was not done to increase awkwardness, or tension, or anything for the scene. It just felt poorly edited for whatever reason.
There were many scenes where the music was overly bombastic with no tactfulness. In fact, the music was often mixed too loudly and was overly distracting. I usually see the opposite issue where the music is mixed far too low, but I think the kinds of pieces that were chosen with dialogue over top just made most scenes not mesh well quite often.

Despite what I've read online, I find the animation (and even art) in this film to be really inconsistent. It doesn't flow as well as it should either. A lot of sections strangely feel like they were directed by completely different people, despite being directed by one person. Each race feels completely different from the last from tone, to the way it's shot, and even how the characters look, and not in a good way.

Maybe it's because I'm coming off of a series, but there's just way too much jammed into this short film. It feels like a highlight reel of every dramatic moment with absolutely no room for any of them to breath. If there was a whole series behind this, it would be okay, but apparently this is the longer version of the two available, and the pacing is still far too fast. I barely cared enough about these racers before their conflicts were resolved. I think there's 4 races? Not even talking about the characters and their issues. There are some beautiful shots, and some good ideas, but it fell short due to the pacing issues.

Unfortunately, and I feel like this is one of the film's most disappointing aspects. It was difficult for me to take Admire Vega's story seriously up until the end (slight spoilers), when I realized her grieving her sister was manifesting as a wound in her leg, and her downplaying and belittling herself was her grief bringing her down. But, in the end, she was able to accept what happened and move on, which is the most important thing. However, the writing just makes the whole sub plot come off as melodramatic and (at best) goofy. They made her sister kind of seem like a bitch too, which I think could have been delivered in a better way. The whole process felt like they thought of the resolution first, and wrote around it with (melo)dramatic flair. Unfortunately, they do not have the same "I'll make up something up as I go along" writing chops as Akira Toriyama can to make it work for them.

I really sound like I do not like this film. And honestly, I'm not sure I do. I think it had potential, some good segments, potential for good character growth, some (emphasis on some) great art and animation. But falls short due to an overambitious director, inconsistent animation, and too many characters and subplots for its short run time.