Centaurworld S1E1: “Hello Rainbow World”

This review was fast lane commissioned by @Vinegrape.


It's a nETflIx OrigInAl SEriEs, but it's also supposed to be fairly good (not that "supposed to be good/bad" necessarily means much, going by personal experience ). Which I guess isn't unheard of these days, at least for cartoons; live action series not so much. Other than that, all I know about Centaurworld is that it's American-made, musical, and fantasy-adjacent.

Also, from the screenshots I've seen it looks a LOT like Adventure Time, even compared to other shows that were directly inspired by Adventure Time in the years immediately following it. So that's something else that I know about it, I guess.

Not going into this one with any real expectations, positive or negative. Let's see how it goes.


The pilot opens with a pair of contrasting images.

I guess this show is "what if My Little Pony but also From Software?" then. Okay.

A girl with what has to be deliberately A:TLA-ish visual design rides out of a battle-scarred castle on a horse that looks a lot like the one being hugged in the first screencap. As she crosses a rope bridge and cuts it behind her, she monologues about how grimderp her life has been up until now. Born into a war-torn land, orphaned, and now without any surviving friends or companions save her horse. Chaotic neutral, 18 Str, 6 Cha, you get the picture.

She also is carrying a generic glowy artifact. So generic, in fact, that it's literally just called "the Artifact." Apparently she's been told that it's the key to victory, but not why or how.

She probably has to bring it to a glowing structure and place it on a pedestal or something.

She rides to the village her faction was most recently garrisoned at, and finds it ruined, in flames. One might wonder how it's burning so dramatically during this moody rainstorm, but, well, you know. The horse starts panicking, and she has to dismount to calm it down. There's what seems like a tender, earnest moment as she starts lovingly comforting her mount, but then she starts singing and the whole thing gets silly again really, really fast. Like, "autotune Enya-esque chanting that just consists of the words 'sight,' 'alright,' and 'fight' arranged in different ways" silly. The singing continues as she gets back on the horse and does a series of pseudo-artsy slow motion gallops through the devastation while the autotuning gradually ramps itself up to the point of incomprehensibility.

Put succinctly: it's great.

The song is cut off abruptly when she and the enemy army coming over a nearby cliff spot each other.

I thought they were just soldiers in over-the-top "bad guy" spikey armor, at first. Once the chase scene starts though, they reveal their inhuman proportions, quadrupedal gorilla-like gait, and sharp teeth flashing behind their helmets. Orc type things, I guess.

I dig the apelike running that they do. It's actually pretty visually unique, unlike everything else about this sequence. Almost to the point of undermining the joke, honestly.

She flees, escaping multiple attempts at surrounding her with a combination of brilliant horsewomanship and decently animated (but hard to take seriously) feats of acrobatic animu swordfighting. Eventually though, she gets cornered against a tall cliff edge, unhorsed, and has the Sacred Amulet of Generica knocked out of her grasp.

Her horse runs and tries to grab it for her (that is one smart horse...) but an orc knocks it off the cliff edge before she can catch up. Resulting in this hilarious visual:

I actually had to pause and laugh for a good ten seconds at this part. I guess I wasn't kidding after all about that 18 strength.

...you know, between the visual of the army appearing over the plateau and now the "hauling a horse up a cliff by hand" thing, I wonder if they're trying to evoke Disney's "Mulan." Of course, the fact that it's a waifey Avatar-ish girl instead of an inhumanly tall fat guy doing the horse-lifting this time just makes it even more comically absurd than it was in the movie.

She pulls on the generic rope of sacredness. The horse's weight pulls back. The orcs close in. Then the rope snaps, there's a Big No from the girl, and then the Generica Totem lights up and...

She opens her eyes, but they're not her eyes. She sees...

Oh.

Um.

Apparently she's been isekai'd into the Land of Ooh. But in the body of her horse for some fucking reason. Compared to that, the mismatched-looking giraffetaur that greets her here barely even warrants a shrug.

I just now noticed that the tree trunks and mountains are all centaur-shaped.​

She screams. Girraffetaur screams back, seemingly just because she started screaming. She stops screaming and asks him what's happening. He says she doesn't know. She asks how she's able to talk with her new horse mouth, and how he's able to understand her. He doesn't know that either. After a quiet moment, he starts screaming again just to end the awkward silence, and she reciprocates. Which is pretty funny ngl.

Eventually, she gets up and starts tearing her way across the pastel sugar bowl she's found herself in, babbling hysterically about how clean and open everything is and wanting to know why nothing is on fire and trying to see if she can find a version of her horse that isn't herself. Also, the horse was apparently named "Rider." Let me guess, the artifact's name is "Mount," and the girl's name this whole time was "Amulet." She runs passed some Hobbiton-ish mound houses that are shaped like centaurs and have wooden doors placed where the anus should be, is blinked at by a family of talking centaur-fish who emerge from a creek, is laughed at by a talking centaur-apple as it gallops alongside her, and stops just in time to avoid slamming into a centaur...deer...chihuahua...thing.

Anyway, she finally stops running and allows the locals to start a proper conversation with her. Said locals include the deer-chihuahua thing (who turns out to have crippling social anxiety, to the point where meeting a new person gives her a literal panic attack and induces stress-vomiting), the giraffe dude from before, a small bird with a dissonantly deep hypermasculine voice, and a zebra-centaur thing who shakes his ass at her and winks invitingly like he's just finished lubing up. Interesting group, for sure.

Also, the bird can apparently distort its head and upper body into this nightmarish configuration:

Cool, I needed to not sleep tonight, this will help.

The nightmarishness (or...night-MARE-ishness, dohohohoho) isn't one sided, though. The centaurs notice that Amulet is drawn and animated in a different style than them. They are creeped out by her excessively detailed and shaded torso, her realistic proportions, and her rigid, inexpressive face that strikes them as lifeless and mask-like. She thinks that they're...well, she doesn't say anything out loud, for want of anyone to say it to, but her body language speaks for itself.

Over her objections, they crowd in around Amulet and start rubbing her face to see if they can "feel what's wrong with it." Just as she's about to escalate from verbal warnings to iron-shod hoofs, an authority figure arrives. Well, I assume she's an authority figure since the others stand back and stop invading Amulet's personal space as soon as she orders them to. She just looks like a pink alpaca-centaur to me, but they'd know better than I.

Once she's gotten the others to lay off, Alpaca turns out to be pretty excited to have a new immigrant herself. Even if she's a bit more restrained about it.

In her words, it's been so long since she's had "someone to nurture, like a baby. Well, not a literal baby. A baby in spirit, more like. A spiritual baby. Or...a metaphorical baby." It's a very, very Adventure Time sort of gag.

Amulet excuses herself and resumes her search for Rider, quickly explaining things about a war and a desperate quest that the others really don't understand. Alpaca decides that Amulet just needs a proper Centaurworld welcome, orders the others to assist her in giving one, and then...the centaurs all start moving like clipart and tumbling around in defiance of physics as they sing a welcoming song. A welcoming song that's interrupted every couple of lines by Amulet interjecting a deadpan three-word question or critique that goes unanswered.

...

...it's Charlie the Unicorn.

Like, this is literally just a Charlie the Unicorn sketch. There's absolutely no way that this scene wasn't directly inspired by Charlie the Unicorn.

As the centaurs physics-malfunction their way around Amulet, their lyrics fill her in on the basics of Centaurworld culture and social norms. Highlights include the fact that the locals are very friendly to the point of having no sense of boundaries, are aware of their co-dependent social dynamics but have decided that they're still better off sticking with them, and understand that their universal whackiness and hyper-individualism does create a kind of homogeneity that they - once again - have decided to accept for want of better alternatives. I'm doing fairly minimal paraphrasing here.

Also, musically speaking, it's a fairly good song. Not quite as catchy as the best couple of the actual Charlie the Unicorn songs, but not nearly as lame as the weakest ones either.

There's also one part where Deerhuahua launches into a solo about them having barely-suppressed cultural trauma left over from a recent war against genocidal invaders, but the others quickly shut her up and continue the main song. On one hand, there's the obvious irony of Amulet being much more comfortable with this piece of backstory than she is with the stuff they're trying to frontload it with. On the other, I think this is also a nod to Adventure Time and (especially) My Little Pony having implied or explicit conflict and disaster in their in-universe histories that their fans love to launch into.

While also being a brief aside in a circa 2010 Youtube meme sequence. Which is pretty impressive, in terms of screentime economy.

The song ends with Amulet ditching her welcomers once again (well, maybe "once again" isn't quite the right phrasing. She never stopped moving during the song itself) and running away along a rainbow-colored road. It leads her toward some refreshingly dark and sinister-looking woods, but she doesn't get to enter them. A force field barrier blocks her path.

At first I thought that maybe Alpaca had cast some kind of spell to cut her off, but no. The centaurs are nowhere in sight, and it's a static, persistent barrier. When Amulet slams against it harder, it lights up, revealing that the entire meadow region she woke up in is covered by a forcefield dome.

She tries to break through the barrier, but nothing works. There's a Loony Toons ish sequence of Amulet trying all sorts of ways to get through, including stabbing it with sharpened stakes, cobbling a catapult together and launching stones at it, trying to dig under it, and trying to launch herself upward to feel for weak spots. Nothing works. Also, the forcefield actually seems to escalate back against her, eventually extruding limbs of its own to perform slapstick counterattacks when she gets too kinetic. She finally pisses the barrier off enough for it to start using (silly-looking but powerful) energy blasts, culminating in one strong enough to knock Amulet out.

While she's unconscious, she has a brief vision of her human body.

It looks at her, and says "Horse!" and Amulet reacts by...

Oh. HUH.

Okay, I've been misunderstanding something. I just rewatched the first scene, and the rider definitely has a different VA from the horse/narrator. The rider didn't get isekai'd in her horse's body. It was literally just the horse who got isekai'd. The whole opening narration about having been orphaned by the war and knowing only bloodshed and grim darkness was the horse's perspective (I don't know if warhorses normally get to keep in touch with their parents for that long...). She wasn't surprised at being able to speak with a horse mouth when she woke up in Centaurworld. She was surprised at being able to speak at all.

And...this also means that the rider is actually named Rider. And that according to this scene the horse is, apparently, named Horse.

...the naming scheme for that edgy, orc-infested world is...okay, this pretty much HAS to be riffing on Goblin Slayer.

That's funny.

So. Anyway. Horse wakes up again, more motivated than ever to find Rider, but also having decided that she needs more information before she can tackle the barrier. She picks herself up and follows the sound of singing voices to find the centaurs again.

Horse finds Alpaca and the others, who are sitting around a fire toasting pancake/s'more type things. They're a bit less enthusiastic to see Horse this time than they were before, with Alpaca in particular expressing annoyance because of Horse brushing her off last time. Horse refuses her passive aggressive offer of "gigglecakes," and asks if anyone knows about the giant forcefield dome keeping them all imprisoned.

It turns out that the centaurs all do know about the force field dome. Horse is surprised by this, which...okay, the centaurs aren't smart per se, but she should have given them more credit than THAT. Alpaca also reveals that to them, the dome isn't a prison at all. You just need to use your magic to get in and out, and every centaur has magic, so it's trivial for them.

...

There was that previously mentioned genocidal invasion that they don't like to talk about. Seems likely to me that the centaurs or a benefactor of theirs created the dome to protect them from these (presumably nonmagical) invaders. That would definitely explain why the barrier is designed to escalate its use of force when pressed.

Well, if I'm right we'll probably find out pretty soon.

...

More surprisingly for me, Horse doesn't seem to know what magic is herself. She was pretty nonchalant about the Generica Keystone though, so...not sure what to make of that. Maybe magic just isn't called "magic" in the world she came from, idk. Anyway, she asks what "magic" means, and the centaurs answer by launching into another song. Over her objections, of course.

Granted, Horse's presence might have actually been coincidental, because according to the lyrics of the song they sing it every single night. While practicing their magic. And letting their spells and their song inspire each other in a perpetual feedback loop.

Most of the centaurs' spells seem to be limited to personal, mostly-cosmetic effects. Prehensile eyes, shapeshifting faces, giraffe spots that turn into slices of pie, etc. One exception is their universal ability to shoot miniature versions of themselves out of their hoofs.

These minimes then invariably have existential breakdowns along the lines of Rick & Morty's "you pass butter" gag. The centaurs seem unconcerned with this.

After the song (which wasn't quite as good as the previous one, imo), Horse tells the centaurs that she shouldn't need a spell to get through the barrier, since she apparently got through it once before. Somehow. Realizing that the Periapt of Nonspecificity must have been responsible, she realizes that she must have left it somewhere. She dashes around, panicking, trying to find it, until Alpaca gives Deerhuahua a stern look and prompts her to eject the amulet from the pocket dimension she can access through her stomach.

During the song, Deerhuahua mentioned having "tummy portals." Apparently it's less of a "connect two points in realspace" sort of deal, and more like the gluttonizer.

Also, deerhuahua admits that she took it because she's a kleptomaniac, and stealing is the only thing that makes her feel alive. Which I guess explains why Alpaca knew to look at her immediately when Horse said a piece of property had gone missing. Alpaca looks a little shamefaced as she returns the Artifact to Horse.

Her aggravation at Horse's rejection of the group seems to have been balanced by the reminder that the group isn't all that great itself sometimes. She apologizes for this, and insists to Horse that their herd's members can be difficult sometimes, but that they're a family and need to accept and help each other around their flaws. Horse says that she understands that, and that that's why she needs to get back to her own found family; to Rider.

Deerhuahua cuts in here and tells Horse that escaping the dome won't be enough to get her back to her homeworld. Only a "centaur shaman" can do that, and there isn't one nearby. So, escaping the dome IS a needed step, but only the first of many to getting home. Also, Alpaca gets mad at Deerhuahua when she says that and tries to shut her up. Apparently, quite a few subjects are taboo among their herd, and Deerhuahua has a repeated tendency to break these taboos. Maybe it makes her feel alive just like stealing does. When Horse asks if they can please let her out of the dome so she can go find one of these shamans, the centaurs all freak out. Going outside is unthinkable to them, apparently. They all CAN get through the dome, using their magic, but none of them ever DO it, apparently.

Giraffe claims to not even know what's out there, aside from the fact that the Rainbow Road goes all the way around the planet. He might not be telling the truth about his ignorance, of course. Alpaca gets annoyed at him for saying even that much, though. Zebra then contributes that he knows there are five shamans on the entire planet, each tucked away into a different hidden corner of it. Alpaca gets mad at him too, and he retorts that her not wanting him to disclose this information had just been making him want to disclose it more.

Alpaca is starting to really empathize with Horse's frustration with her group now, I think.

Alpaca tries to speak over everyone and emphasize that the reason they never leave the dome is because inside it's fun, it's magical, and - most importantly - it's safe. Horse says that that sounds really boring. Alpaca denies this, while the others all start giving her sceptical looks.

Also, she says "they aren't bored here" before quickly correcting it to "we aren't bored here." Heavily implying that she hates this life too, but puts on a contented face to keep the others placid and safe under the dome.

Hmm. Going to revise my previous hypothesis slightly. I now suspect that Alpaca, perhaps aided by one or more of these powerful shamans, created the dome to protect the other centaurs. Rather than this group having created it for themselves.

Also, it seems like the collection of cartoony neurotic personalities on display here might not just exist because of genre conventions. It seems like we're doing a bit of "reality ensues" here by positing that the whacky cartoon characters only became this way because of their gilded cage environment.

The group seems to be at an impasse. Not sure whether to follow Alpaca's warnings or Horse's questions. So, deciding that she's going to have to do this if she has any chance of getting back to Rider and saving their homeland, Horse takes a moment and gets ready for her first musical number. She's never done this before, so she's worried about trying. However, given that Rider had a song back in the beginning, it stands to reason that the ability to conjure music, special effects, and lyrics at a moment's notice is possessed by the natives of both worlds. And, sure enough, after a bit of stumbling Horse is able to get a song going, and she gradually persuades the others - one by one - to join in. Urging them to explore and seek adventure over sanity-grating safety. There are some parts of Horse's song that the others can't relate to (like the one verse where she starts advertising the glory of battle and the satisfaction of crushing orcish skulls under one's hoofs), but overall she manages. Soon, she has most of the crew following her down the Rainbow Road toward the barrier, with Alpaca reluctantly trotting behind them and trying with diminishing energy to dissuade them.

Also, I definitely know Horse's voice from somewhere. Maybe multiple somewheres. Can't quite put my finger on it though. According to google, Kimiko Glenn was also in...oh, Penni Parker, from "Into the Spiderverse!" And the psycho origami girl, from "Carmen Sandiego!" Those are the main ones I'm remembering. Cool.

They reach the barrier, singing all the way. The centaurs all do a...thing?...with their magic, seeming like they're charging each other up to penetrate the force field. But, it's not until Alpaca finally acquiesces and lays a hoof on Horse that the group is able to pass.

I'd think that Horse just needed *someone* to cast a spell on her before she could go through with the others. But no. Once the final tapping and glowing has been done, the dome itself actually dissolves at one end, disengaging an entire corner of itself to allow them exit. As if the back-and-forth hoof touching was some kind of activation code.

Weird.

Anyway, that's the end of the pilot.


I feel like we kind of lost the plot at the end there. The conflict wordlessly shifting from "Horse wants to leave the dome and doesn't know how" to "Horse wants to convince everyone else to leave the dome" was pretty clumsy, and felt like the writers didn't know how to put their characters at cross-purposes. It's easy enough to justify by saying that Horse needs someone to guide her to the shamans, or that the bubble can't be reactivated after they take it down, but the show really should have done that on its own. It doesn't help that the comedy (which had been the focus up until then) also kind of took a back seat during the end.

Everything up until then was pretty good, though. Some of the humour is of the late 2000's Mad Magazine flavour of comedy, where it's spoofing a different piece of media in every other cut, and that certainly isn't for everyone. Honestly, it was a bit much even for me at times, and pop culture references are literally my online career. But there were also some really clever original twists (like the Horse reveal) and plenty of deadpan wordplay comedy that stands on its own. And, if you do like the 2000's Mad Magazine sort of multi-referential parody, this is an example of it done well.

Speaking of the 2000's, I still can't get over how weird it is to see fucking Charlie the Unicorn being spoofed in a professionally made and distributed show in the 2020's.

Got another episode of this to review. Also, it's fast laned for this month, so I'll probably be reviewing it tomorrow. We'll see if it holds up.