Wallpaper gallery link.
Yappa-pa, Yappa-pa, as if I don’t already have a ton of anime to watch, someone in my D&D group decided to lend me the first box set of Ranma 1/2 for no apparent reason. I’ve got the first two volumes of Code Geass and the last volume of Simoun, sitting on the pile just waiting to be viewed. Getting into a 100+ episode series like Ranma 1/2 is the last thing I need. So what do I do? I put it in the machine and hit play.
Ranma 1/2 is a Rumiko Takahashi thing where the cursed main character, Ranma, turns into a girl when splashed with cold water and back to a boy with warm water. Gender swap built right in. Naturally, this water triggered curse leads to a lot of bath scenes. And man, girl Ranma gets naked a lot. Too bad Ranma is a guy. There’s also a lot of humor tinged combat where boy Ranma turns into girl Ranma somewhere along the way and gets Ikki Tousen’ed. It doesn’t feel lurid to me though, but maybe I’m just a desensitized anime fan slash dirtbag figure collector.
In the first ten or so episodes, when they do the first minute refresher in the beginning, they actually re-animate those scenes instead of just recycling the animation. Crazy. They seemed to do fewer refreshers as the season wore on though, but I think the re-animation of those refresher scenes indicates a pretty decent budget for the show. And it shows in the smoothness (for a weekly TV show) of the character animation.
It feels much more mainstream sitcom than it does otaku and I found it pretty amusing. While Ranma does have arcs that involve a new character every few episodes, the status quo stays the same for the most part after each episode/arc, so it’s not something that requires much commitment.
That’s actually pretty good since I look at Ranma 1/2 as a show that I can pop in every once in a while and not have to focus my entire attention to it like some other shows. On the other hand, I don’t feel this huge need to see the rest, even if I enjoyed what I saw.
Hmm, a lot of people told me this anime rocks, I have never seen it myself (and I am not tempted to just because its really old, although some old ones are great). I might give this a shot if I ever happened to stumble onto a dvd or something.
It does rock. About the oldness, I think Ranma 1/2 holds up very well. But, I hear you on not giving it high priority. I wouldn’t have watched it if someone didn’t put it on my table and say, “watch this.”
I find your assessment that Ranma is more like a sitcom rather than an otaku anime quite interesting – it’s true, anime back then seem to be much less otaku-focused than today, I wonder why?
I have read the entire manga and used to love it, but I’ve never watched one single episode of the anime. Maybe I should?
I loved to watch the Anime back in those good old days on TV.
I dont think that your desensitized tough.The show aired here at 2 pm and nobody really complained.Simple Series can be so much fun sometimes.
I loved the perverted pantsu stealing grampa the most^^
Ranma 1/2 is one of the first anime that I got into back in the day. I think I still have some of my 3-4 gen tape raw episodes around here somewhere. That was one of the great things about Ranma you could get into it with out understanding Japanese as it was such a physical show. The downside to Ranma is that it just kind of drags on and on and didn’t have a very good ending.