Ranma ½

• 1. Introduction

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  Ranma ½ is a Japanese manga by Rumiko Takahashi about a teenage martial artist whose body changes with the temperature of the water that touches him. Ranma Saotome has trained in fighting since early childhood. He spends the series hunting for a way to rid himself of the curse. Nearly everyone around him seems determined to make that harder, from friends and enemies to a surprising number of fiancées. The series then traveled far beyond Japan and became, for many Americans, their first introduction to manga. How does a curse like Ranma's come about? Why would an author hand her hero such a handicap on purpose? And how did a comedy of rivals, fiancées and cold water grow into one of the best-known series in its field?

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• 2. The Cursed Springs

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  Deep in the Bayankala Mountain Range, in China's Qinghai Province, Ranma and his father Genma fell into the cursed springs of Jusenkyo during a training journey. Each spring holds the shape of whatever drowned there hundreds or thousands of years ago. Anyone who falls in takes that shape whenever cold water touches them, and hot water reverses it. Genma landed in the spring of a drowned panda. Ranma landed in the spring of a drowned girl.

  Soun Tendo, a fellow student of the Anything-Goes School of martial arts, owns a dojo in Nerima. Years earlier he and Genma agreed that their children would marry and carry on the Tendo Dojo. Soun has three teenage daughters. Kasumi is polite and easygoing, Nabiki is greedy and indifferent, and Akane is short-tempered and trains in martial arts. Akane is Ranma's age, so her sisters hand her the bridal duty. They reason that as the older sisters they can simply pass the job down. They also think Akane's dislike of men is the right way to show their fathers how little anyone likes the arrangement.

  The Saotomes arrive in the forms the springs gave them, which baffles the Tendos. Then Akane sees Ranma change from girl to boy in the bathtub, much to her horror. It takes several more pages before anyone explains the situation to Soun and his daughters. Neither Ranma nor Akane wanted the engagement, since nobody asked them, but both fathers are insistent. The pair end up treated as betrothed. They sometimes help or save each other, and they argue constantly in an awkward love-hate manner that the franchise treats as its focus.

  That prickly closeness is only one of the claims on Ranma, because his school and neighborhood fill quickly with rivals and rival fiancées.

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• 3. A Crowded Neighborhood

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  Ryoga Hibiki once took so long to get from the front of his house to the back that he traveled halfway across Japan, while Ranma spent three days waiting for him. Ryoga is eternally lost, and he wants revenge on Ranma. He followed Ranma to Jusenkyo and fell into the Spring of the Drowned Piglet, so cold water now turns him into a little black pig. Akane, unaware, adopts the piglet as a pet and calls it P-chan. Ranma knows the truth and hates Ryoga for hiding it and taking advantage of the situation.

  Mousse, a nearsighted fighter, also fell into a cursed spring and becomes a duck when he gets wet. Happosai, the impish grand master of the school that Genma and Soun follow, passes his time stealing the underwear of schoolgirls.

  At Ranma's school, Tatewaki Kuno captains the kendo team and is thoroughly conceited. He pursues Akane aggressively, yet he also falls in love with Ranma's girl form and never discovers the curse, even though most other characters eventually do. His sister Kodachi, a rhythmic gymnastics champion, is another of Ranma's prospective paramours. Ukyo Kuonji, an okonomiyaki vendor and childhood friend, becomes his second fiancée. Shampoo, a Chinese Amazon, arrives with her great-grandmother Cologne as support.

  As the series goes on, the school grows stranger. Principal Kuno returns, obsessed with Hawaii, and Hinako Ninomiya becomes Ranma's English teacher. She drains power from others and alternates between a child and an adult. Ranma's indecision about whom he truly loves keeps his romantic and school life in chaos. The relationships are complicated, but the characters rarely change once they are settled into the series.

  Many of the places these characters haunt are modeled on real locations in Nerima, Tokyo, which was Takahashi's own home as well as the story's setting.

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• 4. Takahashi's Idea

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  Rumiko Takahashi set out to make a martial arts manga that connects every part of everyday life to fighting. Her previous series had female protagonists, so this time she wanted a male one. She worried about writing a male lead, so she decided to make him half female. In her telling, the idea "just kinda popped into her head," and she then looked for a way to let him move back and forth between genders.

  The answer arrived as a vision of a bathhouse's cloth entrance sign. She considered having Ranma change every time he was punched, then settled on water. That choice convinced her that Jusenkyo had to be in China, the only place she felt could hold such mysterious springs.

  In 1993, an interviewer from Animerica asked whether the sex-changing theme was meant to enlighten a male-dominated society. Takahashi answered that she does not think in terms of societal agendas and wanted only "a simple, fun idea." Recalling the manga she enjoyed as a child, she felt that humans turning into animals might also be fun and "märchenhaft... you know, like a fairy tale." She aimed the series to appeal to women and children. In 2013 she revealed that her editor had told her at the start to make the story more dramatic, which she felt she could not do. She admitted that drama did begin to appear toward the end.

  She also sat in on the voice actor auditions for the anime. There she insisted that male Ranma and female Ranma be voiced by different actors, each matching the gender of the part.

  In a 1990 interview with Amazing Heroes, Takahashi described four assistants who drew the backgrounds, panel lines and tone. She created the story and layout, and she penciled and inked the characters herself. All of her assistants were women. She explained, "I don't use male assistants so that the girls will work more seriously if they aren't worried about boys." In 1992 she described her rhythm. She laid out a chapter in the evening so as to finish by dawn, then rested for a day before calling the assistants. They finished the chapter in two or three nights, and a chapter usually took five days.

  That routine had to keep pace with a weekly magazine that expected a steady stream of new chapters.

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• 5. Years In Print

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  Weekly Shōnen Sunday issue #36, published on the 19th of August 1987, carried the first chapter of Ranma ½. It followed the end of Takahashi's earlier series Urusei Yatsura. For nearly a decade the manga appeared on a near weekly basis, with the occasional colored page to brighten the black and white stories. The final chapter ran in issue #12 on the 6th of March 1996.

  Shogakukan gathered the 407 chapters into 38 black and white tankōbon volumes between 1988 and 1996. It reassembled them as 38 shinsōban volumes from April 2002 to October 2003. A Shōnen Sunday Special edition, published from 2016 to 2018, included a series of Takahashi interviews called The Making of Ranma.

  In North America, Viz Media first released the series from 1992 to 2003 as a monthly comic book holding two chapters per issue. The images were flipped to read left to right, which mirrored the art. On the 18th of March 2004, after releasing 21 volumes, Viz announced reprints in a smaller format with new covers and a lower price. The material stayed the same but was regrouped, so the run spans 36 volumes instead of 38. The final volume reached stores on the 14th of November 2006. That made it Viz's longest running manga, at more than 13 years.

  On the 7th of July 2013, at Anime Expo, Viz announced another re-release. Each book would combine two volumes, and the original right-to-left reading order would return, a first in North America for this series. The first 2-in-1 book appeared on the 11th of March 2014, and the last on the 14th of March 2017. On the 27th of July 2021, Viz released all 19 of the 2-in-1 books digitally.

  In 1995, Texto Editora published the manga in Portugal. Together with Spriggan, it was the first manga released there, a year before the Japanese run ended.

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• 6. Studio Deen On Screen

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  On the 15th of April 1989, Fuji TV began airing Studio Deen's first Ranma ½ anime on a weekly schedule. Low ratings cancelled it after 18 episodes, the last of which aired on the 16th of September 1989. Most of the same staff then reworked the series, retitled it and launched it in a different time slot. That version ran for 143 episodes, from the 20th of October 1989 to the 25th of September 1992.

  The anime stays true to the manga in most respects but differs in telling ways. It keeps Ranma's transformation a secret from the high school students for most of its length. Hikaru Gosunkugi appears only very late, and Sasuke Sarugakure, the diminutive ninja retainer of the Kuno family, fills several of his early roles. Sasuke is a major character in his own right. The anime also moves many story arcs around and adds numerous original episodes and characters. In total it adapts 56 percent of the manga, which is 229 chapters, or 22 of the 38 volumes.

  Studio Deen also made three theatrical films. The Battle of Nekonron, China! A Battle to Defy the Rules! opened on the 2nd of November 1991. Battle at Togenkyo! Get Back the Brides followed on the 1st of August 1992. Super Indiscriminate Decisive Battle! Team Ranma vs. the Legendary Phoenix arrived on the 20th of August 1994. The first two are feature length. The third originally played alongside two other films, Ghost Sweeper Mikami and Heisei Dog Stories: Bow.

  After the television series ended, eleven original video animations went directly to home video, the first on the 7th of December 1993 and the eleventh on the 4th of June 1996. All but two are based on stories from the manga. In 2008, an animation based on the story "Nightmare! Incense of Deep Sleep" from volume 34 played on odd numbered days at the "It's a Rumic World" exhibition of Takahashi's artwork in Tokyo. It ran from the 30th of July to the 11th of August, and it reached video only in 2010.

  Viz Media licensed both anime series in 1993, making Ranma ½ one of the first anime titles it ever licensed. The English dub was recorded by The Ocean Group in Vancouver, British Columbia. The episodes came out on VHS through the Viz Video label, and on DVD a few years later with Pioneer Home Entertainment. Those releases merged both series into one, split the episodes into what they called seasons, and reordered many of them. Viz re-released the show on DVD in 2007. At Otakon 2013 it announced that it had re-acquired the series for Blu-ray and DVD in 2014. The show has streamed on its Neon Alley channel since autumn 2013.

  In September 2020, Toonami co-creator Jason DeMarco revealed that he had tried to get the series on that American programming block. He said, "it's something we never were able to figure out, because, frankly, there's too much nudity." In Australasia, Madman Entertainment held only some of the series, and its rights expired after the first four seasons.

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• 7. Remakes And Spinoffs

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  The 6th of October 2024 brought a new anime, simply titled Ranma ½, produced by MAPPA, with Shogakukan-Shueisha Productions handling planning and production. Kōnosuke Uda directs. Hiromi Taniguchi designed the characters, and Kaoru Wada composed the music. Most of the original Japanese voice cast for the main characters returned. The first season aired on Nippon Television and its affiliates until the 22nd of December 2024, with Netflix streaming it worldwide each week after the Japanese broadcast. A second season aired from the 5th of October to the 21st of December 2025. A third season was scheduled to premiere in October 2026.

  On the 9th of December 2011, Nippon Television aired a two-hour live-action special. It was first reported to be an original story, but it takes its main plot from one of the manga's early tales and mixes in other early scenes. Yui Aragaki plays Akane, while Kento Kaku and Natsuna Watanabe play male and female Ranma. Ryōsei Tayama plays Okamada, a new original antagonist. The all-girl pop group 9nine contributed the theme song "Chikutaku white star 2Nite." The special reached DVD and Blu-ray on the 21st of March 2012.

  Seventeen video games have been based on the franchise. Most are fighting games, though there have also been RPGs, puzzle games and Pachinko slot machines. The most recent, Pachislot Ranma 1/2, came out for Pachinko on the 5th of November 2018. Only two games reached Western countries. Ranma ½: Chōnai Gekitōhen was released in the United States as Street Combat, with the characters Americanized, their appearances completely changed, and new music. Ranma ½: Hard Battle was released unaltered in North America and Europe.

  The Ranma ½ Memorial Book appeared just as the manga ended in 1996. It collects illustrations, an interview with Takahashi, summaries of Ranma's battles, his daily schedule and some exclusive artwork. A Movie + OVA Visual Comic illustrates the third film and the two-part OVA The One to Carry On, and includes a layout of the Tendo dojo. Guidebooks for three of the video games carried interviews alongside strategies. Two books of cast interviews and select stories followed the live-action drama in 2011.

  Music from the series, films and OVAs has appeared on many CDs. Three of them compile music by DoCo, a pop group made up of the voice actresses of the anime's main female characters.

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• 8. Reception And Legacy

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  By November 2006, Ranma ½ had sold more than 49 million manga volumes in Japan. Shogakukan had printed 53 million copies by November 2011, and by April 2021 the figure in circulation stood at 55 million. That places it among the best-selling manga series of all time.

  In 2001, Anime Insider ranked the anime number 17 on its list of the Top 50 Anime, though the list covered only series released in North America. TV Asahi's 2006 poll of Japan's favorite animated series placed it 36th, up from 45th the year before. When the first American Anime Awards were announced in 2007, the anime reached the five nominees for Best Comedy Anime, and the OVAs reached the nominees for Best Short Series. A 2019 NHK poll of 210,061 people named the two Ranma ½ anime series Takahashi's second best animated work. Shampoo and Ranma placed fourth and fifth among her characters.

  Theron Martin of Anime News Network observed that Akane Tendo is closer to how tsundere characters would later be portrayed in the 2000s than Lum from Urusei Yatsura, who is often cited as the first. He also suggested that Ranma is an early example of a harem or reverse harem series, since the hero attracts suitors of both genders. Jason Thompson called the series "the direct ancestor of all comedy-action manga, like Sumomomo Momomo and History's Strongest Disciple Kenichi," while noting that it was not the first. Reviewing the final manga volume, Anime News Network praised Takahashi's comedy, romance, introspection and fantasy martial-arts action. It also found some fights hard to follow and noted that mirroring had introduced errors into the art. Reviewing a later DVD box set, the same site called the show a classic but felt that after a hundred episodes the same jokes stopped being funny. Raphael See of THEM Anime Reviews called the television series and OVAs "one of the funniest things he's ever seen, anime or otherwise." Mike Toole placed the first film at number 83 on The Other 100 Best Anime Movies of All Time.

  Hiroshi Aro admitted that he created Futaba-kun Change! based on Ranma ½. Western comic artists who cite it as an influence include Canadian Bryan Lee O'Malley, creator of Scott Pilgrim, and American Colleen Coover, creator of Small Favors. Director Makoto Shinkai mentioned it as an inspiration for the 2016 film Your Name. Matt Bozon, creator of the Shantae games, calls it a big influence, and the title of Shantae: Genie Hero is a tribute to the series. The series also created or popularized tropes now common in anime, including Akane's violent tsundere streak, Kodachi's distinctive noblewoman laugh and Ryoga's perpetually lost sense of direction.

  The influence even reached zoology. Dr. Keiichi Kakui discovered a crustacean species in 2009 that contains both male and female reproductive organs. In 2024 it was named Apseudes ranma, after Ranma Saotome.

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