Ranma 1/2
Comparing the manga series Viz Graphic Novel collected editions, volumes 1 through 3 with the anime series season one on DVD.
by William the Bloody
Rumiko Takahashi, the woman who both wrote and drew the manga comics, is a genius.
In the world of Ranma 1/2, 16 year old Ranma and his father, Genma, travel to China in order to train in the ways of "Anything Goes" martial arts. Unfortunately, the site Genma chooses to train on is the legendary Training Ground of Cursed Springs. There are over 100 springs here, each of which carries a tragic legend of someone or something having drowned there and the proper curse to go with it. Genma falls into the Spring of Drowned Panda and emerges from the water in the body of a panda. Ranma falls into Spring of Drowned Girl and comes out, well, as a girl. A pretty shapely girl actually. The effect of the curse can be reversed by a splashing of hot water, but cold water will always return them to their cursed forms. To make matters worse for Ranma, his father has arranged for him to marry the daughter of his old friend Soun Tendo, whom trained with him in his youth, and their children will carry on teaching the martial arts together. Ramna and his fiancée have never met.
That's the premise to the series anyway.
Takahashi, in her evil genius, follows this up with great opportunities for sexual awkwardness, tension, and misunderstandings between not only Ranma and his new fiancee, Akane, but with a parade of well developed characters yearning for Akane's and Ranma's affections. Ranma, unfortunately with his unique problem, also attracts boys when he's in his hot female bod, much to his chagrin.
There are also many moments of well choreographed martial arts show-downs, which range from the hand-to-hand variety to some really odd and hilarious "theme" combats. I'm telling you, you haven't seen anything until you've seen Rhythmic Gymnastic Wrestling.
The manga series is brilliant. The comic timing is impeccable. The art is really quite good. The plots are well contrived and executed (the oddball martial arts are almost believable!). The characters and stories are both funny and touching.
The anime series mostly seems to have used the comics as a storyboard. They are pretty close to the same thing (1 episode = 2 issues). The biggest problem I have with the show is that they padded out the episodes to expand content of 2 issues fit into 1 episode, and this not only screws up the comedic timing, but also leads to the cardinal sin of cell re-usage. The show is fine where it sticks to the books, but the padded bits where they had to make stuff up is kinda blah. It also falls victim to another sin that many cartoons do, that of having only so many pre-recorded music choices, which get constantly recycled, and they aren't that good either, mostly really goofy sounding. The voice artists do a good enough job. Big beef here is that in the English language version, the female Ranma artist also does the boy voice by lowering her voice an octave and I'm sorry it just doesn't fly (what are you doing watching it in English anyway? The English Ryoga voice does do better pig sounds, though). I was also pretty disappointed when I noticed the show took out completely the Martial Arts Figure Skating match story and instead made up 2 stories of their own (the skating match was released on the direct to video series, which in Japan I believe was put out at the same time the show was on the air). The first story was actually not bad and pretty cute. The second one, and the last episode to the season, was a total rip. It was a clip show! Talk about lazy animators! Boo!
Ranma 1/2 the manga series: A
Ranma 1/2 the anime, season 1: C-