English Dub Review: Ranma ½ “Here’s Ranma”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Ranma Saotame returns to Japan after a long training journey to pick a fiance, but soon finds something dampening his arrival. He’e been cursed to turn into a girl whenever he’s touched by cold water and can only turn back when getting hot water.

OUR TAKE

Ranma ½ is truly a series that needs no introduction, but then this review would be awfully short so I’m gonna get this to at least four hundred words. Created by the legendary Rumiko Takahashi, also known for creating the iconic Inuyasha series, the story follows the young fighter Ranma cursed with constantly gender flipping due to water temperature while also navigating a new life of women AND men vying for his attention. Despite knowing about the show for just about my entire time being aware of anime in general, I never got around to watching it, so this will be a new experience for me as much as it will for anyone else just starting the series now. With that in mind, it is interesting that the decided to keep the story in the 1980’s when the story was first published, but I guess it would be too much to ask for to change the setting and deal with all of the issues with changing it. Also to my surprise, it seems that this is one of the anime that Netflix is releasing weekly (possibly after getting a lot of complaints about how releasing everything at once is killing the hype for many of these shows).

So, we’ll be covering this show week to week as opposed to watching several episodes within a week for a season review, which is fine for me overall but not great for today when I had three other reviews to do. Still, in terms of an introduction of this premise to newcomers, this is pretty solid. We get people acquainted to the cast, the idea of cursed springs changing people, and kick off the dynamic between Ranma and Akane, first friendly when Akane thinks Ranma is a woman, but then belligerent when she finds out he’s a man, likely beginning their sexual tension that will blossom into romance over the course of the series. And if you want to check out the original series and don’t mind it being multiple decades old, it’s on Hulu if you want to compare while you’re going through this new one! I think that’s what I’ll do just to get the full experience, but we’ll see how well either holds up after all this time. Otherwise, a good start to remaking a classic, so let’s find out where they take it, either for the good or bad that might come with it.