| Ranma 1/2 |
| Rumiko Takahashi's infamous series about a boy that turns into a girl when hit with cold water, and his army of enemies and handful of friends. Running for over 10 years, the original manga spawned a TV series, movies, oav series, albums, toys, videogames, posters, you name it chances are it was available at some point. Rumiko Takahashi has a unique talent for writing highly entertaining romantic comedies with a twist. Her other successes include Inu Yasha, Maison Ikkoku, and Urusei Yatsura. The TV series to a reasonable extent followed the manga quite closely, but often out of order, which led to several occurrences of flashbacks that happen before the actual event. Despite this the series managed to retain most of the humour, and the low production value lent the animation a weird kind of charm. The movies had larger budgets allowing the animation to reach a decent level and make the characters seem slightly better defined. Unfortunately I feel that some of the of the trademark Ranma humour was lost in the movies as they tried to put too much into a relatively short run time, although some of the fans may have complained it could have been improved by some of the central charcters taking up less of the screen time, or obviously adding another 10-20 minutes on to the running time. The oav's were where everything finally balanced out perfectly, with a similar production value to the movies and the humour of the TV series we were treated to some Ranma that finally lived up to the original manga, it was a shame it took so long to get it right and that they didn't do more episodes like this. but you can't have everything. Review by Alia |
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