Main Tropes Index

Troperville

Editing

Tools

Toys

Narrative

Genre

Media

Topical Tropes

Other Categories

new edits
page history
related to...
edit page
discuss
view source
forum

Ranma ½
alt title(s): Ranma One Half

The anime Ranma ½ defies simple explanation, but one can approximate its general gist as "martial arts/urban low fantasy slapstick sex farce". Based on the manga by Rumiko Takahashi, it tells the story of Ranma Saotome, a 16-years-old martial arts prodigy who, after returning from a ten-year training journey with his father, finds himself engaged to marry Akane Tendo, the 16-year-old martial artist daughter of his father's best friend.

Complicating matters is the fact that due to an accident at a magical training ground in China called Jusenkyo, Ranma and his father Genma both bear shapechanging curses triggered by water: Genma turns into a giant panda, and Ranma turns into a short, busty red-headed girl. Further complications arise in the form of other engagements arranged by Ranma's amoral father, the boys pursuing the girls so engaged, plus various other persons wanting to kill or marry Ranma in either or both of his forms. Several of these folks also bear curses from Jusenkyo. Almost all of them are world-class martial artists, which results in considerable property damage most of the time.

This is the series which brought The Unwanted Harem trope to its ridiculous extreme, creating the Love Dodecahedron trope. By the middle of the third season, the core cast numbered more than a dozen persons caught up in a complex web of love, hate, duty, honor and rivalry, all of it played for laughs. And more characters joined the madness every year, making for one of the larger ensemble casts in anime. The show lasted seven seasons on television, and was supplemented by a series of OVAs and several motion pictures.

While considered a "classic" anime it suffers from several problems. It was canceled before it could complete the full storyline from the manga on which it was based, and in fact ended three years before the manga concluded; what material did make it on the air became somewhat repetitious because the production team was given to inserting cookie-cutter filler episodes that were unrelated to the original manga plot. The final season had 25 episodes and only 10 were based on the manga. Finally, towards the middle of its run the artistic quality of the show began to suffer noticeably — indeed, there is a noticeable decline in quality of animation, music, and writing starting in the second season. (The final seasons showed considerable improvement, though, and the OVAs and movies are of superb quality.)

Even given these problems, Ranma ½ was quite popular in its time, a popularity that surprisingly carried over to North America. It was one of the first major crossover hits that ushered in the explosion of anime importation in the early-to-mid-1990s. The dub by Viz Video is thought by some to be the first decent effort in the history of English anime adaptation, with an outstanding voice cast blended from a mix of seasoned professionals and talented first-timers. It was even briefly optioned for a live action Hollywood film in the late 1990s, although nothing ever came of it.

Has a remarkably large and vigorous American fan community despite its age, and is responsible for a significant fraction of the anime fanfiction on the web, including a wide variety of crossovers. (One sub-type of these, the Fuku Fic, is common enough that it has its own trope entry.) Predictably, its length and fanbase result in copious amounts of Fanon.
This show provides examples of:
⊗
« Noteworthy Anime »
⊗
⊗
« Manga »
⊗
Creative Commons License
This wiki is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.