
Ranma ½ is Rumiko Takahashi's long-running Gender Bender martial arts/romantic comedy manga series, which was published in Weekly Shonen Sunday from 1987 to 1996. It received multiple Animated Adaptations, including two television series, three films and various OAVs, and a live-action movie in 2012. It's one of the most popular, well-known, and influential manga properties of the 1990s.
Akane Tendō is a talented and tomboyish martial artist who discovers one day that her father has promised/sold her hand in marriage to Ranma Saotome, the son of a family friend and a martial arts prodigy in his own right. Akane bristles at the thought of being forced to marry someone she doesn't even know, and Ranma has his own problems to deal with. On a ridiculously ill-advised training journey with his father, Ranma accidentally fell into the cursed "Spring of Drowned Girl", and now his body transforms into that of a young girl when splashed with cold water. Hot water will reverse the transformation, but not before a case of mistaken identity gets Ranma and Akane's relationship off to the worst possible start.
Now Akane and Ranma have to put up with each other while an increasingly large snarl of characters try to woo, marry, and/or defeat one or both of them, sometimes simultaneously, often with world-class ability in bizarre or eclectic martial arts styles, and often bearing their own shapeshifting curses.
This series brings the "harem" trope to its ridiculous extreme with the Love Dodecahedron trope (in fact, the term was coined to describe the tangled web of relationships in this show). The core cast numbers more than a dozen persons caught up in a complex web of love, hate, duty, honor, and rivalry – and Takahashi plays all of it for laughs. More characters would join the madness every year of the manga's publication.
Ranma ½'s first TV series adaptation aired on Fuji TV note and lasted for 3 years with 161 episodes. It rapidly Overtook the Manga and was canceled before it could complete the full storyline, ending three years before the manga itself concluded.
It also spawned eleven OVAs, one theatrical short (released as the twelfth OVA outside Japan), and two motion pictures. Production ended when Kitty Studios folded in 1996. A belated thirteenth OVA was released in 2008 (along with special episodes of Inuyasha and Urusei Yatsura) as part of the Rumic World art exhibition that commemorated the 50th anniversary of Takahashi's publisher, Shogakukan.
On the 9th of December 2011, a two-hour live-action TV movie version produced by Nikkatsu aired on Nippon Television.
A new anime adaptation by MAPPA began airing on October 5, 2024 on Nippon TV with a worldwide digital release on Netflix. Watch the first trailer
.
