Episode 17 – Ranma ½

I hereby apologize to anyone who was expecting Ryoga to air this week based on my estimation, but was disappointed to find out that this week’s episode was a one-off storyline. I’m sure they’ll reach a “breaking point” sooner or later; for a lot of the series, that’s an absolute necessity. Plus, it’s a great arc for my favorite wet cat. Ugh, soggy pig. Shampoo is a soaked cat and we’re getting a lot of her this week.

Even though I was extremely disappointed with the incident, I ended up having a great time. Like I said, this is one of those throwaway arcs that doesn’t really add or subtract anything from the world. Ranma ½but not before becoming the norm for the series. In one of the arcs, you take a perfectly normal thing that exists in the world – in this case, a takeaway – apply a combat element to it, throw together some characters we already know, and voila. how many times i want to know Rumiko Takahashi Needed to come up with a chapter idea and base it on mundane things that happened in her life.

It’s also easily the funniest episode of the season so far. Partly because, in the early series Ranma ½ arc, the former one was relatively serious, with stakes and such, whereas “Fast or Free” has the freedom to be pure sitcom silliness. The episode opens with Kuno having a dream, which sounds like it might be a scary prospect. Akane and the pigtailed girl are carried to his mansion by a panda and asked to choose one of them as their heads shake uneasily. No, he couldn’t say “both.”

If there are two things I know about Hisano Tatewaki, it’s that his ability to distinguish fantasy from reality is questionable, and his grasp of the eternity of objects is perhaps even more obscure. So when he arrives at the Tendo Dojo with a bouquet of roses in hand, he declares his love to the first of the two people he sees: Akane, who hands the flowers to her flattered father. But then Genma knocks Ranma into a pond, and he remembers the pigtailed girl’s existence (well, kind of), and declares whoever arrives at his house first is the one he swears allegiance to.

We then watch a martial arts takeout competition, which the anime glorifies as an annual Nerima tradition, with Akane as the much-coveted defending champion rather than Soun selling her out for four portions of eel. It’s actually pretty good; Akane rarely gets a chance to actually excel in this series because she’s constantly overshadowed by Ranma and his various rivals. It’s easy to forget that she’s a highly skilled martial artist in her own right, training just like any other ordinary girl while maintaining the life of an ordinary high school student.

She didn’t win this time, as Ranma and Shampoo eventually joined the fight. While Shampoo is an obvious contender for the cat cafe, Genma sells Ranma in exchange for a year’s supply of ramen. When this chapter was first published in English, it was difficult to understand why he would do this; in the United States, Japanese cuisine is pretty much limited to sushi, unless you have access to your city’s minority neighborhoods. Now the whole world knows how amazing real ramen is. Oh, how times have changed.

Anyway, stupid things obviously ensue, and it turns out that the lucky family chosen at random at the end of the race is the Cuno family. You know, the place where the eldest son is is already looking forward to the arrival of the two top players. The older son is too stupid to understand things like coincidence and too self-centered to realize that people do things for reasons that have nothing to do with him. Things play out just as you’d expect: Akane, Ranma, and Shampoo are all as petty and bitchy as can be. Water of all temperatures will be splashed. Kuno didn’t understand what was going on; all he knew was that Akane and the girl with the pigtails were at his house, both vying for his affection as he had requested, because the competition wasn’t over until he finished his food.

While the plot was entertaining, this episode elevated it with some of the best animation of the season so far. The film was directed and storyboarded by Michel Sugimoto. trigger Alum credits include little witch academia, SSSS Gridman, Promareand attack on titan: final season. Rather than resorting to speed lines and cuts, the animation team made the most of the kinetic energy inherent in the premise, with the characters’ constant motion making every punchline funnier. In one shot, Ranma’s ramen bowl hurtles through the sky, and I can almost see the animator’s cursor swinging through its arc. I mean that in the best way possible because it made me giggle.

It’s important to note that this is another story from the old anime that had significant changes. The Kuno part of the storyline was completely removed and replaced with the revelation that Genma sold Ranma when he was starving as a child, earning him another fiancée. The girl, whose name I can’t remember and would need to actually play the episode to find out, is trained in the art of martial arts takeaways and challenges Akane to a contest where the winner will be engaged to Ranma. It’s the first episode of the “new” series since the first iteration was canceled, and it feels like a manifesto that they won’t just be extending existing plot lines, but fundamentally changing them until they’re almost unrecognizable. While many of the purely animated original series are fun, the changes rarely make them better.

This is undoubtedly one of the best episodes Ranma ½ What’s in store for the new season, maybe even what the series has been about so far. It’s the perfect distillation of everything that makes this show fun: weird martial arts, bizarre coincidences, curse-based shenanigans, and interactions between characters with no brain cells, all tied together by gorgeous animation. I hope we get to see Sugimoto produce more episodes.

Kaori! Her name is Kaori.

grade:

Ranma ½ Currently live broadcast
Netflix.