is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Rumiko Takahashi. It was serialized in Weekly Shōnen Sunday from August 1987 to March 1996, with the chapters collected in 38 volumes by Shogakukan. The story revolves around a teenager named Ranma Saotome who has trained in martial arts since early childhood. As a result of an accident during a training journey, he is cursed to become a girl when exposed to cold water, while hot water changes him back into a boy. Throughout the series Ranma seeks out a way to rid himself of his curse, while his friends, enemies, and many fiancées constantly hinder and interfere.
Ranma ½ has a comedic formula and a sex-changing main character who often willfully transforms into a girl to advance his goals. The series also contains many other characters, whose intricate relationships with each other, unusual characteristics, and eccentric personalities drive most of the stories. Although the characters and their relationships are complicated, they rarely change once they are firmly introduced and settled into the series.
The manga has been adapted into two anime series produced by Studio Deen: Ranma ½ and Ranma ½ Nettōhen, which together were broadcast on Fuji TV from 1989 to 1992. In addition, they released 12 OVAs and three films. In 2011, a live-action television special was produced and aired on Nippon Television. Another anime adaptation produced by MAPPA premiered on October 6, 2024, broadcasting on Nippon Television and streaming on Netflix. The manga and anime series were licensed by Viz Media for English-language releases in North America. Madman Entertainment released the manga, part of the anime series, and the first two films in Australasia, while MVM Films released the first two films in the United Kingdom.
The Ranma ½ manga has over 55 million copies in circulation, making it one of the best-selling manga series of all time. Both the manga and anime are cited as among the first in their respective media to have become popular in the United States.
Plot
On a training journey in the Bayankala Mountain Range in the Qinghai Province of China, Ranma Saotome and his father Genma fell into the cursed springs of . The cursed spring causes any afflicted to assume the physical form of whatever drowned there hundreds or thousands of years ago whenever they come into contact with cold water, which reverts on contact with hot water but resumes with exposure to cold water. Genma fell into the spring of a drowned panda while Ranma fell into the spring of a drowned girl.
Soun Tendo is a fellow practitioner of or "Anything-Goes School" of martial arts and owner of a dojo in Nerima. Genma and Soun agreed years ago that their children would marry and carry on the Tendo Dojo. Soun has three teenage daughters: the polite and easygoing Kasumi, the greedy and indifferent Nabiki and the short-tempered, martial arts practicing Akane. Akane, who is Ranma's age, is appointed for bridal duty by her sisters with the reasoning that they are the older sisters and can dump the duty on her, and that they all dislike the arranged engagement and think Akane's dislike of men is the right way to express it to the fathers. At the appointed time, the Saotomes arrive in their new forms given by the cursed springs, confusing the Tendos, and ultimately leading to Akane seeing Ranma changing from girl form to boy form in the tub, much to her horror. It takes several more pages for the situation to be explained to Soun Tendo and his daughters. Both Ranma and Akane refuse the engagement initially, having not been consulted on the decision, but the fathers are insistent and they are generally treated as betrothed and end up helping or saving each other on some occasions. They are frequently found in each other's company and are constantly arguing in their trademark awkward love-hate manner that is a franchise focus.
Ranma goes to school with Akane at , where he meets his recurring opponent Tatewaki Kuno, the conceited kendo team captain who aggressively pursues Akane, but also falls in love with Ranma's female form without ever discovering his curse (despite most other characters eventually knowing it). Nerima serves as a backdrop for more martial arts mayhem with the introduction of Ranma's regular rivals, such as the eternally lost Ryoga Hibiki who traveled halfway across Japan getting from the front of his house to the back, where Ranma spent three days waiting for him. Ryoga, seeking revenge on Ranma, followed him to Jusenkyo where he ultimately fell into the Spring of the Drowned Piglet. Now when splashed with cold water he takes the form of a little black pig. Not knowing this, Akane takes the piglet as a pet and names it P-chan, but Ranma knows and hates him for keeping this secret and taking advantage of the situation. Another rival is the nearsighted Mousse, who also fell into a cursed spring and becomes a duck when he gets wet, and finally, there is Genma and Soun's impish grand master, Happosai, who spends his time stealing the underwear of schoolgirls.
Ranma's prospective paramours include the martial arts rhythmic gymnastics champion (and Tatewaki's sister) Kodachi Kuno, and his second fiancée and childhood friend Ukyo Kuonji the okonomiyaki vendor, along with the Chinese Amazon Shampoo, supported by her great-grandmother Cologne. As the series progresses, the school becomes more eccentric with the return of the demented, Hawaii-obsessed Principal Kuno and the placement of the power-leeching alternating child/adult Hinako Ninomiya as Ranma's English teacher. Ranma's indecision in choosing his true love causes chaos in his romantic and school life.
Production Rumiko Takahashi stated that Ranma ½ was conceived to be a martial arts manga that connects all aspects of everyday life to martial arts. Because her previous series had female protagonists, the author decided that she wanted a male this time. However, she was worried about writing a male main character, and therefore decided to make him half-female. According to Takahashi, the idea of making Ranma "just kinda popped into [her] head", and she looked for a way to make it possible for him to go back and forth between genders. It was then when she had a vision of a bathhouse's cloth entrance sign. She considered Ranma changing every time he was punched before deciding on water for initiating his changes. That decision led her to feeling that Jusenkyo had to be set in China, as it is the only place that could have such mysterious springs. She drew inspiration for Ranma ½ from a variety of real-world objects. Some of the places frequently seen in the series are modeled after actual locations in Nerima, Tokyo (both the home of Takahashi and the setting of Ranma ½).
In a 1990 interview with Amazing Heroes, Takahashi stated that she had four assistants that draw the backgrounds, panel lines and tone, while she creates the story and layout, and pencils and inks the characters. All her assistants are female; Takahashi stated that "I don't use male assistants so that the girls will work more seriously if they aren't worried about boys." In 1992, she explained her process as beginning with laying out the chapter in the evening so as to finish it by dawn, and resting for a day before calling her assistants. They finish it in two or three nights, usually utilizing five days for a chapter.
Takahashi purposefully aimed the series to be popular with women and children. In 1993, an Animerica interviewer talking with Takahashi asked her if she intended the sex-changing theme "as an effort to enlighten a male-dominated society". Takahashi said that she does not think in terms of societal agendas and that she created the Ranma ½ concept from simply wanting "a simple, fun idea". She added that she, as a woman and while recalling what manga she liked to read as a child, felt that "humans turning into animals might also be fun and ... you know, like a fairy tale." In 2013, she revealed that at the start of Ranma her editor told her to make it more dramatic, but she felt that was something she could not do. However, she admitted that drama did start to appear at the end. She also sat in on the voice actor auditions for the anime, where she insisted that male and female Ranma be voiced by different actors whose gender corresponded to that of the part.
Media Manga
Written and illustrated by Rumiko Takahashi, Ranma ½ began publication in the manga anthology Weekly Shōnen Sunday issue #36 published on August 19, 1987, following the ending of her series Urusei Yatsura. From August 1987 until March 1996, the manga was published on a near weekly basis with the occasional colored page to spruce up the usually black and white stories. After nearly a decade of storylines, the final chapter was published in Weekly Shōnen Sunday issue #12 on March 6, 1996. The 407 chapters were periodically collected and published by Shogakukan into a total of 38 black and white volumes from 1988 to 1996. They were reassembled in 38 from April 2002 to October 2003. A Shōnen Sunday Special edition for all 20 volumes was published from 2016 to 2018. This edition included a series of interviews with Rumiko Takahashi called The Making of Ranma.
North American publisher Viz Media originally released Ranma ½ in a monthly comic book format that contained two chapters each from 1992 to 2003, and had the images "flipped" to read left-to-right, causing the art to be mirrored. These were periodically collected into graphic novels. On March 18, 2004, after releasing 21 volumes, Viz announced that it would reprint a number of its graphic novels. The content remained the same, but the novels moved to a smaller format with different covers and a price drop. Each volume covers roughly the same amount of material as the Japanese volumes, but retained its left-to-right format and had minor differences in grouping so that it spans 36 volumes rather than the original 38. The final volume was released in stores on November 14, 2006, thus making it Viz's longest running manga, spanning over 13 years. At Anime Expo on July 7, 2013, Viz Media announced re-release of the manga in a format that combines two individual volumes into a single large one, and restores the original right-to-left reading order (a first in North America for this series). The first 2-in-1 book (volumes 1–2) was published on March 11, 2014; the final (volumes 35–36) on March 14, 2017. On July 27, 2021, Viz released all 19 2-in-1 books digitally.Ranma 1/2 (2-in-1 Edition), Vol. 1 – VIZ MediaRanma 1/2 (2-in-1 Edition), Vol. 19 – VIZ Media Madman Entertainment publishes the two-in-one version in Australasia.
Together with Spriggan, it was the first manga published in Portugal, by Texto Editora in 1995.
1989–1992 anime series
An anime television series was created by Studio Deen and aired weekly between April 15, 1989, and September 16, 1989, on Fuji TV for 18 episodes, before being canceled due to low ratings. The series was then reworked by most of the same staff, retitled and launched in a different time slot, running for 143 episodes from October 20, 1989, to September 25, 1992. The anime stays true to the original manga but does differ by keeping Ranma's gender transformation a secret from the high school students, at least throughout most of its length. It also does not introduce Hikaru Gosunkugi until very late in the series, instead, Sasuke Sarugakure, the diminutive ninja retainer of the Kuno family fills a number of Gosunkugi's roles in early storylines but is a major character in his own right. The anime also alters the placement of many story arcs and contains numerous original episodes and characters not adapted from the manga.