Back in the dawn of time, about 1996, I was at a friend's house doing some role playing. It was a game called Mage. White Wolf game designed in the eighties, the golden age of game design. And after that session, he pulled out some anima. A show called Ranma 1/2. This was what Japanese children were watching at the time and it was trickling over to North America just as their cars were starting to be driven a lot too.
Ranma was this boy unlike any other boy as he was a martial artist. He was a martial artist of the Anything Goes School of martial arts. His father had arranged that Ranma should marry his father's friend's daughter in an arranged marriage. He had a choice of the three daughters. Kasume, Nabuki, and Akane, aged 19, 17 and 16 respectfully. Ranma aged 16 picked Akane who was also a martial artist. Things would be set for Ranma if he was not cursed. He was cursed with his father who would be politely called a buffoon.
So cursed, he had decided to train Ranma in an odd Chinese shrine: a valley filled with a thousand springs with tall bamboo poles in each one and each pool was especially cursed. Ranma's father fell in one while training, where a thousand years before a panda had drowned and he became a panda. Enraged he kicked Ranma into a different pool, where a young girl had drowned two thousand years ago, and he transformed into a young girl.
So began the trials of Ranma. Cold water turned him into a girl and hot water into a boy again. Same for his father and anyone else who was stupid enough to fall in to a pool. And one would think he would be the only ones, but no there were a lot of people in Ranma's life who trained there. A pig, a cat and a duck trained their too.
Well I found Ranma on YouTube a month ago and I started watching them from start to finish all 161 episodes. They are only twenty minutes long and the plots are simple, but strangely addictive, but maybe that is just me. The graphics are lame, but you have to remember that this was done all before computers started doing all the graphics so they were all hand drawn and there was a lot of reuse of footage and simple graphics used.
They also provide some insight into the culture. There are scenes of nature and natural themes that are not connected to the plot, like a carp jumping in a pond. A leaf waving in the wind. A tree covered with cherry blossoms. All these things have nothing to do with the plot but were obviously important to be animated from the cultural perspective. There are animation concepts to show emotion the tear drop on the side of the face to show exasperation or annoyance, a bubble coming from someone's nose to show that they are sleeping and others. Plus the less obvious, Japanese people must find gender as humorous; Ranma changes sex often in the course of an episode, there are female characters that dress like men and male characters that dress like women
Here is the first episode:
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