Much as Urusei Yatsura received a revival from David Production, now Ranma 1/2 has started to receive a revival from Mappa, distributed internationally by Netflix. It’s a pretty good adaptation, though thus far it hasn’t had any of the series trickier elements to deal with.

The first season of the new Ranma 1/2 covers some of the very early arcs of the story – Ranma and Akane’s first meeting and the start of Ranma’s feud with the Kudo siblings (Tatawaki and Kodachi), the introduction of Ryoga (and with it P-Chan), the first of our stand-alone bizarro martial arts fights with the Martial Arts Figure Skating fight, and wrapping up with the introduction of Shampoo. This is the part where the series has quickly found its footing before Ranma 1/2 has determined what its status quo will be with the introduction of Cologne and Mousse but before the introduction of the absolute mess of Happosai.

The advantage of doing the series again now, much as with Urusei Yatsura, is that the series is done – the course is laid out, and there’s no need for filler. The bad news is that in this part of the story, the earlier adaptation didn’t have that much filler. There was some (the dire pelvic fortune-telling episode), but not as bad as what would be to come with the introduction of Happosai.

This also means there’s some early weirdness – Cologne takes Dr. Tofu’s place in the story shortly after her introduction, and partway through the season Akane gets over her crush on Dr. Tofu – leaving him only as someone who can provide exposition as needed, and frustrating slapstick (with a side of added plot complications) whenever Kasumi is vaguely mentioned.

That said, the series does do a good job of finding some ways to modernize the series. For example, the Chinese characters who don’t speak English (or Japanese) as their first language – Shampoo, the Guide – no longer speak in the clunky broken English (or Japanese) of the original adaptation. From what I’ve gotten from Japanese speakers – Shampoo and the Guide have been changed to having a simpler pronunciation, but not broken or dramatically incorrect, and the same with the English dub. As an additional nice touch – both Shampoo and the Guide both have Chinese or Chinese-American VAs for their roles: Grace Lu as Shampoo and Kaiji Tang as the Guide.

Probably my big issue – which I’ve mentioned on the Anime Explorations podcast and elsewhere – is that this adaption has become a victim of the weirdness in how nudity has become handled in anime these days. You can have nudity with nipples and butts if you’re doing a series that’s borderline porn, but otherwise you can’t (with probably DanDaDan being the rare exception). I don’t mind having Barbie-doll anatomy on breasts, I watched Tenchi Muyo back in the day, after all. However, it goes to the point to eliminating butts on characters – which, as I’ve mentioned on a past episode of the podcast, is artless in a way that draws attention to itself in a form that is neither part of a joke or advances the story. It’s just clunky and bad – something I’d never describe the original series (or the original manga) as being.

I enjoyed watching these stories again in this new form. I did go with the Japanese audio, as much of the original cast was back, and I’m a sucker for a Hayashibara Megumi performance, but I did switch back to the English dub every now and then and really liked what I heard. The series has been renewed for a second season, and the teaser does show the introduction of Mousse. I’m interested to see how they handle Happosai when he comes up.

We can only hope this new series does well enough for Arc System Works to make a new Ranma 1/2 fighting game.

The new Ranma 1/2 adaptation is currently available on Netflix.

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