Review by CJ

The Ranma ½ movie is based on the Ranma ½ series about a young man (Ranma) who changes into a girl whenever he gets splashed with cold water due to a bizarre accident.

The movie follows the adventures of Ranma and his friends.

For the fans and followers of this often rather bizarre love story comedy the movie will be a good story with the usual characters getting into trouble which are mostly the fault of the old master. There isn’t much in ground braking story line or pictures and it’s clear that this movie had its day in Japan sometime ago. Never the less it’s a fun thing to watch and has more than a few giggles for those who stick with it. Regular Ranma fans will enjoy the ‘Spot your favourite Ranma character’ scene in this movie as well as the weird and wonderful weaponry and specialist skills that these people have perfected.

The DVD has a choice of the English Dub or the Japanese with subtitles. Personally, after watching both, I recommend the Japanese as the English made two main mistakes. They kept close to the original script and the voices are for the most part well played. However, the main problem is the English dub had a female voice actress do both Ranma’s boy and girl forms and it shows in the voice. For the most part Ranma sounds strained, like he doesn’t quite get to grips with breathing. This is made even more obvious by the fact that every other male character, such as Ryoga, have voices done by male voice actors and they sound perfectly fine. It would be better if they had gotten a boy to play his male form voice. The other problem is the main Male lead of the opposition in the movie Kirin and a new character Lychee. Kirin and Lychee have the same problem which is they refer to themselves in the third person. You reach a point where you feel like saying ‘get on with it!’ and they do have to change some of the lines for these characters in order to fit in the name. With Lychee this isn’t such a problem as, like Shampoo, she comes from China and has trouble with Japanese and this is made believable by the voice actress. However with Kirin, he doesn’t sound like he has trouble with it at all and just refers to himself in third person all the time because he can. In some ways this makes his character more irritating and unlikeable which is a shame as he’s really quite funny and sweet in some cases. The Japanese voice actors are fine for all the parts they play and Ranma has two different voice actors one for his male form and the other for his female so he sounds much better.

The extras on the DVD are not much to be honest and I wasn’t impressed. The character profiles were disappointing as only Ranma and Shampoo gave any detail at all while the rest just repeated what the movie had gone over already. Considering there were 14 profiles and only two were any good this really wasn’t fair in many ways.

The trailers are really quite old as this movie is, in its own way, way overdue in this country but the trailers are for other animes and you will usually find an old favourite in them so give them a watch.

Apart from the voicing problems I enjoyed the movie and I know this is only one of them so I’m looking forward to see what the others are like. I recommend this for when you want something fun and light-hearted to watch.