Ranma ½

Episode 17

I hereby apologize to anyone who was hoping for Ryoga this week based on my estimations and was disappointed to find this week's episode was a throwaway storyline. I'm sure they'll get to the Breaking Point arc sooner or later; it's absolutely required for a lot of the series. Plus, it's a great arc for my favorite sopping wet cat. Er, sopping wet pig. Shampoo is the sopping wet cat, and we get plenty of her this week.

Despite my immeasurable disappointment at this turn of events, 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 of Ranma ½, but before that became the norm for the series. It's one of those arcs where you take a perfectly normal thing that exists in the world – in this case, takeout delivery – apply a combat element to it, toss some of the characters we already know together, and voila. I have to wonder how many times Rumiko Takahashi needed to come up with an idea for a chapter and based it on something mundane happening in her life.

It's also easily the funniest episode of the season yet. Part of that is because, among early-series Ranma ½ arcs, the previous one was relatively serious, with stakes and all that, while “It's Fast or It's Free” has the freedom to be pure sitcom silliness. The episode opens with Kuno's dream, which may sound like a frightening prospect. Akane and the pigtailed girl, carried in the arms of a panda up to his mansion, demand that he choose one of them as their heads bob about unsettlingly. And no, he's not allowed to say “both.”

If I know two things about Tatewaki Kuno, it's that his ability to discern fantasy and reality is questionable, and his grasp on object permanence may be even more slippery. Hence, when he arrives at the Tendo Dojo with a bouquet of roses in his hands, he declares his love for the first of the two he sees: Akane, who hands the flowers over to her flattered father. But then Genma knocks Ranma into the pond, and he remembers that the pigtailed girl exists (well, sort of) and declares that whoever arrives at his house first will be the one he pledges his loyalty to.

We move on to the Martial Arts takeout race, which the anime has embellished a bit to be an annual Nerima tradition, with Akane as the highly-courted reigning champion, rather than Soun selling her out for four servings of eel. It's actually nice; Akane rarely gets a chance to be actually competent in the series since she has to be overshadowed by Ranma and his various rivals all the time. It's easy to forget that she's a highly skilled martial artist in her own right, just like any other normal girl who trains while maintaining the life of an average high school student.

Not that she gets to win this time around, since Ranma and Shampoo end up entering the fray as well. While Shampoo is an obvious contestant for the Cat Cafe, Genma sells Ranma out in exchange for a year's supply of ramen. When this chapter was first published in English, it was hard to see why he would do that; Japanese food in the US was pretty much restricted to sushi unless you had access to an ethnic neighborhood in your city. Now the whole world knows how amazing real ramen is. Oh, how times change.

Anyway, silliness obviously ensues, and it turns out the lucky home randomly chosen for the race's endpoint is the Kuno household. You know, the place where the eldest son is already anticipating the arrival of two of the top contestants. The eldest son, who is way too stupid to comprehend things like coincidences and way too self-centered to realize that just maybe, people do things for reasons that don't revolve around him. Things proceed from there exactly how you'd expect: Akane, Ranma, and Shampoo are all as petty and spiteful as possible. Water of all temperatures gets thrown about. Kuno doesn't understand anything that's going on; he just knows that Akane and the pigtailed girl are at his house, as he asked them to be, both vying for his affection because the race doesn't end until he eats the food.

While this plot is fun, this episode elevates it with the best animation of the season so far. It was directed and storyboarded by Michel Sugimoto, a Trigger alum with credits including Little Witch Academia, SSSS.Gridman, Promare, and Attack on Titan: The Final Season. Instead of resorting to speed lines and cutting away, the animation team has used the kineticism inherent in the premise to its maximum potential, every gag made funnier by the characters' constant motion. In one shot, Ranma's ramen bowl is hurtling through the sky, and I could practically see the animator's cursor wiggling it through its arc. I mean that in the best way possible, since it made me cackle.

As a note, this is another story that was significantly altered in the older anime. The Kuno aspect of the plotline was excised completely, replaced by the revelation that Genma had sold Ranma as a child when he was starving, garnering him yet another fiancée. The girl, whose name I cannot remember and would be required to actually put on the episode to find out, is trained in the art of martial-arts takeout, and challenges Akane to a race where the winner gets to stay engaged to Ranma. It was the first episode of the “new” series after the first iteration was canceled and felt like a declaration that they wouldn't just stretch out existing plotlines, but radically alter them until they were practically unrecognizable. While many of the purely anime-original episodes were a lot of fun, the alterations were rarely for the better.

This was easily one of the best episodes of Ranma ½ of the new season, and possibly even of the series so far. It's a perfect distillation of everything that makes the show fun: weird martial arts, bizarre coincidence, curse-based shenanigans, and characters without a brain cell between them interacting, all tied up with gorgeous animation. I hope we get to see Sugimoto work on more episodes.

Kaori! Her name was Kaori.

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Ranma ½ is currently streaming on Netflix.