#rumic style study

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More drowrings.

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🐼🫖☔🌊🥋

One thing I hope for the Ranma 1/2 anime remake is to drop out all the filler. People forget, but before Naruto and Bleach, Ranma 1/2 was the poster child of filler episodes. Not only would they have entire filler episodes, but they'd take short manga stories and pad them out with less interesting B Plots. Like, I love Ryouga, but that whole "Akane helping him study" wasn't in the manga story about "Akane fighting in her sleep". Takahashi's storytelling is so tight, that many times, the filler in Ranma 1/2 just ruined perfectly good manga-based anime episodes.

One of the biggest problems is that Takahashi specializes in short stories, but anime adaptation needs more material to prevent exceeding their source manga. Most of her manga were either anthologies of short stories (Rumic Theater, Rumic World), or were long-running series that functioned almost like a collection of short stories. This is why Ranma 1/2, Urusei Yatsura, Mermaid Saga, and I think maybe Rinne were more episodic than focused on a serialized-style overarching plot. This was also why Inuyasha was such a switch, and even Inuyasha still felt like a collection of episodic incidents during the series' beginning. When Takahashi's series got their first anime adaptation, Urusei Yatsura had episodes less than 15 minutes. Each "30min" episode would be 2 stories. And I think this type of adaptation works best for Takahashi's series. Back in the day, it was standard for anime to write anime-only, "filler". But now that the current anime industry is more open to giving anime series a mid-season break, to give the manga time to catch up, or they'll actually wait for the manga to finish before starting the anime adaptation, I have more hope that a new adaptation of Ranma 1/2 will have the opportunity to stay truer to Takahashi's original pacing. Even her choices of when to insert humorous, side story type plots, interrupting multiple chapters of overarching plot drama, felt like masterfully tactical choices, of when to provide relief and when to know how long higher drama storylines should go. I don't know about everyone else, but I enjoyed the short manga chapters of humor, after something heavy happened for multiple chapters in Inuyasha. But those short reprieves of humor worked because they were short. I could feel the friction, when the Inuyasha anime tried to make these short-reprieve, short stories longer than they needed to be. When anime adaptations veer away from Takahashi's pacing, they noticeably suffer. Takahashi writes a lot of short stories, so her storytelling style is extremely efficient. There is no "fat" and everything, even the seemingly wandering side incidents all have a purpose. Sometimes, in my opinion, an anime episode based on her manga doesn't need to be a full half hour (~22min). Sometimes they work best as anime shorts, just like her short story styled manga. Please let this next Ranma 1/2 anime have shorter episodes, when they need to be.

The thing I didn't like about the original anime adaptation of Ranma 1/2, was the pacing. I'm not just talking about overall storytelling structure. I mean moment-to-moment during individual scenes. At the time, I thought maybe this was a more Japanese sense of humor to "sit on" things. But by now, "awkward silence" has become a very popular type of humor in the West. And I think I just don't like it. But besides me personally enjoying faster, more Animaniacs-styled humor (that I grew up on), I suspect that Takahashi meant for her jokes to be very fast too.

When I read the Ranma 1/2 manga, it gives me the sense that the pacing should be faster. And yes, there's a certain amount of subjective pacing that goes into reading manga, individual to each reader. But Takahashi often does these jokes where she will redraw an ENTIRE panel, changing only the one part that's meant to be a joke. The way human eyes/brains work, our attentions tend to glaze over things we've seen before, and take more note of things that are now different than they previously were. So the eye registers all that repeated background information incredibly quickly or barely at all, because it's not worth re-analyzing. That means, the eye goes immediately to the new information, which is usually a gag. When the paneling of a comic facilitates such quick comprehension of one moment to another, I can only assume that there was intentional fast pacing. So I believe most of Takahashi's jokes are fast paced. She also often draws these highly exaggerated, melodramatic poses/scenes/atmosphere, so that the contrast of the later joke panel (where Ranma or Akane refuse to take other characters' melodrama seriously) is instantly jarring. There's no build up to make the sudden change in tone make sense. There's no build up to make Ranma's/Akane's humorous reactions seem predictably aligned with the tone that was just happening beforehand. The joke is that Ranma's/Akane's reactions are jarring, sudden, and I think fast. The humor was often like this, so I can only assume that Takahashi's sense of humor is supposed to be using fast delivery.

So many times, I thought a joke or a storyline from the anime adaptation would have worked better if the pacing was faster. And then I'd read the manga, and find it much more engaging. Or, I'd read that manga storyline first, then see the anime adaptation, and find it too slow. Again, I grew up on Animaniacs' quick sense of humor, so it'd believe it was just my subjective preferences. But so often, these drawn-out places in the anime, do not correspond to Takahashi drawing long panels of atmospheric environments, to intentionally slow the "reading" of a panel/scene. But Takahashi does know how to intentionally control how the readers' eyes drift across a panel. Lots of her manga have proven that she knows how to control the pacing, whether that's how the eye moves across panels, or how quickly stories wrap up. There are slow moments in Maison Ikkoku where 2 or 3 panels that extend from one side of the page to the other, covering the entire breath of a page, just to show how the light in the sky changes from night, to dawn, to daylight. And she will slow down the set-ups for jokes, with long, melodramatic weight, that gives a character only a small part of a panel, so that the panel can be mostly environmental space for the readers' eyes to linger through in silence. And that is often quickly contrasted with the quick cuts to a joke panel, where everything is so easily comprehended (there is no background or no background change for the eye to wander), that the eye has no choice but to comprehend the scene quickly, implying a sudden quick pacing. Takahashi knows how to slow down the pacing and how to control speeding it up. She has very intentional control over the pacing of her scenes. (Honestly, I think she has the best control in conveying information to readers. In almost 20 years of reading her manga, and over the course of multiple 10-year-long series, I only got confused in her panel transitions TWICE. After reading so much Shoujo manga, it's easy to recognize that is an impressive feat.) So when I see the anime adaptation going slow on corresponding manga panels that were read quickly, I can't help but think the anime director's pacing clashes with Takahashi's original intentions.

In short, I hope for a much tighter adaptation of Ranma 1/2. I feel like all those people who used to dismiss Ranma 1/2 could better experience the best of that series, if the anime would just keep the fat trimmed, instead of adding filler or slower pacing.

But also, I'd love to see an anime studio/director better emulate the serious, melodramatic, martial arts movies that Ranma 1/2 was parodying. A lot of the jokes from Ranma 1/2 come from these characters acting so serious and playing out martial arts movie tropes...only for Ranma or Akane to point out how stupid the situation actually is. LOL I always loved that. lol If we could get action scenes like Sunrise's Inuyasha, and serious, melodramatic tones for the joke set-ups, I think it would enhance the humor in Ranma 1/2.

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Christmas sketches! (Actually I took a couple of the previous sketches and tried inking them on ye olde computer.)

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Uhmuhguh I didn't think I was going to get any faces drawn today, yet here we are. 😎

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It is officially a day.

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Went back to pencil for today. There's nothing like trying to work digitally that makes you love drawing on paper.

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Sketches.

I'm sad Season 1 is over, but I'm glad that Season 2 is officially announced! Also it's wild that Season 1 covered the same amount of story as Season 1 of the original series, but in 6 fewer episodes, and they included MORE cute stuff in this one! I'm a big fan of Ranma and Akane liking each other as humans. In the first series, man...Ranma was an arrogant jerk most of the time and Akane seemed to be interested in him only because there was competition. This new series is a nice change of pace!

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I'm so tired, yet I persist with the sketches. 😆

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Sketches sketched.

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I, uh, decided to have a calm day of drawing after that raccoon fiasco yesterday. 😮‍💨

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More Rumiko Takahashi studies from Ranma 1/2 volume 1. I might actually be getting the hang of this...

Rumiko Takahashi has two modes: silly and FIGHTING SPIRIT.

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Today's studies. Trying to break apart head shapes and facial features.

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MOAR SKETCHES. I was checking proportions like a maniac on these, so they took way longer to draw. I've noticed that Rumiko Takahashi doesn't fuck with any facial pose turned further from the camera than just a profile view, even when the body is facing away from the camera. Like, the body is in back 3/4 view while the face is straight profile. No need to calculate a bunch of positions. Most of her faces are variations of front 3/4 view to profile. Very few shots with faces that face directly at the camera. So to all those inner 13 year olds who couldn't draw the second eye, in most cases, you're not gonna need to draw symmetrical faces on the picture plane in the first place! The perfect second eye is a lie.

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I feel like my little faces were better yesterday, but I figured I'd post these since I did draw them... 😆

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Okay since I'm a Ranma 1/2 maniac right now, I'm redrawing some of the silly faces from the first volume. As always, I'm just trying to get a hold of these Rumiko Takahashi proportions.

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Today's studies