So I thought I should catch up on stuff I should have finished watching ages ago. Which is why this weekend I (re)watched the first three episodes of this 2003 Monkey Punch detective fairy tale.
First things first, the animation is a lot worse than I remember. Perfunctory is a fair description. It’s not Musashi bad. And at least it avoids the trap a lot of Lupin III films fall into where only the leads look like Monkey Punch characters, pretty much everyone here looks like they belong.
The story involves detectives Ranma and Rella who by the intervention of bullshit science end up inhabiting the same body, changing between forms at midnight with no memory of the other’s previous day’s experience. This being Monkey Punch, the logical result is comedic hijinks, cross dressing and inadvertent nudity.
It plays like a mix of Moonlighting, 60’s British detective fantasy TV shows, and most surprisingly, The Rockford Files. Ranma is pretty much Jim Rockford down to the living in a trailer (albeit on top of a building). The other thing I should mention is it takes place in the future, though the sci-fi elements so far are fairly light, such as Ranma’s hover London taxi cab, nebulous “hacking”, the Bond-like gadgets Rella’s maid builds her and the bizzare car/castle the recurring suitor of Rella drives.
It’s a 13 episode series, so I hope to get the rest watched fairly quickly.
Cinderella Boy Opening Animation