I'm sure no few of you have heard of Monty Oum's latest work, RWBY. For those of you who need a bit of background, Monty Oum is an amateur animator who became famous thanks to his Dead Fantasy series - a series of 3D animated videos of the girls from the Final Fantasy series and the Dead or Alive series fighting one another. The videos were fanservice in many ways - many saw their favorite characters from either series participate and kick massive amounts of ass... and it helps that the girls themselves have been rather well-known for being fetish fuel. I mean, Dead or Alive. Come on, people. Luckily, aside from having the hottest girls in each series join in, the perverseness is very much a secondary thing, with the gravity-defying, flashy, Advent-Children-style action taking place foremost. The videos - and Monty Oum himself - rapidly gained popularity, enough that Rooster Teeth, a company infamous for its web series like Red and Blue, hired him to do their own series: RWBY.
Cute and badass. At the same time. There's gotta be a law against that.
The series centers around its four girls, whose first name initials make up the name: Ruby Rose (pictured above), Weiss Schnee, Blake Belladonna, Yang Xiao Long. Each girl has their own color code to - and for the sake of avoiding the title of 'Captain Obvious', I'll leave it to you guys to figure out. The backstory is that most of mankind has been wiped out by the creatures of Grimm, and to counteract them, the survivors of humankind have formed the Hunters/Huntresses, people specifically trained to combat the creatures of Grimm. And surprise surprise, our four protagonists have been inducted into the elite Beacon's Academy to start off their adventure.
Now then, to start off with, the action doesn't disappoint - which is certainly helped by Monty Oum's addiction to putting guns (or gun motifs, same thing) on EVERY FRICKIN' WEAPON. Here's just a sample - and I repeat, a SAMPLE - of just how said guns are used on the weapons.
Yes, it's a gun-scythe. Yes, it's awesome. Yes, it would never work in real life. Yes, f*** reality.
Now, if it was just a pure action series like Dead Fantasy was, just having awesome fight scenes would be great. However, it's not all action - there's actually a storyline, in case the backstory I gave didn't already tell you. This is where RWBY starts suffering a bit. On a technical level, while the animations for the fights are absolutely top notch, the animations for the characters doing normal things is... a bit choppy and sometimes just plain novice-like. Obviously, most of the work was put in the fight scenes. Graphics are simplistic, but I don't suppose that can be helped. The 'extras' aren't even fully rendered - they're just black silhouettes. Although a bit lazy, this makes it REALLY handy to tell the main/supporting cast.
Tell me this doesn't SCREAM 'Hogwarts'.
Also, this series has anime cliches coming out of the wazoo. I mean, take your pick, it's probably there. The hyperactive, cheerful girl being paired with the cold and calculating one, the quiet, bookish type with the loud, boisterous bruiser, the whole school itself, good cop, bad cop, etc, etc, etc. The voice acting itself definitely isn't spectacular - but then, it's not like they brought in Michelle Ruff or Stephanie Sheh to do them. It's currently in debate whether this is a very professional amateur work or a very amateurish professional work.
That said, even with these flaws, RWBY does quite a few things right. We expected over-the-top action from Monty Oum and delivers it to us on a silver platter. The characters, despite being cookie cut-out cliches, are developed and written well enough that one can genuinely like the characters for their various quirks and oddities. There are also a good deal of funny moments too, helped by the main character, Ruby, being such a ditz. The designs for the weapons, characters, and the setting are very well done, and that aside, the series is just beginning (despite being 10 episodes in at this time of writing). Who knows how much it'll develop in the future?
So, in conclusion, if you're looking for character-focused, heavy narrative... don't expect to find much of that here. On the other hand, if you're looking for lighthearted comedy and/or insane action that essentially gives physics the middle finger, RWBY is the series for you.
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