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RWBY Volume 1 Review
- Thomas Dulcamaro
- Apr 12, 2016
- 7 min read
Have you ever seen a sniper rifle and thought “I should put a scythe on it?” If you haven’t there is clearly something wrong with you, but that’s how the entire show of RWBY was conceived. Made by animator Monty Oum, who is known for Dead Fantasy, Haloid, and all of the CG fights in Red vs. Blue. RWBY is a lore rich environment with fairy tale inspired characters, unique weapons, some of the most intense fight scenes, and a soundtrack that connects it all together. A lot of hard work and sleepless nights were needed for one man’s vision to come true. Monty unfortunately passed away in 2015, but has left a legacy with RWBY.
The World of Remnant:
The world of RWBY is a vast and full of lore and characters with some of the best fight scenes, cool concepts and character designs. The setting is called Remnant where it is filled with creatures called Grimm who hunted humans to near extinction. However, with the discovery of the resource called Dust, and humanity’s resiliency, humans managed to push the Grimm back. Warriors who defend against Grimm are known as Hunters and Huntresses. Alongside humanity, there are the Faunus, a humanoid race who has animal appendages, such as animal ears or tails. They have been discriminated against for years, and has led many of them to more extreme ways to bring equality to the Faunus. Every living creature has something called an Aura, which is a shield like Deus ex Machina that is a manifestation of a person’s soul, and protects them from harm. Also, every character has a semblance; this is basically a superpower with each one being unique to the individual such as speed, shadow clones, and polarity. And the best part of this world? Every weapon has a gun on it: scythe sniper rifles, shotgun gauntlets, and giant hammers that turn into grenade launchers?! Plot/Characters Our main character is Ruby Rose, a 15 year old hyperactive girl who is a huntress in training. After stopping a robbery, she is recognized by the headmaster of one of the hunter academies named Ozpin who lets Ruby in early to Beacon Academy. She then teams up with Weiss Schnee, the stuck up heiress who is your typical rich girl, Blake Belladonna, the quiet ninja-like warrior with a mysterious past, and Ruby’s half sister Yang Xiao Long, who is aggressive, but a fun loving active girl. With this they form Team RWBY, and yes it does get confusing at times. Also joining team RWBY is another group of hunters known as team JNPR, a team full of gender bent heroes based off legend. Their leader Jaune Arc voiced by Miles Luna, is your loveable, nerdy idiot, Pyrrha Nikos voiced by Jen Brown, the “invincible girl” and cereal mascot, Lie Ran voiced by Monty Oum, the calm, cool, collective silent one, and Nora Valkyrie voiced by Samantha Ireland, the hammer wielding hyperactive girl that will devour all the pancakes. Team RWBY go through Beacon Academy to learn how to become huntresses, and go through the daily troupes of a cliché school activities, learning how to fight, dealing with bullies, and bonding as a team. The main antagonist of the volume is Roman Torchwick voiced by Gray Haddock; he is a cocky, smart-alecky, master criminal who knows he is
better than you. The way he talks and acts just gives off the air of arrogance and overconfidence, but he sounds and acts like he has everything under control.
I thought the characters in this were going to be very standard, and just fit to their stereotypes. However, these characters started to break out of the mold, and developed into a three dimensional characters. It is great to see them gradually develop. Jaune, is an example. He knows he is “the loveable idiot who gets stuck in a tree, while his friends fight for their lives,” but he does not give in. He pushes his ego aside and trains with fellow JNPR member, Pyrrha. The only bad arc in this season, in my opinion, was when we get a bully arc. It’s not the stereotypical anime bully; no, it’s the after school 90s bully that has been used to death in, and I honestly hated it. If I was to tell someone about RWBY, and said this was my favorite arc of Volume 1, they would look at me like I’m crazy.
The plot of RWBY is nothing too original: fantasy school, typical school structure, world with monsters, etc. However, it is the execution of RWBY that hooked me on, as well as many fans. We are introduced to a very interesting world, which we slowly learn about, and it is intriguing. Also, there are some memorable life lessons that the characters show us. These are very important when it comes to a good plot and characters.
Production & Design Monty had spent years planning RWBY. He was given the green light after finishing season 10 of RvB. He wanted to base his characters off of some lore or fairy tales, and also being Monty Oum, he had to have kick ass woman as the main characters. I do like the idea of characters being based off of fairy tales; it is fun to guess who the character is based off of. One thing that I do warn people about the first season of RWBY is that some episodes are 5-7 minutes long. It is not a concern if you marathon it, but imagine when it was released. You waited an entire week just to watch 5 minutes of talking. However, the longer episodes do have fights in them, and you can tell those are going to be pivotal episodes with a lot of work in production. RWBY has a unique design to it, when I mean unique I mean cheap. The design was made with a cheaper
program called Poser, but Rooster Teeth managed to work with it. Let’s get to the best part of RWBY, the fight scenes. Most of them were animated by Monty himself (and one of the big fights all by himself), and it really shows his immense passion. The fight scenes are beautiful, and I didn’t expect anything less from the guy who did those amazing CG fights in Red Vs. Blue, but sadly not as many nut shots. The character designs of RWBY are also unique, I like how most of these characters are designed to be the fairy tale character, and yet, not a carbon copy. One of the downsides is there very few fights in the series, not including the trailers I counted only 3 in 16 episodes, but I will say the fights we did get are spectacular. A small problem I had was when they tried to use anime emotes like a chibi Ruby, it just didn’t look right. But another big flaw was outside of the fights, the animation was ok, not good or great, but just ok. The animation sometimes looks awkward such as when the lips on characters don’t match up to their lines. Also, don’t get me started on how the characters look like while eating. I guess most of the budget went to the fights, but when there aren’t any major fights, you can see the flaws that I mentioned. This is probably the worst part of the show, and that can turn a lot of people off. However, the animation really shines once you get to the amazing fight scenes.
Voice Acting & Sound
Monty took a big risk with the voice acting because he used people who have never voice acted a day in their life. Even riskier, he picked those people to voice the leads. However, it certainly paid off with Ruby Rose being voiced by Lindsay Jones, and in my opinion she was the best voice actor out of team RWBY. Lindsay’s inspiration for the voice came from her “kitty” voice. She does a lot of weird things to get into character, but there is a method to her madness. She nails the voice down of the innocent, naïve, and hyperactive Ruby. Weiss is voiced by Kara Eberle, who was approached by Monty because she had a demeanor of a princess as she isn’t afraid to tell people how it is, even if it comes off as condescending. Barbra Dunkelman, the voice of Yang, was the perfect fit. Both Barbra and Yang are very loud and outgoing. The weakest out of team RWBY was Arryn Zeck who voices Blake. She plays the quiet parts very well, but she falls short when it came to the more emotional moments.
The dialogue for the Black and Yellow trailers were painful to hear at times. It worried some newcomers to RWBY; if this is what the voice acting was supposed to be then what hope do we have for the show? Fortunately, the voices did improve immensely by the first episode.
My favorite voice acting was by Michael Jones, who voiced Sun Wu Kong (guess who he represents), a mischievous, active monkey Faunus. Michael is known for his rage quit videos, and yelling at Gavin Free. With also two veteran voice actresses from Red vs. Blue, Jen Brown (Carolina) who voices Pyrrha, and Kathleen Zuelch (Tex) voicing Glynda Goodwitch, rounds out the cast of voice actors. All in all the voice acting was really well done.
For me, one of the best things about the entire series is the soundtrack. My god is this soundtrack phenomenal. The opening is very epic as it sets the tone for the entire series. The closings are usually different for each episode, and I will listen all the way through. The great thing about these songs is that they convey the plot and character’s emotion very well, so if you listen to these closely then you can find out more about certain characters, even the ones that you might not care for. These songs are all performed by Jeff William who does much of the music for Rooster Teeth, and at the time his 14 year old daughter, Casey Lee Williams performed the vocals. Casey has an incredible range on her, and her skill is going to improve as she ages. The soundtrack even hit number 1 on iTunes in 2013 beating out Hunger Game: Catching Fire. When you hear the opening for the first time, you know this show means business, team RWBY is going and kick some Grimm butt, save the day, and be back for cookies and milk.
Final Thoughts
When I started to watch RWBY, I thought I would just get a standard action anime inspired show. Instead, RWBY is an amazing series with good narrative, solid characters/character development complemented with great fighting scenes and a badass soundtrack. Sure the animation outside of the fighting scenes was a bit average, and the voice acting sometimes was not the best, but these are problems that can be fixed over time with mindfulness. If you haven’t watched the series yet, give it a try, I promise you won’t regret it, and if you have seen it go watch it again and enjoy it once more.
