Birdy
Well, this was an…interesting experience. When I offered to take this one from Kora because I was familiar with the source material and saw all of the similarities, I thought that I knew what I was getting into. In some ways, RWBY: Ice Queendom is an anime remake of the original faux anime web series (I will explain that) with much better visuals and animation flair, but in other ways it feels the need to ruin the original’s story progression in favor of a massive earlier exposition dump on the audience. Yay. This should be fun.
First, the backstory of the project. RWBY is a CGI web series created by Austin-based animation studio Rooster Teeth, who were previously famous for the animated joke takeoff on Microsoft’s Halo franchise, Red vs Blue. The name RWBY has a double meaning, as it’s both the first name of our main character, Ruby Rose, but also an acronym combining the first letters of the first names of our four main characters: Ruby (red), Weiss (White), Blake (Black), and Yang (yellow). It takes place in a typical fantasy anime setting, a high school training young hunters and huntresses to fight the Grimm, black, skull-faced monsters that haunt the world with a broken moon. The weapons they wield to fight the Grimm rely on a MacGuffin mineral called Dust, which allows their weapons to have insane transforming properties as well as flat-out magic. The leaders of the Beacon Academy that train these young warriors are Professor Ozbin and Glynda Goodwitche (the series is not subtle with its jokes and allusions). Alongside team RWBY, the series also quickly introduces team JNPR (pronounced Juniper): Jaune, Nora, Pyrrha, and Ren. The series has these two major teams progress in their abilities as well as grow closer as friends, teammates, and occasionally love interests, while also dealing with an evolving plot against all of humanity in the shadows of Beacon.
The original web series is very much an anime homage made by American fans of the medium, with absurd weapons, over-the-top fight scenes, and characters with broad personality traits and ridiculous outfits that would feel right at home in a Kingdom Hearts game. It is also still ongoing, currently preparing for its 9th series alongside a bizarre cross-promotion with DC Comics, the Justice League/RWBY movie. On top of western projects, there have been manga based on the RWBY story produced for a number of years now. So really, an actual anime project that is based on a series that was a western love letter to anime anyway was really the only spin-off project left. It’s just a shame that the anime producers didn’t learn anything from the original’s approach to story and loaded down their adaptation with unnecessary tropes of the anime genre.
So let’s discuss the positives first, the anime looks great. Studio Shaft is a powerhouse in the industry, and they clearly put the budget in at least for the intro episodes. The fight scenes are dynamic and fluid, and some scenes feel like what RWBY fans must have imagined the anime would look like as they watched the web series. The animation director, Suzuki Toshimasa, is an experienced director and has worked on high energy fight scenes in fantasy and sci-fi anime in the past. So with a big budget and A-list studio behind him, he clearly was allowed to shine alongside primary show director Kenjiro Okada, who has some experience but not as much. I wish the same level of shine could be applied to the writing staff.
So when I was researching this anime, two names jumped out as warning signs for me: Creative Producer Gen Urobuchi and Script Supervisor Tow Ubakata, the primary minds behind one of the most frustratingly bad anime I’ve ever watched: Psycho Pass. Now both of these men have done good to great work in the past. So it’s not impossible that their combined desire to explain everything to the audience through exposition, instead of letting it show in the story naturally, would not come out in this adaptation. Unfortunately, I was proven wrong almost immediately. The entire first episode is a largely pointless plot dump on two members of Team RWBY: Blake and Weiss (the titular Ice Queen).
Now, I want to emphasize, the stuff the anime put in episode 1 is not anime original. All of it is from the original web series. It just was shown later to flesh out their backstories after they had been established more. The reason I call it pointless here is that the start of episode 2 basically tells you what is needed to understand these two characters through dialogue and interactions between the members of Team RWBY on their initiation quest. An entire episode to explain in extensive detail the backstories of these two characters long before it becomes necessary for the plot seems like a waste of time that could have been better spent adapting aspects of other important characters, like Jaune and Pyrrha, one of the most beloved pairs of characters in the series. Maybe the decision to focus so heavily on Weiss’ troubled home life in her past at the beginning is a symptom of the series being called Ice Queendom, implying that the character whose name is literally “White Snow” in German is the main character this time. Even if that is the case, she is not the only character that matters in the story, even in the anime version of it. So tell their stories when it becomes important to the plot as a whole. Unfortunately, this is often what badly-scripted anime do, explain everything to the audience ahead of time like a Star Wars opening crawl, except much longer and much less necessary.
Aside from my gripes about the story construction, RWBY: Ice Queendom is pretty good. The action direction and animation are great. The characters all feel like the ones I like from the web series, and their voice actresses are well chosen. I just wish the anime’s script writers would stop treating visual storytelling and organic plot progression as an inferior form of storytelling to simply telling us everything about the story before it even begins. If you are unfamiliar with RWBY, this is probably worth a watch, even if I still overall prefer the approach of a low budget web show to telling its story over a high budget anime adaptation.
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