English Dub Review: RWBY: Ice Queendom “Red, White, Black, Yellow”

Overview

Based on the works of the late great Monty Oum, the story follows Ruby Rose, a girl who admires Huntsmen, along with her elder sister Yang Xiao Long enrolls in Beacon Academy, a training school for Huntsmen. Her talents were discovered by Ozpin, the school’s Headmaster. Weiss Schnee, heiress of the world’s largest Dust manufacturing company, the Schnee Dust Company (S.D.C.), has disagreements with her father, defeats Arma Gigas, and leaves. Blake Belladonna, a former member of White Fang, a terrorist organization and sworn enemy of the S.D.C., also leaves her organization. These two girls also become new students at Beacon. With hope and secret passion in their hearts, the story of these four girls who dream of becoming Huntsmen begins.


Our Take

Produced and animated by Shaft (Pretty Boy Detective Club, Dance in the Vampire Bund, and a majority of the Puella Magi Madoka Magica franchise) it’s a bit surreal that this longtime show that’s been around since 2013, has gone from being a cel-shaded anime-inspired passion project to actual legitimate anime. For the most part, the animation is gorgeous to look at and Shaft delivers in spades in terms of fully realized action scenes that help do them justice.

As an added bonus while it took months for the dub to eventually release, I’m glad Rooster Teeth’s voice cast remains the same to help give a sense of familiarity to the proceedings since the first episode is sort of a retelling of the first of some if not all of Season One’s events of the original show but with added details that flesh out the other characters in different ways. Later seasons introduced some of these supporting characters such as Weiss’s family members, and her butler which I guess makes sense due to the promotional material making Weiss a bit of the focus which remains to be seen since we don’t know what direction it’ll take due to retelling Season One’s events so far.

As a longtime fan of RWBY since the beginning, I would never have imagined something like this coming full circle. For newbies, it could work as a jumping-on point since it’s mostly introducing the key four characters and the events leading up to them meeting within the same school. And while this is meant to take a different direction, later on, I’m more curious how far they’ll replicate iconic scenes and story events before slowly doing its own thing.