I've been listening to RWBY's soundtrack a lot (seriously, it's great stuff, especially the character themes), so I decided to give the series another shot. The first 8 episodes were still extremely rough, and I found myself having to skip around a lot just to make it through it - the animation, direction, and tone were just all over the place! I found myself laughing at it rather than with it more often than not.
However, it did start to shape up after the mid-point of the first season, and now that I've finished episode 16, I think I'm unironically enjoying it now. The characters do seem to have an interesting dynamic, the world is fleshed out enough that I actually feel like things are building towards a major event instead of just making things up by the seat of their pants (with that said, credit to the RvB team for making that style of writing look easy), and some of the jokes can be funny & clever. I really look forward to watching the next season tomorrow.
Animation's still dogshit, though, but understandably so. I spent the first couple of episodes racking my brain trying to figure out what program they're using, since I notice a few quirks that looked familiar. Turns out, if I just finished an episode I'd get the answer in big bold letters, but hey. I've definitely seen other indie animations that were made in Poser to varying degrees of quality, and it reminded me of the scale of their operation. There are much bigger animation teams that have utterly failed to do what they set out to accomplish, even at their relatively short average run times. I mean, just look at some of the CGI anime shorts from the past few seasons if you want examples of how bad it could be.
Move over Miyazaki!This is fine enough. As long as the writing holds up, I'll have a good time.